Month: June 2024

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Last Week’s Results & Upcoming Meetings

Yet another late update for the previous week: we enjoyed an excellent lecture from Frisco Del Rosario then assayed a longer time control in our first impromptu slightly-longer-than-blitz event, a G/7;d2 affair with 18 people joining the fray, and with yours truly being treated most shamefully over the board, it must be said. Andy Applebaum once again claimed first with a perfect 4-0, while Pranav Jindal, Adam Ferrell and Venugopal Mani tied for second a full point behind (3-0); full results for this event are in the attached image. People appeared to approve of the time control but the general thinking is that G/5 or less with some small delay affords more rounds and less waiting between rounds, so we’ll likely return to the faster time controls for our impromptu tournaments.

Frisco will give another lecture this Thursday evening beginning at 6:30pm sharp then we’ll play another free, unrated blitz event beginning shortly after 7pm. As a reminder, there will be no club meeting July 4th, given it’s a national holiday and I believe the Arrillaga Center will be closed, and I will be out of town July 11th but Frisco offered to host the club that evening for a lecture, casual play and/or a thematic tournament. Thank you once again for all you are doing for the club, Frisco!

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Unrated Quick & Impromptu Blitz #18 Tournament Results

Just a quick note to share the results from our previous two informal tournaments, with the unrated quick event taking place on the 6th (congratulations to Andy Applebaum, Breakwell Loyalka, and Austin Chen for meting out perfect scores in their respective sections) and our impromptu blitz #18 occurring last week, with first-time visitor Ashwin Hebbar claiming sole first ahead of a stacked if smaller field (four masters and several near-masters), while Adam Ferrell sat alone in second, enjoying his best showing yet in one of these blitz affairs. We’ll hold another imformal blitz tournament tomorrow evening and the first couple people to arrive at the club will choose the time control. In other news, Olivia Smith ran away with the most recent Tuesday Night Marathon at the Mechanics Institute, landing 1.5 points clear of second-place finisher IM Elliot Winslow. Great result, Olivia! The full results and all the games may be found via the following links:

https://www.milibrary.org/chess-tournaments/2024-summer-tuesday-night-marathon#standings

https://www.chess.com/events/2024-summer-tuesday-night-marathon

I hope to see many of you at the club tomorrow evening and, as always, please let me know if you have any questions or comments.

Mark Drury

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A4c Variant Tournament Results

Twenty-two people participated in three sections of our second A4c Variant tournament this past Thursday, a three-round best-of-3-games-in-10-total-minutes affair which was again rife with surprises and a few upsets. When the final time scramble settled Yash Shah and Joey Lo reigned supreme over sections one and three, respectively, with perfect scores while youngsters Austin Chen and Hugo Pu shared first in section two with 2.5 points. Hugo had an interesting match in round two against Benjamin Chen wherein they split the first two games but Benjamin was left with a scant 13 seconds in the deciding third, and despite some very fast moves he succumbed on time, highlighting the game within a game aspect of this format, while in section one Andy Applebaum and Pranav Jindal split their first two games and drew the third in their round 2 encounter, securing one of just two drawn matches during the night.

Feedback about this variant was again positive (well, there was one half-hearted detractor but he bemoans all faster time controls) so we’ll hold another A4c tournament again soon, and thank you to everyone who joined us for this event.

In other tournament news, we have nine registrations for our double-round quick-rated event scheduled to begin this Thursday, which is insufficient for a number of reasons so I plan to cancel it, regrettably. Perhaps people are traveling in June and cannot commit to all three weeks, or they don’t like the double-round format or the faster quick-rated time control or I simply didn’t promote the event as much as I have others in the past. We typically end up with a waiting list for similar tournaments but there was clearly no risk of that this time around, so I’ll try to understand if this format doesn’t work for most of you (or if the timing was simply bad).

This Thursday we will likely hold free, unrated G/10;d3 Swiss sections of 6-8 players over three rounds, somewhat like last week but we’ll play just one game in that time control. If you’d like to play in that event please try to arrive at the club round 6:45 so we can begin the tournament at 7pm. Better yet, arrive shortly before 6:30 in case Frisco Del Rosario has another lecture on tap for us–if you’ve missed these in the past I highly recommend attending as Frisco’s chess insights are eminently worth your time.