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For several years Spain has been hosting the world championships for juniors in different age categories: U-10, U-12, U-14, U-16, and U-18. Last year the U-18 boys section was won by the Russian Dmitry Kokarev. This year the defending champion  was not successful and the Spanish GM Paco "Valllejo" Pons celebrated victory.

My original goal for the tournament was to get a FIDE rating, that is to have a performance rating over 2000. I was very surprised to get home after the tourney and discover that I was actually on the October 1, 2000 FIDE list with a rating 2115. This was however, an unofficial number, for this reason in the tournament I was paired as unrated. I scored 4 points out of 11; the result could not have been that miserable had I scored more than 0.5 points in the last 3 rounds. For swiss this is always a disaster...

My major excuse is that in most of the games I played new openings for the first time in my life. This mislead my opponents in their database preparation against me, but I was not very well familiar with the positions that I was getting. This also prevented me from really fighting for the initiative and that is why some of the games were just boring draws. On the other hand, I think I have gained a lot of experience from this tournament and am generally happy with this trip!

Here is a link to another site about this event: http://www.chess-mate.com/iaodm00.htm

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