Aruba-Curaçao Internet match a great success

Last Saturday Aruba and Curaçao played internet matches against each other. These matches were played at the same time as the internet matches between Slovenia and Turkey through use of the same format. For Curaçao this was the second experience in this kind of competition having already played against Malta and Utrecht in March.

The Youth team of Curaçao in action against Aruba.

The ChessBase development team had made several modifications to the Playchess software for these kind of matches, including the ability to reconstruct games (including the clocks times) after disconnection or other disruptions.

In addition there are now two dedicated Chess Stadions available for these matches. The teams of Aruba and Curaçao had the honor being the first players of the Wilhelm Steinitz Chess Stadion. While Slovenia and Turkey were the first players of the Emanuel Lasker stadion. Aruba hosted their teams in a training room of an IT company, while Curaçao decided again to provide the Cyberspace room in the Van der Valk Plaza Hotel.

The geographical distance between both islands is not big and the chess players of both places have a warm friendship with each other. But team matches had rarely been played in the past. Playing such matches would easily cost a few thousand dollars for air transportation and lodging. It looks like that with the Internet matches a new tradition for the island has been born.

The Commissioner of Sports of the island of Curaçao Mr. Dennis Jackson opened the match officially. He gave a short speech to both teams by using Skype connection.

The Internet encounter started with two Rapid matches between the youth teams of the islands. Aruba won both matches (4.0-3.0 and 4.5-3.5).

The winning Youth team of Aruba

The Rapid Chess matches between the adult teams produced surprising results. Normally the players of Aruba and Curaçao are more or less of the same strength, though Curaçao may be a little stronger due to the fact that the island has a higher population and more chess players. On this Saturday everything went wrong for Aruba. The first match ended in a 7-0 victory for Curaçao and the second match ended in 5.5- 1.5 for Curaçao.

The national team of Curaçao in action against Aruba

Ger Jan Meijer, Klaas Dekker of NetTrain (photo left) and Fabio Mensing were the organizers of the Curaçao leg of the matches, while Octavio Croes and Maurits Dijkhoff were looking after the Arubean part. Curaçao is planning to proceed with organizing a four country internet tournament for both youth and adults team for the weekend of June 17 and 18.