It seems that top seed Michael Yeo did not have too much trouble in the first round, but looks can be deceptive.  Michael has kindly annotated his win against Joe Coburn, which shows where Joe could have improved on the actual game.  

The game also follows a previous game of Michael's, which is not that surprising, but the opponent is! I'll let you check that one out. 

Richard Perrin and P.Byre also did well in the first round, drawing against David Cordner and Tom Anderson respectively.

As always a couple of the lower graded players bit back and Fraser McLeod and Ian Cary were the higher graded players who lost (Ian's opponent was ungraded).

Ian Matthew plays very aggressive openings, but he soon has a dubious position against Fraser McLeod, after playing the Dutch defense. He got back into the game though, and stood slightly better when Fraser missed a pretty combination. In the diagramed position Fraser played 26.Qe3, allowing a mate in 4 with 16..Ng4. I will let you work out the mating combination yourself..

Position before 26.Qe3 in McLeod v Matthew

Round Two

So, as early as round two their were some heavyweight clashes, with the John Wheeler v D.Pye, Dominic Tunks v Martin Newbury and Michael Yeo v Khaled Esmat games being the pick of the bunch. On board one Yeo v Esmat was a real tussle, with both players holding an advantage at some stage. In the final position Khaled was going to win a pawn, but the resulting Rook and pawn ending was not winnable, so a draw was agreed. A good result for Khaled, drawing with Black against the top seed.

As mentioned above, the Wheeler v Pye and Tunks v Newbury games also looked very interesting pairings and so the games proved. John Wheeler and David Pye maneuvered their pieces until John's attack crashed through on the Queenside, winning material and the game. 

Meanwhile Martin was very late to his game (a common theme of his over the weekend) and when the game started Dominic built up a very commanding position. But then it started to go wrong, when Dominic blundered first one piece for very little compensation and then another. The game finished soon after. As I keyed the moves of this game into Chessbase, I wondered if this was just about the worst pairing from my point of view. Both Dominic and Martin have very messy scoresheets and normally I would use their opponents scoresheet to enter the game. This of course was not possible for this game, so not surprisingly I don't have all the moves. I could hardy decipher 10 moves, let along the full 24 moves. 

After a number of fine performances in the Hampshire Championship (3 times a champion), it seems Dominic was due a poor tournament, was the loss to Martin the start of this?