Filipino Chess Player League - Doha Tops Qatar Open Chess Tournament 2009

Filipino techie wins chess tournament
Web posted at: 2/8/2009 2:8:56
Source ::: THE PENINSULA

Children engrossed in games in the SDC Inter-School Chess Tournament organised by Skill Development Centre in Doha yesterday.

DOHA: A Filipino engineer became champion of Qatar Open 2009 chess tournament after garnering a perfect nine points in the nine-day competition that saw some 67 participants outsmarting each other in the mind-challenging board games.

Declared champion last night was Richard Roxas , a structural engineer of KEO International Consultant Co after an exciting final match with Ahmad Al Batah who settled for only six points and was ranked number ten on the list of finalists.

FIDE master Ghanem Al Sulaiti, a national player of Qatar, came in a close First Runner Up with eight points, just a point behind Roxas who beat him in the preliminary rounds.

It was a grueling nine-day match with all players looking exhausted in the final games

last night.

Five other Filipino chess players made it to the top ten of the tournament sponsored by Qatar Chess Association. The players include Andro Huerto in third place, Ferdinand Tan in fourth place, Agustin Nanola Tabol in fifth place, Rommel Elarcosa in sixth place, and Asiclo Villafuerte in seventh place. Other nationalities who made it to the finals were Mohammed Abu Ra’ad, a Jordanian in eighth place, Abdelaziz Al Mahmoud, a Lebanese, in ninth place and Ahmad Al Batah, a Syrian, in tenth place.

Roxas was in top form in the games even though he has not been participating in chess tournaments for the last ten years after he became a consistent champion at the National Collegiate Athletic Association in the Philippines where he represented Mapua Institute

of Technology.

He took a clean sweep of the games with no losses, a feat considered as extraordinary for a champion who had yet to hone back his skills and prepare for the matches against equally competent chess players of different nationalities.

Roxas admitted he was a bit nervous when he faced Al Sulaiti in the preliminaries. Al Sulaiti was being considered the favourite being a former champion himself.

In the end, however, Roxas managed to outsmart him

to emerge the final winner.