World Youth Championships, 17-29 November, Turkey

The World Youth Championships have just ended in Turkey.

Scores - (all were 11 round tournaments) by England Juniors are:

U8 Matthew Wadsworth 5.0 points
U8 Girls Anna Wang 5.0 points

U10 Adam Taylor 5.5 points

U12 Daniel Hunt 6.0 points
U12 Girls Maria Wang 5.5 points; Radha Jain 5.5 points

U14 Yang-Fang Zhou 7.0 points
U14 Girls Abigail Pritchard 4.5 points

U16 Ankush Khandelwa 5.5 points; Callum Kilpatrick 5.5 points
U16 Girls Jessica Thilaganathan 5.0 points; Amisha Parmar 5.0 points

U18 David Howell 7.5 points

David Howell was on 3.5/6 and then produced four straight wins.

This took him to board one for the 11th and final round where he met top seed Ivan Popov of Russia (Rated 2539). David was second seed (Rated 2527). An exciting game, which I'm sure many of us followed 'live' via the tournament's website, resulted in a win for the Russian. David thus ended in 7th-14th places.

Peter J B Wilson

The Journey: On Saturday, 17th November, the England Squad (consisting of 13 players, 9 parents and 4 coaches) gathered together for coffee at 10am at Heathrow Airport. They were already some tired faces as some had already been travelling for hours and everyone knew there was a long way still to go.

The flight to Istanbul arrived in late and we discovered that they were holding up our connecting flight to Antalya for us and that we had only a few minutes to get our visas, go through security and board the plane. The last of us (myself and Neil) just made it in time after being held up at security where they wanted to examine our laptops.

We finally touched down in Antalya shortly after 9pm Turkish time (+2 hours). There was discussion of how far it was to the hotel and how long it would take with answers varying from “about 15 minutes” to “¾ of an hour”. These proved wildly optimistic as the actual time was closer to 2 hours than one.

Upon arrival at the hotel there we were all looking to grab something to eat and get to bed, however it was never going to be that easy as there were forms to fill in, queues to join, ID badges to pick up and more queues to join! The hotel had kindly kept the restaurant open and during dinner some uplifting news reached the squad… Russia and Croatia had both lost their Football Euro 2008 qualifiers!

Time to introduce the players and coaches. Out of the 13 players there are 7 boys: Matthew Wadsworth (Under 8), Adam Taylor (U10), Daniel Hunt (U12), Yang-Fang Zhou (U14), Ankush Khandelwal (U16), Callum Kilpatrick (U16), David Howell (U18) and 6 girls: Anna Wang (U8), Maria Wang (U12), Radha Jain (U12), Abigail Pritchard (U14), Jessica Thilaganathan (U16) and Amisha Parmar (U16).
There are four coaches; GM Tony Kosten (coaching Amisha), GM Neil McDonald (coaching Maria, Abigail, Jessica and Matthew), Jovanka Houska (coaching Anna, Radha, Yang-Fan and Callum) and myself (coaching Adam, Daniel and Ankush).

The coaching began at 10am (later than it normally would because of the late arrival the previous night) as the players and coaches prepared for the 1st round. After a team meeting and lunch the players gathered outside the playing hall at 2.50pm. After the usual chaos that is the first round at any World Youth Championships the games ‘kicked-off’ at 3:30pm. Here are the results from the first round…

Report by IM Thomas Rendle.