Christian Laverton

Wednesday was matchday, and we were both nervous and very excited! Unfortunately, Tottenham tend to lose fairly often, so coming all the way to London to see a game is risky business. But, read on…

We left for London around 2PM, taking the underground from Debden to Holborn. At Holborn we changed to the Piccadilly line, which we took to Wood Green. There we took a bus to White Hart Lane. We later found out that it’s simpler and faster to change at Liverpool Street and take the railroad to White Hart Lane.

At White Hart Lane we first visited the Spurs Shop. I bought the home shirt and got the away shirt for free! Edward bought some training equipment. The funny thing was that Edward asked the shop staff for “knickers”. This would sound alright in Norway, but it turns out that this means ladies underwear in England…

After shopping, we went to Bricklayers, one of the best supporter pubs. Here we met quite a few Norwegians also travelling to see the game. After a beer (or five), it was finally game time.

Our seats were in row 3 at East lower. We sat almost at the corner flag, at Tottenham’s attacking end in the first half. The game started with chances for both teams, and as my brother said, all chances seem a lot bigger when you see them live compared to on the telly. To our surprise and great joy, Tottenham scored the first goal!!! From a corner by Luka Modric, Robbie Keane put the ball in the net, making his first goal after his return. What a great start, but more was coming!! Just a few minutes later, Pavlyuchenko made it 2-0! Me and my brother could hardly believe what we were seeing. Our friend Petter later told us “you picked the right matchday”, and we sure did… Before the first half was over, Aaron Lennon made it 3-0 after a great pass from Robbie Keane.

The second half had less action, but Tottenham defended well and even got a 4th goal scored by Aaron Lennon. After the game we had a Spurs beefburger and then went back to Bricklayers to have a few more beer before heading home.

You might wonder why I called this post “Yid army”. It turns out that some time ago the Arsenal fans started calling the Spurs fans “yiddos” or “yids”, because quite a few Spurs fans are jewish (yid is a slang jewish ethnonym). This was of course meant as an insult, but the spurs fans started calling themselves “Yid army”, defusing some of the insult’s power. So before, during and after the game, Spurs fans (including us) shouted Yid army!!

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I’m sorry I haven’t blogged for a long time, I’ll try to improve

Me and my brother Edward are now in England! We arrived at Stanstead tuesday morning, and took a taxi to Pyrles Lane, Loughton, where our grandparents live. The main purpose of this trip is of course to visit them, as I haven’t been over here for over 10 years! But also, we wanted to see a Tottenham game, which I’ll write about in the next post.

Not much has changed in Pyrles Lane. My grandparents are of course getting old, but they’re still doing alright. Yesterday me, Edward and grandpa went to PCWorld in Harlow to buy a new computer. The old laptop spends 10 minutes opening Internet Explorer, so….We bought a £400 Compaq workstation with a 19″ widescreen. It’s a good computer, not too expensive, and more than powerful enough for my grandparents’ needs.

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Me, Anders Rundgren and Bent Hestad are now in Serbia playing an international tournament. The tournament is in Obrenovac, a town 30km outside of Belgrade.

In the first round, I faced a very tough opponent. FM Ivan Martic played the King’s Indian defence against me, and was able to get a decisive advantage in the early middle game. Today I will meet an unrated player, so it’s hard to know how difficult it will be.

Bent struggled against a 2100-player, but certainly had drawing chances. Unfortunately he didn’t find the right moves in the rook endgame. Anders played very well, also against a 2100-player, and won!! Today he faces a strong IM

Our Serbian friend GM Mihajlo Stojanovic is also playing in the tournament, but he spends a lot of time to help us feel at home and to improve our chess. He’s a fantastic person and a great chess teacher! So far we’ve had a great time down here, and believe that our chess will improve a lot.

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The match between Mid-Norway (Trøndelag) and Mid-Sweden (Jämtland) has become a yearly tradition, and the 2008 edition was played this weekend. I participated for the first time for the Norwegian team, and was able to draw my game against a higher-rated opponent. But unfortunately the Swedish team beat us 13-7. This came as no surprise though, as the home team usually has an advantage. It is hard to convince the best players of the club to travel all the way to Østersund in Sweden to play a game of chess.

On sunday, a rapid chess tournament was played, with 15 minutes per player per game. With 32 players, there were quite a few strong players in the field, and I knew that getting a decent result would be a tough job. However, I got off to an amazing start, scoring 5 points on the 5 first rounds! This included wins against strong players such as Lennart Burman, Terje Lund and Ulf Persson. But my winning streak came to an abrupt halt when I faced Kjell Arne Lilleløkken. In the last round I got paired against Christer Mäki, the same player I met in the match the day before. Christer slowly outplayed me. Maybe I struggled to shake off the loss against Kjell? But when everything looked completely lost and resignable, my opponent made a terrible move, capturing his own pawn with my pawn! This is of course not a valid move, and because we were playing with blitz rules, it lost him the game. Christer was very disappointed, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how unfair the result was. However, this was quickly forgotten when I was handed the 1st prize trophy!

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Despite the warm weather, I decided to go to the cinema today with a friend. We saw Batman - The Dark Knight, and what a movie it was!

Earlier today I had noticed the incredible 9.4/10 score it has on imdb. I thought maybe this rating was a little biased, because most of the people who have rated it so far are probably Batman-fans. Thus, it might even out after a few weeks. But, the movie really lived up to the expectations. Especially Heath Ledger impressed me in the role of The Joker.

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What to do when you lose a game of chess? Well…

For more funny use of English, check engrish.com

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The tournament ended well for me, as I was able to snatch a full point on the final day. This put me on 50% with 4.5 of 9 points, and a nice 35th place. Doesn’t sound too impressive, but my performance was well above expected. The norwegian rating performance was 1881 (+172), and the international was 2021. I already have a provisional international rating of somewhere around 1800, so including this tournament I should get my first official international rating of somewhere around 1900 on the next FIDE list.

My friend and clubmate Anders Rundgren had a disappointing final day, but anyway ended up on a respectable 3 out of 9 points. His norwegian rating performance was 1573 (+143), so nothing to complain about!

Unfortunately I caught a heavy cold on wednesday, meaning that I’ve not been able to do anything useful the last few days. Hopefully I’ll be fit for fight again soon. Luckily I didn’t catch the cold during the tournament…

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I should probably have mentioned this before, but I’m actually playing in a tournament in Oslo now. Maybe I wanted to keep it a secret in case I played badly? Luckily I will never find out, since my performance has been above all expectations! My score is 3.5 out of 7, with 2 rounds to go, giving me an international rating performance of 2032 and a national rating performance of 1910.

I’m not sure what to say about the quality of my games. It seems that I often get very good positions out of the opening, but then struggle to make anything of the advantage in the middlegame. Actually in one of the games I lost and in two of my draws, I would say I had an almost winning advantage but failed to make any use of it. This indicates that opening play is one of my strengths, and that I should work harder on the middlegame phase and how to convert to an advantageous endgame.

The tournament is in memory of norwegian IM Svein Johannesen, who passed away earlier this year. The organizers have done a fantastic job so far, it has been a pleasure to participate!
I’ll try to write more about the tournament after today’s rounds. In the mean time, check the tournament blog.

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TSF arranged the rapid chess tournament Gamle Bybro 2008 yesterday, with 6 rounds of 30 minutes per player. My previous rapid tournament was a great success, where I won with 6 of 6 points. Because of this, I felt some pressure to perform well in yesterday’s tournament. But, the day before the tournament, Daniel Kovachev from OSS had signed up. He’s a 2250-player, especially strong in blitz and rapid chess. In addition, I went to a party saturday and drank quite a few beer.

Despite this, I played pretty decent chess and had 3.5 points after 4 rounds. In the fifth round I was paired against Kovachev with the white pieces. We played a classic Nimzo-Indian with 4. Qc2 0-0. As is usually the case for me in the Nimzo-Indian, I had no idea what I was doing. Still, I managed to survive all the way to an endgame where I should have held the draw. Unfortunately I’m far from a 2250-player in endgames, especially when low on time. 0-1 …

In the last round a relatively quick draw was agreed between me and Pål Andreas Hansen. I had the black pieces and was too tired to play for a win (although this could have given me the second place). So I ended up in third place, not a bad result at all!

My rating is now at 1709, which means it has increased 350 points in 1.5 year. Assuming my rating increase is linear, I should be 2000+ by the end of 2009

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My brother Edward and his girlfriend Trine are moving into my apartment. Today I helped Trine move her stuff, using a car from Rent-a-Wreck. The car turned out to be bigger than expected (a Mercedes diesel), so we managed to move everything in one go.

Although the car qualified to be called a wreck, it was fun driving. You get a “king of the road” feeling when driving such a big car.

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