Thursday, May 25, 2006

Support the Aussie Teams

If you haven't already done so, why not make a donation of $50 or more to the Aussie Olympiad Fund? Those who do will receive "by email a daily bulletin from the Australian team, including notes to some games." I haven't donated myself. Silly me! After having read one of the emails, I will now.

The writing is absolutely brilliant and a must-read. Here's a sampler written by our round 4 hero, IM David Smerdon:

Ian's opening bored me to tears, but he maintains it was fine and even - shock! - interesting. Grandmasters, eh? Unfortunately his speculative attack was no match for Bigfoot [Peter Heine Nielsen], and as the game heightened (pun!), Ian's pawns were in short (haha!) supply. In the end, holding the queen ending proved to be a tall (I'm so witty!) order, and even a desperate stalemate swindle proved to be a long (okay I'll stop now) shot.

[Brief interlude from Ian himself: "You know what they say - big feet, big rating." Comic genius.]

Later on David talks about laundry, a Chinese restaurant, treachery by the men's team captain, the Aussie girls getting hitched and tops it all off with an annotation of [the-already-hitched-to-a-rock-star-boyfriend] Caoili's game.

But one more thing: somebody please tell these guys to stop using the word "blog".

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The bulletins have all been excellent and a lovely, unexpected reward for donating to the appeal. You get lots of insights into the Olympiad atmosphere and the personalities involved (including the bulletin writer of course), not to mention the description of the day’s games. Because they've been so good... for the next Olympiad appeal they should advertise the bulletins at the start of the campaign and use a couple of the 2006 ones as a teaser. Smerdon’s round 3 one, which included his game against Kasim, was particularly good. The nice thing about a lot of these strong chessplayers is that they know how to write (no, I don’t mean that literally ;-)) Well worth $50… !

Anonymous said...

I agree - the bulletins have been worth every cent of our donation. I now have the family queuing up in the morning to read them. :)