What happened at FGM SEA games training 2011.

Sumant had been training with us for some time even before SEA games selection. We will sit down and discuss meaning of strategy etc etc. Ref: Here.

Since I normally assess both Mark's and Sumant's performance at most tournaments they go to together, my evaluation of Sumant was that he lacked discipline to train and he also did not carefully think through which opening to play with each player.

The strategy agreed for SEA games selection was that he must win against the lower ranked players and take down or draw with at least 2 of the IM's present. Of the IM's present we chose Jimmy, Mok and Yee Weng to study since we could not find the right weapon for Mas.

Now, as you remember, Zhuo Ren also asked to come. But he did not agree with the strategy. He kept saying that Mok was unbeatable and so he did his own thing. I guess it shouldn't have been much of a surprise when his email came out on Jimmy's blog.

With Sumant we helped to evaluate the best possible line against Jimmy if he had played French. But Jimmy switched to Philidor and Sumant lost.

The choice of line that we looked for are lines that take the fight to the IM's and not play passively.

With Mok, we found that Sumant also did not have a good line and then the boy's contacted an IM friend of theirs and he provided a line that we felt Sumant can win with. And so Sumant won.

Up to now, our contribution is mostly to get Sumant to train and to methodically go through each line with each player, as both white and black, that was in for the selection.

And we acted as his sparring partner and sounding board to challenge his assumptions.

But this is where we contributed technically. We also found that Sumant did not have a fighting weapon for Yee Weng.

Mark came to me quietly. He told me he had a personal line for Yee Weng that he felt was also good for Sumant. But he wanted to keep it for himself. So my advice to him was that when you work together, you need to give your best to each other. We were there to help and so I advised him to share but it was his choice. Mark shared his weapon with Sumant and Sumant got a draw from a winning position.

And so history was changed by this training. A junior won his place on the senior squad, in a selection, and the IM's here now know they will have a fight on their hands in the future.

The sequence of events after this will show you just how frightened certain IM's and trainers became as a result of this training. Next post.