New Year´s Eve - Rilton Cup, Half Time

It is time to say good bye to 2013 and to say welcome to 2014 year.
I wish Happy New Year to all my readers, many success on the chess board (not against me) and outside of sixty four squares.
For my part, it will not be some crazy celebrations later on, as tomorrow I had unpleasant task to stop 2600+ player with black pieces.

Rilton Cup 2013/2014

In the next, almost two weeks I will pal in Rilton Cup, the biggest open tournament in Sweden.
The tournament is shared in three groups, but I will only write from the first group (Rilton Cup).
Only players who are rated above 2200 in Elo can play in the highest group, but organisers gave some wild cards for some promising player who are under 2200 in Elo.
It is interesting that the tournament is played over New Years Eve, so it will be played in 2013 and in 2014.

Report from Desert - World Youth Championship 2013

There are still three rounds to go in 
World Youth Championship for 2013, and I got the report from a parents of my student Baldur Teodor Petersson who is playing in U12 category, and the rest of Swedish delegation in this competition helped with the report.
All the pictures in this article was taken by 

Hallfríður Sigurðardóttir and Robert Petersson.

The original text is written in Swedish, and the following text is the best form of translation that the readers can get from my knowledge of Swedish and English.

Quality over Quantity

Recently, I played some games in which I was forced to think about giving up material to keep the initiative alive or just to stay in the game.
In some of my games I missed my chance by giving up a material.
I shall show some positions in which quality mattered more than quantity, but also some positions when it was good to keep material and stand a ground.
You can try to guess (and answer with yes or no) the right thing to do in every position...

Solution for December combinations

The solutions for December combinations will be published in clear and simple form.
The positions demands more analysis, but  the purpose of this rubric is to inspire you to analyse these positions and eventually improve in chess.
As always, if something is not clear you can ask in the comments or by messaging me on Facebook.
As there were no combinations published during November I decided to show somehow harder combinations for December.
I hope that you enjoyed.

December Combinations

The rubric about combinations was not updated in November due to other things in schedule, but in December we will continue as before.
I will always continue to underline an importance of solving combinations in order to improve in chess.
If you are the regular reader of this blog you could solve around one hundred combinations in 2013.
If you are not, then you can open the archive of all combinations published on this site, and solve it as in the chess book.
The link is here Monthly combinations .

The Hedgehog

I decided to publish my best game from Västerås.
I played against player who had a very successful season, winning Swedish B Championship and qualifying for the main group in 2014.
During the same week, Tommy Andersson won Swedish Blitz Championship.
In the previous season he won the game in the match against Eksjö S.K. (against GM Jacek Gdanski), so this time it was the time for revenge.
The quality of the game was very high as I think that he didn´t made any obvious mistakes.

Michael de Verdier - Elitserien

The first 3 rounds of the Swedish League was a success for my club, Eksjö SK. 
With a refurbished line-up consisting of 3 Grandmasters and 2 International Masters we had a very strong team going into the first 3 games.
In the first round we defeated the solid team Upsala ASS with 7-1. 
Only two draws were conceded (from admittedly lost positions).

Memorial E. Crespi 2013, Milan Italy

The tournament in Milan is over, and it is time to rise up the activity on Chess&Life.
The trip to Italy can be considered as a success from the point of view of my result and the level of enjoyment that we got there.
However, there are the spots on the Sun (as there is a light at the end of the tunnel, when the result is not so good) and I will try to be as much objective as possible.
The games, and some other details will be discussed in some of my next posts, but for now I will concentrate on the most important things.