The Menlo Park Chess Club will hold the first of perhaps two consecutive team blitz tournaments, one the week of March 9th and another on March 16th, something of an experiment to see if the format works for our membership. Depending upon the number of entries, we’ll have eight teams of four players (32), six teams of six players (36) or ten teams of four players (40). If there are six or eight teams the format will be round robin, with each team playing every other team; if ten teams we will likely hold a Swiss system tournament of five rounds. The time control will be G/5 d/2 if there are six or ten teams (five rounds), G/4 d/2 if eight teams (seven rounds).
Entry is free for this first tournament, in case there are things which don’t go quite right, with a $5 entry fee planned for the second event (March 16th), one that will make for a reasonable prize fund for the winning team. Everyone will enter individually via the button above and Mark Drury will create the teams based upon a patent-pending, proprietary algorithm known only to him and to ChatGPT. Teams will be announced a day or two before the event and it is hoped that players will notify the tournament director as soon as possible if they need withdraw for any reason, so that teams may be rebalanced as necessary. The tournament will begin promptly at 7pm so please arrive by 6:45 to check in.
Note that, given the team nature of this event, we can only register a certain number of players, so if you try to enter late you may find registrations are closed. That said, please do not register if you are on the fence about playing in the event–late withdrawals or, worse, no-shows are a serious pain in team tournaments such as this. We will follow the US Chess Rules for Blitz Chess for this event, with the lone exception that we’ll be using clock instead of touch move (we’ll explain the distinction before the tournament starts).
Please direct any questions or comments to info@menloparkchess.club and we hope to see you on March 9th and 16th!
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.
Our regular weekly club meeting now occurs Thursday evenings from 6:00-9:45pm in the Oak Room of the Arrillaga Family Recreation Center. Casual, blitz and bughouse chess are in the offing and we’ll discuss details of the next blitz tournament, tentatively scheduled for March 9th.
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,
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,
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,
Our regular weekly club meeting now occurs Thursday evenings from 6:00-9:45pm in the Oak Room of the Arrillaga Family Recreation Center. Casual, blitz and bughouse chess are in the offing and we’ll discuss details of the next tournament, tentatively scheduled for February 2nd.
We held our first blitz tournament of the year last night with 28 players participating in two sections. Section A, an 8-player round robin, was won by FM Shawnak Shivakumar with the statement score of 6.5 out of 7 points. Adithya Karavadi took second with 5 points and Alaric Stein rounded out the top three of this hard-fought group with 4.5 points.
Newcomer Samuel Agdamag won Section B, a 5-round Swiss event, with a score of 4.5 points, while Jörg Lamprecht, Kornél Csernaiand youthful Sahil Shivakumar tied for second with 4 points each. Congratulations to our winners—Shawnak and Samuel took home $25 Kepler’s Books gift certificates for their efforts—and thank you to everyone who joined us last night (including our five first-time visitors)!
I’ll send information later today or tomorrow about the USCF-rated tournament which begins next Thursday, a 4-round Swiss event in one section with a G/45 d/5 time control, and I hope many of you will be able to join us then. Regards,
Our regular weekly club meeting now occurs Thursday evenings from 6:00-9:45pm in the Oak Room of the Arrillaga Family Recreation Center. Casual, blitz and bughouse chess are in the offing and we’ll discuss details of the next tournament, tentatively scheduled for January 19th or 26th.
Last night we held another single-section Swiss-system blitz tournament, a G/3+2 affair with 24 players and, as with last week, Kunal Modi mowed through the field for another perfect 5 of 5 result. Adam Stevens and Aaron Cho tied for second with 4 points and all three received $25 Kepler’s Books gift certificates for their exertions. Congratulations to our winners and thank you to everyone who participated in this event, our last of the year!
It’s hard to believe the club will observe its one year anniversary when we next meet January 5th and it has been far more successful than I would have imagined in January or February of this year. For my part, the greatest reward is meeting so many of you fine people, both at the club and online. Thank you for your participation and support over the course of the year, have a great Holiday season and a safe New Year and here’s hoping next year will be even better! Regards,
