Friday, December 29, 2017

3rd Kolonnawa International Rated Chess Tournament 2017

The 3rd Kolonnawa international Chess tournament started on the 8th December 2017. The venue for this year‘s tournament was Parakramabahu College, Narahenpita. The tournament was a 9 round tournament. I was the only visually impaired player and organizers supported me a lot by providing necessary facilities for me to play the tournament.
There was no visually impaired category for this tournament. After 9 rounds I was able to score 6 points and my final rank was 61 out of 365 players.
 This will be my final tournament for 2017. I played 3 tournaments this year. In the first tournament I became the first visually impaired Chess player in Sri Lanka to participate in an international rated Chess tournament organized for sighted players. In my 2nd tournament I was able to gain FIDE ratings to become the first Sri Lankan visually impaired Chess player to get FIDE international rating. In my 3rd tournament I played well to get 6 points out of 9 rounds while I got 5 and 5.5 points respectively previous 2 tournaments which had 10 rounds each.

My goal is to be in the top 10 visually impaired Chess players in the world by 2019. That makes the year 2018 a hard working year for me. The world visually impaired individual Chess championship will be held in Italy 2019 and the Asian visually impaired Chess championship in Philippines 2020.