Chess and Life Bejtovic Jasmin: 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.

The starting field in the tournament was weaker compared with the previous editions, and there were two major reasons.
The first one is that the dates of the tournament was in a colision with the dates of Italian Individual Championship.
There were some players, the members of the chess club in Milan, that played in Italian Championship. One of those is GM Sabino Brunello.

The second reason was the famous cheater, Borislav Ivanov.
When Michael de Verdier and I entered the game centre in northern part of Milan (Sesto San Giovanni), the big surprise was waiting for us.
Borislav Ivanov discussed something with the organisers.
His name was deleted from the list, the day before the tournament and we thought that he will not play there.
When we got back for the first round, we found out that he was not allowed to play, because two Bulgarian GMs refused to play if he enters the tournament.
Michael and I decided to refuse to play against him (if paired) but as I can see now, Bulgarian players took even better decision.
The guy got some material compensation from the organisers, and later on managed to ruin the tournament in Spain.
You can read about that on chessbase news portal.

However, in the starting field there were four Grandmasters and six International Masters, which could guaranty everyone quite good opposition in the case of good results in the beginning.

After nine days of the fights, the final table (top 10) was as follows:

Pos	Pts	ID	T	NAME	Rtg	PRtg	Buc1	BucT	ARO
1	6.5	1	GM	Rusev Krasimir	2539	2517	47.0	51.5	2351.0
2	6.5	4	GM	Arnaudov G. Petar	2448	2504	45.5	49.0	2337.8
3	6.5	3	GM	Naumkin Igor	2460	2531	45.0	48.0	2364.7
4	6.0	2	GM	Sanchez Joseph	2529	2425	46.5	50.0	2299.7
5	6.0	7	IM	Bejtovic Jasmin	2394	2426	42.5	46.5	2301.4
6	6.0	10	IM	Aleksic Nenad	2351	2331	40.0	43.5	2206.3
7	6.0	11	FM	Pavlidis Anastasios	2342	2383	38.0	41.5	2258.1
8	5.5	5	IM	Martinez Rolly	2422	2393	45.0	49.0	2313.0
9	5.5	6	IM	Roeder Matthias	2419	2387	44.5	47.5	2306.8
10	5.5	8	IM	Mrdja Milan	2388	2304	44.0	46.5	2223.7

As it can be seen, I finished on the fifth place (I was rated seventh), practically on the first place after the GMs.
The last column shows the average elo of the opponents for chosen player, and it can be seen that the top trio had the hardest opponents, and that GM Sanchez and I got a bit harder opponents compared with IM Aleksic och FM Pavlidis.
I made some plus in Elo, and the tournament could be considered as a real success for me, if my play was as good as the table shows.

I got some luck in the critical moments, especially against Italian IM Vezzosi Paolo.
Michael de Verdier never got his play going, and at the end things started to work against him, even if on detail level.

Except the Master Open, there were also Open A, Open B, Open C and U16 Open.
The playing hall for the all tournaments were situated in Sesto San Giovanni, which is outside of Milan´s administrative zone, but don´t be fooled by this.
This part of the city in not even near to be at the edge of the city.
If you look on Wikipedia Milan has only 1.3 millions inhabitants, while the metropolitan area has almost 9 millions which makes this city one of the biggest in Europe.
The playing hall is one part of the centre for the all kind of strategic and board games and left very good impression on me.
However, the hall in which we played somehow lacks more space, and the heat was on the maximum (with the windows closed all the time, the feeling during the games was a bit unpleasant).

This was my first tournament in Italy, and what I can say is that I was completely surprised by the level of play by Italian amateurs.
I don´t know is it in the whole Italy or just in the club in Milan (as I assume that the most of them are members of Milan club), but their level of routine in a play and the maturity (most of them are juniors) of their play was a positive surprise for me.

The details about tournament can be seen on the official home page Chess in Milan .
Here are some pictures that I took from the facebook page of the organisers.