Hey all,

I didn't get a great sleep (as most of us were up 'til the early morning), but got a bit which was better than nothing! Took me and my roommate (Loren Laceste) a while to get the air conditioning up and running until we
could go to bed peacefully. We got up at around 9:30 AM to get breakfast, and chilled around for most of the day until it was close to the round. I reviewed a bit of main-line and sidelines but could not find too many of my opponent's games because of the inefficient internet service. Today was the first round, and we went into our rounds today without too much preparation. I was playing first seed (Karen Grigoryan), an IM with 2484 Fide, and although he is a strong player, I was not affected performance wise by his rating.

The game started with 1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 d5 4. Bf4, I pondered here whether to play Bg7 or c6, but since I was used to the c6 position, I decided on 4 ... c6. Soon I had a solid center and had already castled, while he was developing pieces around d4. As black, I was not playing too aggressive as I knew he would be trying to complicate the position to gain an advantage. I broke open the center and traded off queens and at this point I had equalized with a confident position. I wasn't afraid of going into an endgame as we were both left with a lot of pawns, a light-squared bishop, knight and two rooks. I saw a tactic that could potentially put a lot of pressure on his kingside pawns but very unfortunately missed an easy/obvious move that trapped my rook. I blundered the exchange with 30 minutes on my clock. We played it out for a bit more and eventually I resigned as I had no chance left. It was a very regretful loss as I had a solid position. 1-0

Everyone is still getting used to Brazil/Caldas Novas but I think most of us are enjoying the best of it. Although the whole resort just blacked out, the power will be coming in soon (hopefully). Most of the Canadian team has brought back good news, and noone lost without a good game (except for mine :()! First round we had 2 players facing top seeds, 1 player facing 2nd seed and a bunch of other Canadians playing against FMs, IMs, etc. Best of luck to all players, and I'm going to recover from this 1st round loss and will hopefully play better tomorrow!

WYCC 2011 Pre-Tourny

Hey all,

After a 30 hour long trip, the Canadian team has all arrived at Caldas Novas, Brazil. The flight was a tiresome journey, but everyone is in the hotel. Most of the team is currently living in the Thermas diRoma Hotel. The hotel is all right, although it's not comparable to '09 Turkey WYCC, it still seems like a fine place and am looking forward to a fun tournament. I will be trying to update this blog every night after the round, so keep in tune!