Jakarta flops in Asian Cities team chess tour

JAKARTA (JP): Without grandmasters Utut Adianto and Edhi Handoko, Jakarta could not defend its title at the 10th Asian Cities Team Chess Championship in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, which ended on Saturday.

Jakarta, which won the biannual tournament in 1992 and 1994 finished fifth with 21.5 points. Tashkent and Samarkand of Uzbekistan came first and second respectively after both scored 25.5 with a solkov difference of 10. Solkov refers to the scores collected by one's opponents.

Ashkabad of Turkmenistan and Ho Chi Minh City of Vietnam finished third and fourth. The two cities also ended up with 22.5. A solkov difference of 8.5 put Ashkabad ahead of Ho Chi Minh City. As winners, Tashkent, Samarkand and Ashkabad were awarded US$6,000, $4,000 and $3,000 respectively in prize money.

Jakarta lost Utut, currently the country's number one grandmaster, and senior grandmaster Edhi, to Bandung. The capital of West Java has the right to include Utut and Edhi in its team because both Utut and Edhi live in Tangerang, one of Jakarta's suburbs in West Java.

As a result, Jakarta's team was weakened, Jakarta's team captain Danny Yuswanto told The Jakarta Post from Dubai yesterday. Even though Jakarta's third and fourth players remained as strong as they were in 1992 and in 1994, without Utut and Edhi, they could not achieve much.

Bandung could not make it either. Its new acquisitions, Utut and Edhi, are fine as its first and second players. But its third and fourth players could not fully support them, Danny said.

Until the sixth round, Jakarta was running fifth with 17 points, half a point ahead of Bandung, Danny said. But in the seventh round, Jakarta was beaten by Tashkent with 3.5-0.5 and Bandung only managed to draw with Singapore for a 2-2 result. "This meant that in order to win the tournament, we had to beat the other former republics of the Soviet Union 4-0, which was quite impossible," Danny said.

Jakarta fielded a full team in the last two rounds, the eight and the ninth round. But Bandung, realizing it stood a very remote chance of winning, fielded only reserve players and finished eight with 20.5 points.

The only consolation for the Indonesians, however, was in the rapid chess tournament held alongside the championship. In the rapid chess tournament, Bandung won first place with 27 points, followed by Samarkand with 24 points. The Kazakhstani city of Pav Lodar, Ho Chi Minh City and Jakarta finished third, fourth and fifth respectively.

The Indonesian squads are expected to arrive home tomorrow. (arf)