Dubai: Dubai-based Ikrom Ilhomzoda may have experienced “the worst moment of his chess career” this week, but his fifth-place finish in Tajikistan’s National Championship has still allowed him to sneak into his country’s Chess Olympiad squad.
Having blundered the queen in his last game of nine in a ten-player round-robin, Ikrom, the defending champion, fell from second — his pre-tournament national rank — to fifth, winning five, drawing three, and losing one of his games.
The 19-year-old Canadian University of Dubai student therefore lost three points on chess’ Elo rating system, leaving him on 2,220, 280 short of his lifelong ambition to become a Grand Master.
His points haul was also ten short of his career best of 2,230, achieved after a third-place finish in the 2008 Asian Youth Championships.
Now he has just two months to recover his game before heading to Istanbul, Turkey, for his Chess Olympiad debut from August 27 to September 10. With almost 200 teams competing, Tajikistan, currently ranked 79th in the world with an Elo average of 2,296, have 13 games of five-a-side as they bid to move up the world rankings.
Ikrom will occupy his nation’s fifth board facing the fifth-ranked players of the opposition countries.
But because of his indifferent display in the nationals, he will miss out on the chance to play his idol, Nigel Short of England, who occupies his nation’s first board.
“I’m very disappointed I couldn’t get above fifth seeing as I was planning to win,” said Ikrom, who will also be looking to improve his individual ranking at his first Olympiads.
“I made a very stupid error, which cost me dearly. My queen was under attack but instead of moving her, I was too busy thinking about a plan for checkmate. It was a complete oversight, but when I realised what I had done it hit me like lightning.
“In a way the loss was good because it brought me back to reality ahead of the Olympiads. It shows I’m not perfect, and I cannot blame anybody else but myself.”
Renowned for documenting every move of every game in a dossier in order to avoid future errors or plan new lines of attack, Ikrom, who started playing when he was four, is now studying hard to avoid a repeat performance.
“No matter how many years you play chess, you’ll never know every move. We’ve been playing chess for 20 centuries and still only six per cent of the game has been discovered. You learn something new every day. There are more combinations than stars in the sky. I only know three or four per cent of the game,” said Ikrom.
The telecommunications engineering undergraduate now plans to build an unbeatable chess computer program using his playing records.
But first he wants to cement his legacy as a Grand Master, a title he hopes to earn from notching 2,500 Elo points within the next two years. In order to achieve this, a move to India, where the competition is greater, could be on the cards.
“The world’s best players like Nigel Short and Gary Kasparov are on 2,800 points. I just want to become Tajikistan’s second Grand Master. Farrukh Amonatov is Tajikistan’s only Grand Master to date, but he lives and trains in Russia, so if I were to make it I’d be the country’s first real Grand Master.”
