The 2010 Hungarian Championship

The 2010 Hungarian Championship
by Diana Mihajlova

The Hungarian Individual Championship that took place at the beginning of July in Szeged, Hungary, was composed of two groups of 12 players:

(Group A) – GM Ferenc Berkes (2670), GM David Berczes (2551), GM Jozsef Pinter (2519), IM Gabor Kovacs (2500), GM Robert Ruck (2560), and IM Tamas Banusz (2529);

(Group B) – IM Gabor Papp (2545), GM Zoltan Medvegy (2522), GM Zoltan Gyimesi (2598), GM Viktor Erdos (2592), GM Richard Rapport (2534) and FM Tamas Fodor (2452).

After the preliminary round robin tournaments, the two winners from each group qualified for the finals: Ferenc Berkes and Zoltan Gyimesi would compete to decide the 1st and 2nd place and David Berczes and Zoltan Medvegy would fight for the 3rd and 4th place.

I attended the final two days and witnessed an anguished fight that evolved in the four-star Forras Hotel, with Berczes’s clock coming
precariously close to running out of time, and eventually costing him the game.

First-place winner, Ferenc Berkes pointed to the worrisome signs: “David Berczes is a very good player but with his time-trouble problems he cannot go too far. He plays beautiful games, has good ideas, but with one minute on your clock it is impossible to go on for a long time.”

And he pointed out other very good players who were also unable to reach their potential because of this same impediment, such as Reshevsky in the past and Grischuk today.

Here is the full article on Chessbase.