Oriental Poker Sports Club

Like the rest of the world ,poker is growing by leaps and bounds. A testament to its increasing popularity in Cebu is the opening of a new club to accommodate the increasing number of new players.

Everytime I play, I see new faces and a lot of them are women. Poker players are requesting me “adopt” the game and to cover big events .

The new kid on the block is Oriental Poker Sports Club located at Casino Filipino,2nd floor ,Parkmall ,Mandaue City. The location is easily accessible and parking is safe and secured.

This is the 5th Poker Club in Metro Cebu. The others are All-in in Waterfront Lahug, Metro Card also in Mandaue, Tulip in Mactan and Diamond Club beside the Grand Convention Center.

Grand opening of Oriental is tomorrow May 21. They started right by featuring a Free Roll tournament (no buy-in).

The guaranteed pot is 30K and registration is on a first come, first serve basis.

Eat-all-you-can Lechon Fiesta dinner will also be served.

I will be playing tomorrow with my daughter ,Zarah, and my chess buddy Nicnic Climaco. Coming with me are lovebirds Joe “Phoenix” Luna and Cindy Yap. Poker buddies Keith Coyoga and Jessie Ruiz will also be playing.

For more details on this and upcoming tournaments and events ,contact Joey Barbas @0917-3202695, operations manager or Mona @ 0915-8533836-floor manager.

Gelfand and Grischuk in finals The Candidates matches is taking place from May 4-26 in Kazan, Tatarstan, Russia. 8 top rated players are vying for the right to challenge Vishy Anand for the 2012 World Championship match.

Levon Aronian (Armenia), Shakhriyar Mamedyarov (Azerbaijan), Teimour Radjabov (Azerbaijan) and Veselin Topalov (Bulgaria) were knocked out in the quarter-finals.

In the semi-finals, Alexander Grischuk (Russia) won against Vladimir Kramnik (Russia) after a rapid and blitz tiebreak thriller.

In the other semis Boris Gelfand beat Gata Kamsky (USA) also in the rapid and blitz tiebreaks.

To review, time controls in the regular games are 120 minutes for the first 40 moves, 60 minutes for the next 20 moves and then 15 minutes for the rest of the game, plus an additional 30 seconds per move starting from move 61. In case of a tie there will be four rapid chess games, and if the tie is still not broken then up to five two-game blitz matches 5'+3". Finally there may be a sudden-death final decider.

The Grischuk-Gelfand final was not expected. When a survey was made on a leading website prior to the matches less than 10% of the readers expected anyone of them making it.

The finals will be played in 6 regular games plus tiebreaks if necessary.

Asian Championship The 10th Asian Continental Individual Championship and First Asian Individual Blitz Championship (Open and Women's) took place from May 1-11 in Mashhad, Iran.

GM Wesley So had 2 final draws against GMs Bu Xiangzhi of China and Parimarjan Negi of India and finished in a tie for ninth to 12th places .

So, one of five Filipinos entered in the prestigious, nine-round tournament, had too many draws ,as usual, with 5.5 points on three wins, five draws and only one loss.

Wesley, who was seeded third in the 50-player field, finished a full point behind GMs Pentala Harikrishna of India, Yu Yangyi of China and Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son of Vietnam.

The top four players – P. Harikrishna , Y. Yu , N.N. Truong Son and R. Jumabayev (Kazakhstan) -earned the right to play in the 2011 World Chess Cup scheduled in Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia later this year.

As a consolation though, Wesley tied for 1st -3rd in the blitz competition.
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