An Observer's Perspective

Get two hundred people, a computer, one man at a card table with a stack of pretty red squares and what do you have? Stress. Lots of it. Dan and Donald played 10 games and took three days to do it in. How they managed to keep up their quality of play, I'll never know.

As an advertising event, it went great. Donald managed to put up with the background noise from all the visitors to The Science Centre and Mawatu Museum and the occasional delayed move due to me chatting to bystanders.

The match, however, did highlight the need to regulate the number of games played. Squeezing in 3 or 4 championship games per day was just too much. Donald (and presumably Dan) was worn out at the end of the 3 days. Big thanks to Lufi's Cafe who provided an excellent lunch - the only real stress relief during the entire tournament!

The time problems were even worse for the Candidate's Tournament highlighting the need for more formal guidelines for major tournaments, especially where games are played over the Internet.

The match