Let's start again...

This is my first post here after deciding to start afresh on blogger rather than continue using the MyYahoo blog that I started a while ago.

This is to be my chess blog where I can spout off about my favourite game and I hope that some of what I write will be entertaining for fellow chess addicts. I won't make any predictions at this point of the sort of chess content that I will have here - I'll see how it goes and what feels right.

I'll start off where I finished on my old blog, with a picture of Lev Aronian, the joint winner of the Wijk Aan Zee tournament at Corus. Having joint winners strikes me as odd. Why not have a tiebreak to decide on a single winner? This is achieved in some tournaments by using a tiebreak scoring system, for example the Sonnenborn-Berger (S-B) system which uses the sum of defeated opponents scores. This is particularly useful in big open events, but perhaps less so in all-play-all events.

My preference would therefore be for rapid play-offs to decide the winner of Wijk Aan Zee. Time would need to built into the schedule to allow for this, but it would only need an extra day at most and would produce a single winner for the sponsor to parade to the world.