This event started on 30th March and ended on 1st April. The Organiser begins to inform schools about 3 weeks before the event dates. It gave many schools ample time to do their own selection and submit a list of players to the event organiser.
In my profession of training, I teach one school only in this zone. This year selection process for me has been made easier without having to submit a list of 4 players (boys and girls respectively) to take part in the Team event. I heard the team event was scrapped in every zone in KL due to budget constraint. The same goes to the Final without Team event.
With the Individual event at play, I can give full concentration to all players who are in the School team squad without favours. Some may asks, what's the problem if there is a Team Category. Well, first of all the team always uses 25 min/player time control, while the Individual category uses 45 min/player. A player that is good in Rapid, may not be as good under 45 min and vice versa. I believe people who are familiar with chess will know what I mean.
Over the years, training has to be divided into 2 parts to accomodate different time control. It's a very difficult thing to implement on students especially they have to get adjusted to both speeds at the same time and some students end up just concentrate on 1 speed. That explain why a "relatively good" player can perform below par in the one of the time control of the same event. How this happen?
For those who still could not figure out the explaination, let me gives an example. Say, a runner is supposed to train for 400m and 800m run at the same time. He or she may not able to do well in both races, unless he or she is clearly way above other runners by standard (let us remove this scenario because it translates to non-competitive race). Chances of winning both races under competitive environment is very slim.
Without the team event in the fixture, how they had fared in the Sentul Zone Individual Chess Competition?
To start off, the school none other than SJK(C) Kepong 2 had sent 8 boys for U12B Category, 7 boys for U10B, 1 girl for U12G, 3 girls for U10G.
The results (extracted from MSSMKL blogsite) can be seen as below:
As from the result, we can see that the school made a clean sweep from 1st to 5th placing for U12 Boys Category, another clean sweep from 1st to 4th placing for U10 Boys, the lone representative in U12 Girls finished the event as Champion, and the other 3 new girls qualified themselves into the Final. Besides these 13 students, 2 other students also make it to the Final. This is the most impressive results (top finishing) ever recorded for the school as a result of single time control implementation.
Next installment, Keramat Zone (Primary).