Chessemy Open 2023
Walsrode gave home to The Chessemy Open, which was held from the 4th to the 12th of March. The nine-round swiss system tournament has a decent prize fund of €6500.
The players had to have a rating higher than 1800, which resulted in a strong tournament. 86 participants with 4 grandmasters and many other titled players.
From the beginning, IM Das Sayantan from India took the lead with 3 straight wins, which was followed by two draws in the fourth and fifth rounds. After the seventh round, a domestic player IM Lubbe Nikolas overtook with 6 points. Although he finished second, he had to be pleased with his performance as he made a GM norm. In the 8th round, Das Sayantan took back the lead and won the tournament with a better tie-breaker. Right behind him was Lubbe Nikolas and Baklan Vladimir took third place with 6,5 points. You can check the results here.
IM Jonathan Carlstedt, the Business Manager of the Chessemy organization, answered our questions:
Jonathan, please introduce the company! What does the company do and what are the primary goals for the future?
WGM Melanie Lubbe, IM Nikolas Lubbe and GM Ilja Zaragatski founded Chessemy around 5 years ago. Our primary field of expertise is the production of high-quality video lectures in german. Therefore, we work together with the top german speaking coaches, to bring the best content to our customers. In 2022, we started our event branch, which gave us the Chessemy Open.
On your website, you have a lot of team members. The Chessemy team looks big. Are you planning to expand outside of Germany?
We work with a lot of freelancers. I am the only employee so far. The three CEOs have regular jobs and invest an enormous chunk of their free time into the company. The reason I am on board is to help grow the company further. Our first goal is to offer more lectures in german. For instance, in endgames, we hope to provide a lot more. Time will tell if we can expand to other regions.
Are you organizing the Chessemy Open every year?
The first one was in 2022. We received amazing feedback from the participants from last year. As soon as we know all the numbers from the 2023 tournament, we will evaluate it and then decide if we will do it again. The idea of the tournament was to make it a permanent yearly event.
How would you describe the tournament? Are you planning to make the tournament bigger, or are you satisfied with the current state?
We try to organise a tournament that meets the highest standards. In Germany, many tournaments still take place in fully packed, average playing halls. We choose a 4-star hotel with a beautiful playing hall. In the evening we offered free lectures in the german language and one evening we did a blitz tournament with €1500 in prizes. We had live games from all boards and did a daily live commentary. In the long run, we need more participants, if we want to keep the standards of the tournament. I think 200 players is a good mark, which should be our goal in case we do it next year.
As an organizer, what are the biggest challenges before and during the tournament and how would you evaluate this year’s event?
There are many challenges. The main thing is to expect anything that could lower the experience for the participant during the tournament. That concerns the quality of the tournament hall, hotel room, and the level of noise during the round. The quality of food, decent prices for beverages… We are organising this tournament for the participants and they should feel that they are welcome at our tournament. During the tournament, the key challenge, in a nutshell, is to stay calm and friendly in every conversation despite the stress and lack of sleep.
I think we can proudly say that every participant will now connect the name Chessemy with professionalism, hospitality and high quality. But we would love to give this experience to more players 🙂
Thank you, Jonathan. Hopefully, the King Watcher team will join this outstanding event in the coming years.
You can follow Chessemy on Facebook, Twitch and YouTube.
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