Exciting Estonian mental sports MV Karepal

Over the weekend, another individual Mind Games championship was held in Karepa (in chronological order, the disciplines were sudoku, chess, bridge, gomoku and checkers). A total of 35 competitors took part, although several of them only participated in 1-2 disciplines. As expected, there was never a feeling that Andres Kuusk would not win, it was more a question of what score he would collect. The top six were as follows: 1. Andres Kuusk 100 2. Villem Mesila 90 3. Eino Vaher 83 4. Martin Hõbemägi 81 5. Kalev Pagar 77.5 6. Ivo Adermann 72 I hope to bring you the course of the competitions and the full results soon.

1st area - solving sudokus. The sudokus were prepared by Marten, he also offered a solving time of 60 minutes. A total of 149 points could be obtained for 13 sudokus. Since Tiit and Ain were absent, a duel between Martin Grossberg and Villem Mesila could be expected. Martin brought the solutions when exactly 38 minutes had passed, 7 seconds later it was Villem's turn. Unfortunately, it turned out that the fighting between them had disturbed their calm concentration so that both of them made mistakes! So the victory was won by Timo Ilu, who was slower (brought the solutions after the time limit was up), but solved them accurately, and was the only one to collect 149 points. Villem followed with 127 and Martin with 113 points. An interesting story was with Andres Kuuse, who simply failed to notice the sudokus on the back of one of the pages. True, as it turned out, the 30 points he could have collected there would not have helped him either, because he collected "only" 81 points. However, this was enough for 4th place. 5th place went to Kuno Kolk with 72 points and 6th place to Kalev Pagar with 70 points. Kalev was upset with himself for messing up the last 2 numbers of a sudoku puzzle - 4 and 8. Kalev was followed by Triin Narva, Mati Nirgi and the trio who had equal points - Martin Hõbemägi, Ivo Adermann and Argo Lillemaa.

The 2nd area was chess. Timo Ilu focused on his son's birthday (he turned 4) and skipped chess and bridge. The main favorites in chess were Eino Vaher and Andres Kuusk. Eino had to accept a defeat in the second round - from Ralf Ahil. Initially, Andres and Ivo Adermann went from victory to victory, and after 4 rounds they were leading with full success. In the fifth round, they met and Andres won. However, he did not get an easy defeat, because in the next round he had to stop the clock in a game with Martin Grossber. Before the last, 7th round, in addition to Martin, Eino and Kalev now tried to catch the leader. In the last round, however, Andres managed to defeat Kalev and Eino Martin. Thus, Andres and Eino managed to collect 6 points equally during the tournament without meeting each other, but Andres took first place with better odds. 1. Andres Kuusk, 6 2. Eino Vaher, 6 3. Kalev Pagar, 5 4. Ralf Ahi, 5 5. Martin Grossberg, 5 6. Triin Narva, 5 7. Ivo Adermann, 4 8. Enith Li Saag, 4 9. Ervins Veitsurs, 4 10. Mati Nirgi, 4 11. Martin Hõbemägi, 4 Of the medal contenders, Villem was forced to settle for 13th place. Andres, who became the leader after 2 events (45 points), was followed by Martin Grossberg (40) and Kalev Pagar (39).

I will show you my and Kuus' game: [IMG]http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/7794/kuuskvsgrosberg.jpg[/IMG] Kuusk was white and I was black. This position came after - I don't know what opening because Kuusk tried to avoid my opening. I wanted to try the Sicilian Defense myself. Anyway, it's White's move. Kuusk played the spear on g7 and I the pawn on g7, then White moved the f-file rook to e2 and I played with the pawn on b2. Kuusk played with the rook on f6 and I played with the rook on c2. So far, we both made the best moves, so to speak. [IMG]http://img707.imageshack.us/img707/6821/kuuskeksis.jpg[/IMG] Then this position came and White moved. Kuusk thought better of it and played the pawn on d5 and White is checkmated in two moves. It would have been more correct to fire the rook on g6 and then the pawn on d5, after which White would have a 0.8 point advantage. I guess if we continue to make the best moves, we would probably end up with a draw.

Thanks to Martin for the chess game, it's encouraging to see that even Suur Kuusk can sometimes be so good at betting :). But now for the bridge tournament. 16 players participated here (24 in sudoku and 24 in chess). Individual bridge, especially between players with such a large difference in skill, is of course a real lottery. However, after 8 rounds played, Andres Kuusk emerged as the clear leader with 83.3%, surpassing Triin Narva, Ivo Adermann, Martin Hõbemägi and Kris Holtsman by almost 20%. Kuusk's success slowly began to decline, but Ivo, who had been in second place for most of the tournament, could not quite catch up. The last 4 out of 20 rounds brought the most success to Martin Hõbemägi. In the end, the top three were as follows: 1. Andres Kuusk 62.5% 2. Martin Hõbemägi 60.83 3. Ivo Adermann 60.0% Followed by Villem Mesila, Eino Vaher and 6th-7th in Enith Li Saag and Kalev Pagar.

I will also show you a bridge hand that I chipped at 2 tables. Nord: Exx/Sx/Kxx/ÄKS10x (cards are listed in suit order - spade, ace, diamond, club. x stands for an unimportant blunder or small card) Ost: KSx/Exxx/Ex/xxxx Süd: Äxx/Ä109x/ÄS9x/xx West: xxxx/Kxx/10xxx/Ex At both tables, the deal was 3NT from Nord with ace opening. At one table, declarer was Martin Hõbemägi. Probably annoyed by my chipping, he played everything "top", starting with ace of ace. However, since West did not go through the spade, after some adventures he managed to get 11 tricks. The second table was a board of bridge aces - Kuuse, Vaher, Adermann and Ahi. I don't remember who was declarer, Ralf or Ivo, in any case he played more technically, but the result was still 11 tricks. However, there is a chance to get 12 tricks. To do this, first of all, after passing the opening move through the board, you have to discard the knight of the hearth and hope that West does not continue the hearth (this would break the forced throw bond). Nord now takes the ace of spades, 3 diamonds and 5 clubs and, finishing with the last club from his hand, East forces - he cannot hold both the king of spades and the queen of the hearth with 2 defenses at the same time. Final position with 4 cards: Nord: Ex/x/-/x Ost: K/Exx/-/- Süd: x/Ä,10,9/-/- West's cards are already irrelevant.

After bridge, Andres already had 70 points together, followed by Kalev Pagar with 56.5 and Eino Vaher and Villem Mesila with 54 points. As a strong gomoku player, Martin Hõbemägi could also dream of a medal with 50 points. 34 players took part in the fourth discipline, gomoku. 4 of them - Tunnet Taimla, Johann Lents, Chinese Cun Xie and Paul Väljata - were strong gomoku players who had been at the renju and gomoku camp, but unfortunately only participated in one discipline. This behavior caused Eino Vaher to be justifiably indignant and he suggested that such "one-discipline players" should participate outside of the scoring in the future. Timo Ilu gave an excellent performance in gomoku. Already in the second round, the game brought him a very strong opponent - Johann Lents, and so on until the end. Martin Hõbemägi was very close to defeating Timo in the sixth round, but Martin made it more difficult for himself to achieve a certain victory than necessary, and Timo, of course, defended strongly. The top six was as follows: 1. Timo Ilu 7 2. Tunnet Taimla 6 3. Paul Väljataga 5 4. Villem Mesila 5 5. Stefan Karlsson (Sweden) 5 6. Johann Lents 5 While Villem had a successful tournament and could not complain about the draw (in addition to losing games to Tunnet and Timo, he also had to meet Stefan, one of the top players), Martin Hõbemägi had to settle for only 10th place. True, his medal hopes remained. 11th was Martin Grosberg, the best non-gomoku player, if you can say so. Martin G. dreamed of meeting Andres Kuus at the tournament and knocking him out, but others did the job. Andres, who initially scored 3 points out of 4, then lost 3 games in a row - to MartinH, Villem and Paul Kolg. Eino Vaher was half a point and one place ahead of Andres. Another non-gomokuka - Ivo Adermann managed to score as many as 4 points, but with poor odds it was only enough for 17th place.

Before the last game, checkers, Kuuse's lead over Villem had shrunk to just 1 point (75 and 74 respectively). Despite a mediocre gomoku tournament, Martin Hõbemägi came in third with 64 points, but the gap with the following - Eino Vaher (60) and Ivo Adermann (59) - was not very secure. In the women's competition, however, everything was already clear - Triin Narva's lead over Enith Li Saag was already 8.5 points. Eino Vaher showed a tough fighting spirit at the tournament, winning the first 4 games and also putting up a good fight against Suur Kuuse himself, losing in time in a position where a draw was probably possible. In the end, he deserved 2nd place. The surprise was the game of the Swede Stefan Karlsson. In May, he was in Tallinn once and said that he would also like to participate in the Estonian World Championship. When it came to checkers, he asked if the pieces could only jump over each other diagonally, and a test game where he kept missing pieces proved that the questioner really had no idea about checkers. I don't think Stefan had time to play in the meantime, but he started the tournament with 2 wins out of 3 over other beginners. In the 4th round, however, Triin Narva came up against him. Somehow, Stefan managed to win against such a strong player, and at one point he had 4 checkers against his opponent's 1. However, he didn't manage to turn it into a win due to lack of time. The first end of the tournament looked like this: 1. Andres, 6 2. Eino, 5.5 3. Kalev, 5 4. Ervins, 5 5. Enith, 4.5 6. Triin, 4.5 7. MartinH, 4.5 8. Villem, 4 9. Mati, 4 10. Kris, 4 11. Ivo, 4

I'll show you the last round game between me and a guest player. [IMG]http://img801.imageshack.us/img801/3107/avang.jpg[/IMG] The guest player made a sioux opening :D. Since I watched it with Olumetsa before the tournament started, I thought I would get an easy win with White. Unfortunately, he had done his preliminary work at home and I had to think a lot in advance. When I had less than a minute, this was the situation. [IMG]http://img341.imageshack.us/img341/953/gomokuseis.jpg[/IMG] (The picture shows Black's move) Black defended and attacked at the same time, and I tried to think of something in my limited time. I could have made three or four more moves if I hadn't seen Black force a win with fours. After the game, we analyzed whether White still had any hope of winning. We looked at several different variations that went very deep into the position. It turned out that the way I play it, black can defend and attack with fours and white had no hope. I think this opening should still give white some advantage. I'll play it differently next time. So there's no point in trying this opening against me anymore :D

nice presentations and opinions......but this is not the protocol of the competition.