"KingLoek" Van Wely King At Dutch Lightning Championship

GM Loek van Wely won the revived Dutch Lightning Championship last week in his home town Tilburg, The Netherlands. The Dutch GM beat GM Daniel Fridman 2-0 in a playoff.

About eight, nine years ago it was held several times, and after a long break it is back: the Dutch Lightning Championship. This spectacular tournament, where the players get only two minutes each per game, has been picked up by chess club King.

For this first edition of this revived event, the new organizers found a special location: the Willem II football stadium in Tilburg.

The tournament had two stages. The first stage consisted of four preliminary rounds, in groups of eight players, followed by final groups of 16 players. That means a total of 43 games on one day!

The top seed (by classical ratings) was GM Loek van Wely. The Dutch GM has lived in Tilburg for most of his life (and still does) and was the ambassador of the tournament.

Besides some blitz specialists, his main rivals were the other GMs present: Daniel Fridman, Benjamin Bok, Tanguy Ringoir, Roeland Pruijssers, Robin Swinkels, Vladimir Epishin, Andrey Orlov and Felix Levin.

Normally IM Manuel Bosboom would be a serious rival as well, but he wasn't in great shape and didn't even make it to the top group in the final stage. Two GMs didn't make the cut either: Orlov and Levin.

Your reporter gladly visited the tournament to make some videos. The reason? In 2006 I also visited the tournament in Apeldoorn, and shot some videos with a small photo camera. I had recently started a blog, and posted the videos there. It was the start of what would grow into ChessVibes, and eventually my move to Chess.com!

So, let's show some videos. The first is the clash between Van Wely and Fridman in one of the preliminary groups. These players would later face each other in the playoff final. 

The following game was played in the final round of the top group. GM Bok could have won the tournament outright if he'd beaten Van Wely, but it wasn't meant to be. Things were more or less equal until right before the end...

Fridman and Van Wely finished on the same number of points: 12 out of 15. This meant a playoff was needed to decide on the winner!

2015 Dutch Lightning Championship| Top Group, Final Standings

The organizers made the excellent decision to hold several 2-game mini matches, until someone would win one with 2-0 or 1.5-0.5 — so no Armageddon. As it turned out, only one mini match was needed.

Here's the first game:

And here's the second:

And so Van Wely was crowned Open Dutch Lightning Champion 2015. Besides the 500-euro first prize he got a ridiculously big trophy.