Menlo Park Chess Club

Our February “Mud Month” Mini-Marathon wrapped up last night with a slew of upsets as well as three draws, two of which meant a swing of tens of dollars in prize money. The half point agreed to by Adithya and Quincy on board one allowed Pranav to share Group 1 and overall first place, with 3.5 points, and all three are a cup of coffee and a bagel richer for their exertions. The group prizes and winnings are reflected (somewhat unclearly) in the image, below, and note that groups 1, 2 and 5 had nine players and $45 in total prize money; the other groups eight players and $40. Congratulations to Peter, Anton and Darshil for taking sole first in their respective groups!

I’ll reach out to our prize winners to ask about a preference for Venmo, PayPal or cash remittance and please let me know if you see any errors in the results or prize distributions in the meantime, as I produced the document rather hastily between work meetings this morning. Something I mentioned before the start of the round last night and wish to repeat here is that this tournament would have been better served by two or even three distinct sections, given the number of participants and the ratings groupings, but I created a US Chess Tournament Life Announcement which stated one section and, hence, needed to stick with that format–future such events will likely include more than one section.

I plan to submit the tournament for rating to US Chess this afternoon so you may see the report as soon as Monday. Thank you again to everyone who played in this event and put up with the accelerated pairings, and to those who spectated over the past four weeks. Our next rated event will likely use a Quick (Rapid) time control and should begin in mid- to late-March—more to come about that soon.

Last night’s round 3 of our “Mud Month” Mini-Marathon brought more interesting chess, with a couple puzzle-like finishes which were too complicated to solve over-the-board in time trouble, for both players and spectators alike. I hope to share a few of the more interesting games from all rounds at some point but that will likely occur after the tournament finishes next week. The prize group standings (first and second places) heading into the final round are as follows:

Group 1: Adithya Karavadi, Quincy Chen, 3.0
Group 2: Nick Matelli, Daniel Francis, Tobin Bennion, Roshan Mahanth, 2.0
Group 3: Kornel Csernai, Peter Roumeliotis, 2.0
Group 4: Anton Bobkov, Akshat Gupta, 2.0
Group 5: Grant Jensen, 2.5; Darshil Chauhan, Tutul Rahman, 2.0

I’ve also shared the tentative round 4 pairings below, given I know some of you like to prepare for your opponents. These will stand unless we get zero-point bye/withdrawal requests before Thursday, in which case I’ll send the usual update. Please let me know if you have any questions and thanks again to everyone who is participating in this event! Regards,

Mark Drury

We enjoyed another tough-fought round in our February “Mud Month” Mini-Marathon last night and, while there were fewer upsets this time around, there were a number of games which came down to the final seconds of the G/45 d/5 time control. Below are the current standings and I’ll share the round 3 pairings next Wednesday, as usual. Please let me know asap if you need a bye next week—currently Aaron Cho, Jeff McGinnis and Andy Shih have made such a request.

We had several first-time visitors to the club last night, as well as some repeat visitors who are not playing in the tournament, which reinforces the need to keep out skittles room open for casual and blitz games during tournaments. I’m still trying to negotiate a larger room for the club but don’t know when/if that will happen. Thank you again to everyone for making the club the success that it is and please let me know if you have any questions about this or future tournaments (several people last night requested that we hold more rated events with longer time controls, like G/45, as one bit of recent feedback). Regards,

Mark Drury

Our February “Mud-Month” Mini-Marathon kicked off this past Thursday with unprecedented interest—we have 42 players participating in this single-section rated event and, regrettably, I had to turn away another dozen or so people who wished to play for lack of room. This serves as an unsubtle reminder to register early for these tournaments until we can arrange for a larger/second room at our current location (I’m not yet willing to dedicate the skittles room to tournament play given all the other activities this space allows for during and after tournament games).

There were quite a few upsets in our first round, a not-unexpected result given our use of accelerated pairings for this and subsequent rounds, which make the initial matchups a little more even. I have the second round pairings in hand and like those matchups even better, so I’m hoping everyone is able to play next week (but I won’t release the pairings until Wednesday just in case there are late bye requests or withdrawals). Note that the “Group” column in the wall chart below is the player prize group, which was determined by rating before the start of play Thursday. As always, please let me know if you have questions or comments about this event and thank you again for playing with us! Regards,

Mark Drury