Helmut Froeyman 19.09.2024
The prize money in our Belgian summer tournaments has not been indexed for decades so (foreign) professionals rarely play in them nowadays. 11 years ago it was completely different with among others 7 grandmasters in Open Gent 2013 see my blog article: Swiss Gambit. This is a pity for our young talents because games against professionals are a necessary learning curve to get higher. In other words, those who have ambitions to become IM or stronger today should go abroad to find the right opponents.
As a 48 year old FM I am obviously no longer one of those young wolves with sky-high ambitions but for a tournament abroad I like to be present. Last 2 summers it was Dieppe (France) but that track came to an end last year due to the permanent discontinuation of the Deurn chess tours. So when this year I was invited by other chess friends to play Dortmund Sparkassen Chess Trophy in August, I gladly accepted.
Open Dortmund is a top tournament in Europe with a prize pool of 20,000 Euros. 13 grandmasters drew present this edition. With my 2252 fide I was only 44th on starting rating. Nevertheless, also here we see that the budgets are getting smaller. The prize money was reduced by 5000 euros compared to last year. There were only 3 + 2600 players compared to 9 + 2600 players last year. The new playing hall offered room for only half of the players so shifts had to be played. The B-group (-2000) played in the morning, the A-group (+1900) in the afternoon. This is extremely inconvenient when you go to a chess tournament with friends who do not all have the same playing strength. It also ended up being the main reason why my daughter dropped out of this tournament.
Dortmund (about 600,000 inhabitants) is 3 hours by car from Antwerp (about 100km from the Belgian border). The tournament organization offered the Intercityhotel as relatively cheap lodging (single room with air conditioning and nice breakfast for 87 euro/night). Parking was free or at least we didn’t pay for it. Moreover, the hotel price also included a ticket for unlimited public transportation in Dortmund. Dortmund is clearly betting on green like more and more German cities. The latter was very interesting because every day I took the streetcar to commute from hotel to tournament venue and back. There was one every 10 minutes and the ride took about 15 minutes.
I didn’t have time to do sightseeing, which I regretted. For example, for 18 euros I could have attended a friendly soccer match of Dortmund during the tournament. Dortmund is soccer and the city fills up completely with colorful supporters when the city team plays. They then also have a very strong team(yes painful yesterday for Club Brugge that 0 -3). Dortmund even has its own soccer museum. The technology museum with numerous experience and discovery rooms is definitely worth a visit. In the center you have numerous picturesque squares where there are nice restaurants and bars. During the tournament there was a very busy attended Street Food& Beach festival with music performances. We did not have board but eating and drinking even late at night was never a problem. Trip Advisor never failed and let us eat delicious and cheap food in a Thai, Italian, Spanish, Vietnamese, … The last evening we opted for a Dortmund soccer pub with traditional local cuisine.
Nevertheless, I highly doubt we will return in the future. There were some serious downsides before that. For example, there was no air conditioning in the tournament hall and we had to play in temperatures around +35 degrees during the heat wave. I guess money was tight because many professional players (including some ladies) got free accommodation but that is no excuse. However, even more distressing to me is that the center in Dortmund is overrun with drug users and alcoholics. We saw people on the street just snorting lines. Glass from broken bottles was everywhere. You couldn’t sit on a terrace or you were harassed to give money. Germany sits with a huge social problem see also 13,844 stabbing incidents on 1 year reported because it is certainly not only Dortmund. I saw the same thing in Berlin and Hamburg last year.
The tournament was strong and I did not play badly but not well enough to break the swing between stronger and weaker opponents. My score between rounds 2 and 8 was 1-0-1-0-1-0-1. I had the “misfortune to have black each time against the stronger ones and then also DWZ is used for my weaker opponents. DWZ is the German national rating and it is usually significantly higher than the fide. I think it is nonsense to mix DWZ and Fide in the pairings (some Belgian organizers dare to make the same mistake).
I close with perhaps my most spectacular game of the tournament. It is a game I lost in the third round against a young German FM of 2400 elo: Moritz Weishaeutel. It demonstrates how modern neural networks already at this modest level, make opening analyses to an insane depth and danger. Moritz’s finishing is spectacular and demonstrates keen tactical insight.
Helmut Froeyman