Arriving to Plovdiv and the 1st round

I left Sarajevo 6 in the morning to pick up Jozsef in Belgrade before noon. Belgrade was a bit tricky because I didn’t have a map so I just memorized the location of the hotel at home. But reality is always so much different than a 2D map so it took more than 30 minutes to find the hotel and another 30 minutes to find the highway to Nis. From there on it was straight 500km to Plovdiv. 

Entering to Bulgaria

 The opening ceremony was a bit boring chesswise – folk dancing and singing. We were waiting only for the pairing of the first round so we could start preparing for the next day. Finally we got the pairings at around 11pm. At that time I was already very tired but still I started to browse the databases.

Preparing at "home"

I had the Black pieces against GM Frank Holzke (ELO 2508) from Germany and I found that he plays the French Tarrasch opening.

Black against GM Holzke

I prepared a line up to move 12 and to my great satisfaction it appeared on the board so I had a good position and lost no time in the opening.

The prepared line appeared on the board

I had a balanced game up to move 22 when he already started to attack my e6 weakness so I decided to fight a brave battle instead of bleeding out slowly and I sacrificed a rook for a knight and some positional advantage. Unfortunately my time was running short and it turned out that the sacrifice was not completely sound. On top of that I missed a strong move by my opponent, my queen became overloaded and I had to give up a full piece for nothing. The game was over but it was a good game and in my first game against a grandmaster I didn’t feel I was destroyed – I was outplayed and that’s OK.

Tomorrow my opponent will be a Hungarian international master, Antal Tibor Kende (ELO 2350).

The playing hall

Jozsef and me before the first round

The playing hall during the first round with GM Holzke in blue

Jozsef played against GM Valery Popov