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2009 King's Cup Commentary: Round 13

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Go to: Before the Tournament, Round 1, Round 2, Round 3, Round 4, Round 5, Round 6, Round 7, Round 8, Round 9, Round 10, Round 11, Round 12, Round 13, Round 14, Round 15, Round 17, Round 18, Round 19, Round 20, Round 21, Round 22, Round 23, Round 24, Round 25, Round 26, Round 27, Final Round 1, Final Round 2, Final Round 3, After the Tournament.

So today we've moved into two large adjacent banquet halls at the Royal Paragon Hall, an entertainment complex on the fifth floor of the Siam Paragon Mall. In the middle of the larger hall is a riser large enough for all of us in the Open division. At one end of the same hall is a stage set up for the official opening ceremony. All around us are tables for a few thousand students, who will be playing crossword game in different variations: 11x11 for up to Grade 6, regular 15x15 for older students, and a 9x15 version in Thai (with spaces above and below each consonant tile for designating vowels with slips of paper: the racks hold nine tiles and there are increasing 'bingo' bonuses for using 5-9 tiles at once). They're also playing AMath, which is like crossword game, but played with mathematical formulae: the shortest legal play is three tiles, consisting of a digit, an equals sign and another digit, so there are no overlap plays. Another group is competitively solving crossword puzzles; and then there's something called Word Up, which is a quiz game testing English spelling, grammar, synonyms and antonyms, and trivia. For that, players are taking a written test to qualify for a game show-style event that takes place on stage.

Music is playing loud enough to make it difficult to hear announcements, but it's not as distracting as I thought it would be: no risk of hearing damage, and it helps drown out the hiss of the ventilation system. Also, much of the time, it's the catchy and inspirational Crossword Game anthem.

Jason Katz-Brown (USA) is playing Pakorn Nemitrmansuk (THA) at Board 1. We've switched to two paper annotators and one electronic annotator entering results into side-by-side netbooks. I'm not sure about the usability of netbooks in future; the keyboard size makes accurate data entry difficult. (We're making do right now with external keyboards attached to the netbooks.)

Ricky Purnomo (IDN) reports that he played TRIAXONS (110) against Hubert Wee (SGP) this round.

I've calmed down now, after sleeping in through repeated alarms this morning. I eventually woke up feeling very refreshed at 08:52, not quite in time for hour 09:00 scheduled start. I was at my seat by 09:07, which I thought wasn't bad, given the distance from the hotel to the venue, and the crowds I had to go through along the way. I rode up the elevator with Akshay Bhandarkar (IND), who was initially relieved when he thought that he wouldn't be late if he was with me. In any case, the schedule has been extremely flexible due to the large number of people involved and the unpredictability of such factors as the time of the arrival of the royal party.

We're supposed to switch from WiFi service to a wired connection this morning, but I haven't yet had time to do all the network configuration necessary, and will likely do so at lunch.

The background music gets drowned out by a high school marching band, on its first rehearsal for the opening ceremony. It's followed by a rehearsal of the Parade of Nations, accompanied by the theme from the movie Star Wars. For this rehearsal, Thai staff carry the names of the represented countries, and their flags, but the players continue to play.

Jason beats Pakorn 537-426 and stays a game ahead of Nigel Richards (NZL), who beat Marut Siriwangso (THA) 518-413, and Charnwit Sukhumrattanaporn (THA), who beat Charnrit Khongthanarat (THA) 510-293.