Alan Tate records Grandmaster norm
Rijeka, Croatia
November 13-20, 2010
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Alan Tate, 30, of Edinburgh recorded the best result of his career in the "Mediterranean 2017" tournament which finished on Saturday, November 20 in the Croatian port city of Rijeka. Having recorded his first ever IM norm in round 7 he pushed on to score a further 1.5 points to enhance the norm to grandmaster status. Has any other Scot gained a GM norm before his first IM norm?
Alan gained a massive 67 ratings points to take his rating past the 2300 level, thereby gaining the FM title - but there are now much greater ambitions after such a remarkable result.
This is one of the best ever tournament performances by a Scot and rivals the British Championship successes of Rowson and Aagaard. In Croatia every opponent was either an IM or GM.
Alan had recently returned from coaching the Scottish Youth team in Greece. Prior to the Croatian tournament Alan's domestic rating was slightly down for the season and there was no particular inkling of the success to come.
However Alan has been one of the few Scots to have made serious efforts in recent years to seek out strong opposition in foreign events. There have been several occasional good scalps but here the strong play was maintained for a full 9 rounds.
1 |
IM |
Yilmaz Mustafa |
2476 |
TUR |
w ½ |
2 |
IM |
Zufic Miroslav |
2442 |
CRO |
b 1 |
3 |
GM |
Cvitan Ognjen |
2526 |
CRO |
w ½ |
4 |
GM |
Drazic Sinisa |
2524 |
SRB |
b 1 |
5 |
GM |
Lenic Luka |
2619 |
SLO |
w ½ |
6 |
GM |
Predojevic Borki |
2632 |
BIH |
b 0 |
7 |
IM |
Nikolov Sasho |
2458 |
BUL |
w 1 |
8 |
GM |
Brkic Ante |
2564 |
CRO |
w ½ |
9 |
IM |
Loncar Robert |
2404 |
CRO |
b 1 |