Chess and Ping Pong in Catalonia

4th CHESS PONG TOURNAMENT: RECORD OF PARTICIPANTS, NEW WINNER. THE CHESSERS BEATS THE PONGERS

On Saturday 11th June the 4th chess pong tournament  was held again, this time in Barcelona, capital of Catalonia, in the Lluïsos de Gràcia site.

Chess pong is a combination of table tennis and chess. We have tried different systems in every edition and this time there was a new format also. It was a table tennis game at 28 with the possibility to finish 28-28 and draw and for every point of advantage 10 seconds less in a blitz game, meaning that minimum starting with 20 seconds. If the game started with chess, then for every 10 seconds you could save in the game if winning you got 1 point in table tennis, so if giving mate in 40 seconds you could start 26-0 in table tennis.

The favorites were the usual contestants  from the other tournaments, like Enric Bosch and Dani Luco from the table tennis world and Josué Expósito, 2297 in blitz and Albert Ezquerro, 2125 in blitz and winner in the first two editions. Of the newcomers, the catalan GM Dani Alsina, stood out , 2521 elo and 2418 in blitz. This time the number of participants rose to 36, not bad, the numbers in the other editions were 17, then 21 and last year 25. Some players also travelled a way to get there, one came from Zaragoza and a father and a son from Andorra.

After 6 rounds with the swiss-system, the first 8 started a knock-out and the others were doing also a knock-out in groups of 4 to establish all the positions. These 6 rounds  showed great matches, as the better in table tennis Bosch against the better in chess Alsina. In chess Alsina  won spending between 40 and 50 seconds, that was 25-0 for him in table tennis, but Bosch has remounted a 27-15 to win at the end 29-27. Also the other ponger Luco was not in the first 8 losing the last round against Javier Morais 1959 in chess where Morais gave the mate to Luco with the flag falling down. It was also necessary to do an extra-match between Xavi Grau and Jose Muñoz to determine the last place for the quarter-finals because they were with the same points and same bucholz.

The quarterfinals the first 4 passed trough the semifinals and here arrived one of the matches more repeated in the chesspong, Ezquerro against Bosch, the only winners until now of the tournament. Ezquerro was able to score some points in table tennis, losing 28-8 and with 1 minute 20 Bosch tried a Larsen opening but Ezquerro had no excessive problems to get victory. In the other semifinal after losing some seconds in table tennis Alsina won a rook + pawn vs rook ending to Expósito.

In the great final Alsina got enough points in table tennis losing 28-21 and with 3 minutes 50 had equalized in time rapidly and with an attack to the short castle with knight + rook + queen and Ezquerro with the queen badly placed was the new winner of this edition that after seeing the number of participants and the enthusiastic that they are is pretty sure that a new edition will arrive maximum next spring.

The complete classification was as follows.