Month: August 2025

We enjoyed another good turnout for last night’s lecture (thanks, Frisco!) and G/5+0 blitz tournament of six rounds and, suffice to say, many of us floundered without the benefit of a delay or increment (though most seemed to like the time control). After six long rounds, then, Hayden Brongersma and Alex Chin stood alone atop the wall chart, the lone “blemish” in either’s score a shared draw in round 4. Sanat Singhal took sole third with 4.5 points and clipped me on the way to that score in an interesting From’s Gambit, one which could have gone either way. It was also great to see Alaric Stein again last night, who shared fourth with Pranav, Cameron and Alex. Full results are in the attached image and thank you to everyone who joined us for this event.

Note that the club will NOT meet next week, August 28th, given the Arrillaga Center will be closed then, but we will hold another casual evening with a lecture and blitz tournament the following week, September 4th. We will also postpone our quick-rated event to later in September or early October and will instead run a number of variant tournaments next month–more details about that will be shared soon. Regards,

Mark Drury

I’m finally getting round to sharing the results from last week’s 7-round, G/3;d3 blitz tournament, one which featured a number of upsets and dramatic time scrambles, not least of which was Josen Kalra’s scintillating effort against Pranav Jindal in round 4, though Pranav recovered nicely to win the event with 6 out of 7 points. Josen and perennial wall-chart-topper Hayden Brongersma tied for second at 5 points while Yash Shah and Austin Chen split 4th place with 4.5 points. For my part, my angry Bird’s Opening got the better of three strong junior players, players who normally have no trouble dispatching me in these blitz events, so I’m pondering retirement from competitive blitz play at the club while I’m ahead (the probability of my ever again besting the same three players in the same evening is very near zero, frankly). Congratulations to our winners, full results are in the attached image and thank you to everyone who joined us last week.

Tonight we’ll do pretty much the same, with a lecture beginning at 6:30pm followed by another free, unrated blitz tournament round 7pm, though we’ll opt for a different time control—much as people appear to like G/3;d3 it’s getting a little stale. I hope to see many of you at the club this evening! Regards,

Mark Drury

We had another good turnout at the club last week with several first-time visitors joining us for the lecture and free blitz tournament. After seven rounds of G/3;d3 schadenfreude Hayden Brongersma stood alone atop the wall chart with a perfect 7-0 score, followed a point behind by Pranav Jindal in sole second, while we dropped down to 4.5 points to pick up the four-way tie for third between Gabe Sanchez, Josen Kalra and juniors Austin Chen and Surya Raghav. Two other young players, Cameron Troy and Max Cheung, also had excellent results in this event, foretelling the inevitable changing of the chess guard, as it were. Full results are in the attached image and thank you to everyone who joined us for this fun, free tournament.

At present we have just eight people registered for our August quick-rated quads so I plan to postpone that event some number of weeks, perhaps into early  September (the 4th or 11th). We could proceed if we get 4-8 more registrations this week so I’ll make the final call tomorrow, Wednesday, and I apologize for the uncertainty round our schedule. Note that if we do proceed with the rated event we’ll also have a skittles room open for those who wish to play casual games or even a concurrent, unrated blitz event. As always, please let me know if you have any questions and I hope to see many of you at the club this week.

Mark Drury