It's a quiet affair so far down here in the capital as Doeberl opens with just the premiere event on day 1. The field will greatly increase tomorrow, Friday, as players from both the major and minor sections turn up. Right now the organisers can feel at ease and relaxed. I think they're only challenge so far is that the internet seems to be down. I hear even the main Doeberl website is unavailable. Earlier, TD Shaun Press jokingly said that it was because some 300,000,000 Indians were trying to log on!
Our Indian friends, of course, have plenty of reason to pay attention to this event as well as next week's SIO. An impressive complement of Indian masters including most of their women's national side have arrived here no doubt hoping to bag most of the prize monies. One to watch among the women is WIM Ruttika Nadiq. Already, she attracted attention from one Sydneysider. This hopeful young fellow said, "One of the Indian girls smiled at me".
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Early in the first round, the Victorian player Denis Boumistrov fell to his own self-inflicted defeat when he apparently forgot to turn off his cell phone. The thing went beep-a-beeping about 20 minutes after the start of play. Boumistrov simply smiled the incident off, conceding the point to Indian IM Jha Sriram.
Lastly, I'll start with the live blogging tonight for round 2. We had a bit of a problem with the internet set-up this morning which is why some of you may have had problems with the live games viewer. All seems to be fine now, however, so we should be set.
UPDATE at 4.41PM
The first sensational result has come through. Local junior Andrew Brown has defeated visiting GM Shojaat Ghane when the latter apparently left his Queen en prise. Also a surprise loser was IM George Xie who went down to Iranian Zibaei Abdoulla, rated 2067.
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