Nigel Short edges Eric Hansen on tiebreaks to win the 2013 Canadian Open

The Canadian Open 2013 took place on 13-20th July at the National Hotel and Suites Ottawa in Ottawa, ON.

The tournament saw a very intense fight for first place with strong players such as Nigel Short, Lazaro Bruzon and Ivan Sokolov aiming to get a big payout. These strong GMs were joined by young and ambitious Canadian players, such as GM Eric Hansen and IM Aman Hambleton.

Former world championship challenger Nigel Short showed his class and finished the event with six wins and three draws, but he had to wait for the organizers to calculate the tiebreak scores to get the winner’s title, as GM Eric Hansen achieved the same score.  Both players received the same money prize, $ 4.000.

Five players shared 3rd-7th place after getting 7 points: Lazaro Bruzon, Ivan Sokolov, Aman Hambleton, Edward Porper and Arthur Calugar. Full standings below.

Chessdom talked with Eric Hansen, who transmitted his satisfaction with his performance at this event:

The tournament took place in our capital, a quiet city. Because there were not many distractions, I was pretty focused on my tournament games. I managed to play solid and take advantage of my opponents’ mistakes for most of my victories. This is my last tournament in Canada before moving to Spain so It’s nice to leave on a good performance. Now, I will focus all my attention to preparation for the World Cup.

Aman Hambleton, who is a member of the Master Team that plays regularly at Chessdom Arena, was part of the organizing team, but this did not prevent him from getting a really good score at the tournament:

I was a part of the organizing team for the tournament, my job being the Elite Player Coordinator in charge of the foreign invitations, VISA’s, conditions, etc.

I thought the tournament was a great international look for Canada, with some near-2700 level participants (Nigel Short, Lazaro Bruzon, Ivan Sokolov).

Also, most of Canada’s young players (FMs, IMs) played the tournament so it was a nice chance for them to play with some different competition for a change :)

I found the tournament to have a nice schedule, very relaxing one game/day for the most part and it allowed time for most players to visit the many tourist sites in Ottawa, especially Parliament Hill. For me, it’s not an issue since I am living in Ottawa!

GM norms were possible, but unfortunately the GM’s in the tournament were not doing so well so even though I had 5.5/7 I only played an FM in round 8. I was close to making a GM norm, with performance near 2600 and 7/9 but I had only played 2 GM’s.

For a big Open of 200 participants, I think the Organization did a good job keeping the spectators up to date with pairings, as well as a very detailed Multimedia page with postmortem videos and pictures from the rounds.

Bruzon, Sokolov and Hambleton are among the players that traveled straight to Quebec to participate in the Quebec Open Chess Championship 2013.

Official website

Final Standings:

1	GM Nigel Short(title on TB)	2697	7.5
2	GM Eric Hansen	2587	7.5
3	GM Ivan Sokolov	2642	7.0
4	GM Lazaro Bruzon Batista	2758	7.0
5	IM Aman Hambleton	2580	7.0
6	IM Edward Porper	2494	7.0
7	IM Arthur Calugar	2418	7.0
8	GM Elshan Moradiabadi	2557	6.5
9	IM Artiom Samsonkin	2557	6.5
10	GM Bator Sambuev	2688	6.5
11	IM Raja Panjwani	2517	6.5
12	IM Richard Wang	2484	6.5
13	GM Ioan Cristian Chirila	2519	6.5
14	IM Rodney Oscar Perez Garcia	2464	6.5
15	FM Roman Sapozhnikov	2396	6.5
16	GM Luis Manuel Perez Rodriguez	2480	6.5
17	IM Keaton Kiewra	2423	6.5
18	GM Eduardas Rozentalis	2601	6.0
19	GM Eugene Perelshteyn	2571	6.0
20	IM Leonid Gerzhoy	2571	6.0
21	GM Reynaldo Vera	2514	6.0
22	FM Kevel Oliva Castaneda	2399	6.0
23	GM Walter Arencibia	2610	6.0
24	IM Bindi Cheng	2516	6.0
25	FM Michael Dougherty	2290	6.0
26	Michael Song	2390	6.0
27	Evgeny Miller	2234	6.0
28	FM Victor Plotkin	2394	6.0
29	Alex Yam	2367	6.0
30	Kevin Pacey	2223	6.0
31	Stijn De Kerpel	2157	6.0
32	Agastya Kalra	2130	6.0
33	FM Jason Cao	2239	5.5
34	FM Michael Kleinman	2367	5.5
35	FM Eric Rodriguez	2318	5.5
36	IM Leon Piasetski	2392	5.5
37	Digeng Du	2009	5.5
38	Geordie Derraugh	2297	5.5
39	Mike Ivanov	2252	5.5
40	James Fu	2257	5.5
41	Steve Demmery	2110	5.5
42	Jonathan Yu	2224	5.5
43	William G Doubleday	2166	5.5
44	Ramon J Cova	2077	5.5
45	Qiyu Zhou	2160	5.5
46	Dmitry Chernik	1918	5.5
47	James Chan	2184	5.5
48	Saeid Sadeghi	1978	5.5
49	Martial Larochelle	2232	5.5
50	Yevgeni Nahutin	2044	5.5
51	WC Alexandra Botez	2204	5.0
52	Armando Valdizon	2219	5.0
53	Miladin Djerkovic	2287	5.0
54	Mate Marinkovic	2231	5.0
55	Kevin Wan	2148	5.0
56	Tanraj S Sohal	2263	5.0
57	Jason Kenney	2159	5.0
58	Vasil Khachidze	2359	5.0
59	David Itkin	2151	5.0
60	Ruining Ray Wu	2117	5.0
61	Butch Villavieja	2275	5.0
62	Mark Plotkin	2223	5.0
63	Adam Dorrance	2185	5.0
64	Paul Leblanc	1839	5.0
65	Diwen Shi	2030	5.0
66	Ismail Ibrahim	2057	5.0
67	John Doknjas	2065	5.0
68	Zachary Burrows	2031	5.0
69	FM Robert Hamilton	2374	5.0
70	Amos Kuttner	1946	5.0
71	Max Gedajlovic	1875	5.0
72	Danail Donev	2023	5.0
73	Joey Zhong	2033	5.0
74	Jeremy Hui	1976	5.0
75	James Currie	1999	5.0
76	Mateusz Dydak	1975	5.0
77	Gordon Giacomin	1951	5.0
78	Adam Adriaanse	1924	5.0
79	David Cohen	1866	5.0
80	Jeff Babb	2211	4.5
81	David Petty	2161	4.5
82	Yuetong Davy Zhao	1873	4.5
83	CM David Gordon	2319	4.5
84	Francesco Dunne	2066	4.5
85	Daniel Van Heirzeele	2088	4.5
86	Chris Felix	1993	4.5
87	Stephan Tonakanian	2071	4.5
88	Wenlu Yu	2032	4.5
89	Mike Sun	2080	4.5
90	Vitaliy Matytsyn	unr.	4.5
91	Vladimir Drkulec	1988	4.5
92	Nathan Farrant-Diaz	1748	4.5
93	Alex Y Lin	1809	4.5
94	David Forget	1921	4.5
95	Joshua Doknjas	1848	4.5
96	Benjamin Blium	1927	4.5
97	Guy Piche	1745	4.5
98	Brendon Lee	1870	4.5
99	Matthew Morabito	1799	4.5
100	Brian McKay	1860	4.0
101	Rod Hill	1959	4.0
102	Roger Lebrun	1914	4.0
103	Gilles Jobin	1942	4.0
104	Simon Kuttner	1877	4.0
105	Victor Itkin	1707	4.0
106	Gordon Ritchie	1730	4.0
107	Jeffrey Xu	1862	4.0
108	Lali Agbabishvili	2099	4.0
109	Patrick Scantland	1838	4.0
110	Michel Desjardins	1996	4.0
111	Robin Yu	1751	4.0
112	Jaime Solis	1658	4.0
113	Kai Richardson	1626	4.0
114	Wenyang Ming	1851	4.0
115	Michael Su	1770	4.0
116	Ryan Yang	1911	4.0
117	Rinna Yu	1301	4.0
118	Kajan Thanabalachandran	1759	4.0
119	Stanley Wu	1741	4.0
120	Luc Villeneuve	1931	4.0
121	Jill Ding	1585	4.0
122	Luc Gauthier	1740	4.0
123	Edward Selling	1579	4.0
124	Jean Bigras	1762	4.0
125	Doug Gillis	1618	4.0
126	Garland Best	1603	4.0
127	Ian Finlay	1936	3.5
128	David Kenney	1936	3.5
129	Mario Moran-Venegas	1880	3.5
130	Ashley Tapp	1481	3.5
131	Yinshi Li	2081	3.5
132	Mackenzie Hardie	1838	3.5
133	Lenard Grossmann	1614	3.5
134	Thomas Kurian	1640	3.5
135	Jacob Krolczyk	1909	3.5
136	Walter Macneil	1655	3.5
137	Robert Laszlo	1753	3.5
138	Melissa Lee	1534	3.5
139	Grant Schaper	1647	3.5
140	Kyle Creamer	1838	3.5
141	Marcel Laurin	1625	3.5
142	Robert J Armstrong	1590	3.5
143	Steven Faust	1711	3.5
144	Thomas Guo	1608	3.5
145	Alan Tomalty	1764	3.5
146	Clark Zhang	994	3.5
147	Rowan James	1072	3.5
148	Alex Reny	1067	3.5
149	Curtis Barlow Wilkes	1861	3.0
150	Norman Devine	1631	3.0
151	Alex Danilov	1767	3.0
152	Chris White	1757	3.0
153	Maurice Smith	1494	3.0
154	Fernando Echavarria Hidalgo	1679	3.0
155	John Remillard	1633	3.0
156	Kevin Low	1484	3.0
157	Francois Poitras	1687	3.0
158	Samuel Chen	1339	3.0
159	Richard Feng	1364	3.0
160	Aiden Zhou	1136	3.0
161	Konstantin Vlasenko	1660	2.5
162	Miles Duggal	1231	2.5
163	Brian Murray	1459	2.5
164	Conrad Macneil	1598	2.5
165	Ken Douglas	unr.	2.5
166	Vilas Karmalkar	1604	2.5
167	Daniel Du	1038	2.5
168	W Thomson Bruce	1528	2.5
169	Annika Zhou	1045	2.5
170	Simon Perkins	1614	2.0
171	Frank Lee	1471	2.0
172	Neil Doknjas	1228	2.0
173	Dee Wu	1188	2.0
174	Jeff Zhang	1500	2.0
175	Ethan Low	1105	2.0
176	Jatinder Dhaliwal	1461	1.5
177	Keven Eyre	1536	1.5
178	Nicholas Short	unr.	1.0