The last round of this year’s championship had three key matchups: Board 1 was Li Yunshan (6 points) vs. Svitlana Demchenko (7); Board 2 was Ashley Qian (6.5) vs. Laksshana Deepak (5.5); and Board 3 was me (6) vs. Oksana Golubeva (6). Only Svitlana truly controlled her own fate: if she had won, then the championship would have been hers. As it happened, Yunshan won that game, leaving the door open for Ashley to leapfrog them both into first place; but Ashley surprisingly lost to Laksshana, who made her first appearance on the top boards in the final round, having gone on a winning streak over the second half of the tournament from the middle of the crosstable. Laksshana thus played spoiler, and left Yunshan and Svitlana in shared first, with the door open for either me or Oksana to join them.

During the game, I didn’t know this. The other two games ended quickly, and I hadn’t seen which way they’d gone. But I certainly didn’t expect both results to have gone my way, and I did not know that I was playing for a share of first place!

After the game, I learned to my great surprise that I had tied for first place in the Canadian women’s championship! Yunshan, Svitlana, and I had to wait some time while the organizers calculated the mathematical tiebreaks, each of us having beaten one of the other two during the tournament. The tiebreaks involved an arcane formula taking into account the results of each of our opponents throughout the tournament, in order to determine which of us faced higher-performing opposition. It also required waiting until the results on the lower boards were known, as they could actually affect the formula’s results, and thus the outcome of the tournament! It’s funny to think that the outcome of a game on the 10th board, for example, might be used to determine things, but there has to be some way, and this method beats flipping a coin! So we all congratulated one another; but in the end, Yunshan was declared the winner, Svitlana the second-place finisher, and I the third. That made sense, in hindsight, since they both finished the tournament playing on the top board, whereas I was on Board 3; but for a while after the conclusion of the games, we were all like Olympic skaters waiting for the judges to raise their cards and let us know who had won!

Anyway, it was a great honour and great fun to play with such talented and sporting players. Finishing in third place, and equal with the champion on the cross-table, was certainly a far bigger achievement than I had hoped for, entering the event. Defeating both Yunshan and Oksana was an improbable feat that I’m unlikely ever to repeat, even if I get the chance. But having done so once, I look forward all the more to following their future games in international competition, and of course Svitlana’s and the rest of the national team’s as well. I’m quite sure that Ashley Qian will be making her own splash at the Olympiad before long, if she sticks with the game, and probably other players from the tournament. There are so many promising young candidates, I hardly know whom to single out by name. Canadian women’s chess is in good hands!!