The Menlo Park Chess Club will hold another USCF-rated tournament beginning Thursday, May 4th, at 7pm, a four round Swiss-system event over two weeks using the Quick-rated G/15 d/3 time control, with two games played each evening. This tournament is suitable for experienced players as well as newer US Chess members seeking to establish an over-the-board rating. Multiple sections will be created with the goal of allowing players four games against opposition close to their own rating or skill level (sections could be as small as 8-10 players). Details follow:
Format: Four round Swiss-system tournament in 2-4 sections, two games per evening
Rounds: May 4th and 11th—play begins promptly at 7:00pm but please arrive by 6:45pm to check in
Control: G/15 d/3 (USCF Quick time control)
Entry Fee: $5 (PayPal: mark@drury.com; Venmo: @Mark-Drury-12), entire entry fee goes to the prize fund.
Prizes: Players will be divided into two or more sections based upon rating and number of participants; top two scorers in each section win that section’s prize fund, with 1st place taking ~75% (any ties will split the cash prize).
Byes: Half-point byes are available for any round except the last
Register: Please sign up in advance using the ‘Register’ button above
Boards, sets and clocks will be provided by the Menlo Park Chess Club (bring a clock if you own one)
Fourteen club stalwarts and six new visitors played in our first Bughouse Swiss tournament this past Thursday and the fact that Robert’s team claimed first prize with a perfect 4-0 was a surprise to no one, given his strength in this format. Robert’s teammate, John Vitlacil, and I go way back to the Burlingame Chess Club circa the late 1980s, where we played a number of tournament games against one another, so it was great to see him again after so many decades. We also had four or five first-time visitors who played casual and blitz chess Thursday, opting not to play in the tournament, which is always an option if you’re not a fan of any specific format or variant.
Congratulations are also due to teams Amogh / Pranav and newcomers Nirvan / Rachel for their second-place tie at 3 points, ahead of four teams with 2 points. For my part, I weighed poor Andres down with moves like 2. f4 in my game against Kornél, when his teammate, Jerome, extracted a pawn to drop on my f2 square with check, leading to a very quick, instructional and most embarrassing forced mate several moves later. I have no future in bughouse but I’ll continue playing it for the humor value, alone.
As much fun as this bughouse tournament was, I think we’ll forego the second such event scheduled for April 13th, given the format (chiefly the makeup of the teams) still needs some thought to make it appealing to a larger swath of our regular players. Please let me know if you have any feedback, good or bad, thanks to all of you who played in this event and we’ll most likely try the format again in the near future.
Twenty-two intrepid souls joined us for the Chess960 tournament Thursday night, one which morphed into an individual Swiss rather than a team event due to the number of relatively late entries. When the last flag fell two things were clear: we had, as a group, finally figured out how to castle (for the most part) and Josh Garrow is at least 3 inches taller and his chess skills are even stronger than when he visited us last summer. Congratulations to Josh on his perfect 4-0 score, to Quincy Chen for sole second with 3.5 points and to Chris Murphy, Jay Wacker, Jerome Oriel and Steven Swick on tying for third with 3.0 points!
As another reminder, the first of two bughouse tournaments occurs next Thursday and you have the option to choose your teammate (via the registration form or by contacting me) or to allow me to pick one for you from the pool of other individual entries. The first event is free to enter, given it will serve as a club trial for the format, and the following week we will hold the same event with a $5 entry fee per player, all of which will be returned in prizes. Enter one or both events at https://menloparkchess.club/events/ and I hope to see many of you for some bughouse over the coming two weeks! Regards,
The Menlo Park Chess Club will hold its first team Bughouse event April 6th, a follow-on to our Team Blitz tournament and part of a long-promised experiment to see if the team format works for our membership. The tournament will consist of sixteen teams of two players in a 4-round Swiss with a G/5 time control and free entry. More information about Bughouse rules and strategy may be found here.
Sign up individually using the Register button, above, and indicate your desired team member if you have one (optional). Given the fixed team nature of this event there is little flexibility where the number of participants is concerned, so if you wish to play please sign up early. That said, please do not register if you are on the fence about playing on the 6th, as nothing causes more swirl in a team event than late withdrawals or, worse, no-shows.
Shortly after registrations close team rosters and pairings will be shared with all participants. If you need to withdraw for any reason please let the tournament director know as soon as possible, so that a replacement player may be found and the teams rebalanced, as necessary. The first round will begin promptly at 7:00pm so please arrive by 6:45 Thursday to check in. Our Tournament Rules Summary will be followed for this tournament with the lone exception that we will observe clock move rather than touch move (the distinction will be shared before the start of the first round). Please send any questions or comments to info@menloparkchess.club and we look forward to seeing you at at this event!
The Menlo Park Chess Club will hold its first team Chess960 event March 30th, a follow-on to our Team Blitz on March 9th and part of a long-promised experiment to see if the team format works for our membership. The tournament will consist of eight teams of four players in a 3-round Swiss with a G/10 d/3 time control and free entry. The Chess960 starting positions to be used will be shared at the beginning of each round.
Sign up individually using the Register button, above, and teams will be crafted by the tournament director, with the avowed goal of making the event as equitable as possible where rating and/or skill level are concerned. Given the fixed team nature of this event there is little flexibility where the number of participants is concerned, so if you wish to play please sign up early. That said, please do not register if you are on the fence about playing on the 30th, as nothing causes more swirl in a team event than late withdrawals or, worse, no-shows.
Shortly after registrations close team rosters and pairings will be shared with all participants. If you need to withdraw for any reason please let the tournament director know as soon as possible, so that a replacement player may be found and the teams rebalanced, as necessary. The first round will begin promptly at 7:00pm so please arrive by 6:45 Thursday to check in. Our Tournament Rules Summary will be followed for this tournament with the lone exception that we will observe clock move rather than touch move (the distinction will be shared before the start of the first round). Please send any questions or comments to info@menloparkchess.club and we look forward to seeing you at at this event!
Our “Tower of Flints” team blitz tournament last night was an interesting and fun experiment with a few lessons learned (off the top of my head—there are certainly more): with assigned teams as were used in this event, have people on the same team introduce themselves to one another before the start of the first round, so everyone knows who is on their team (it was pointed out to me after the second round that there was some uncertainty about team makeup, resulting in a “Doh!” moment); balancing team strength is difficult when most participants don’t have an established blitz rating and there are a number of first-time participants; a five-round blitz tournament can take longer than 90 minutes, even with the pairings pre-made.
That said, I think the format has promise and I heard generally positive feedback from participants, so we’ll try it again next week or the week thereafter, perhaps playing Chess960 to further obfuscate my questionable team balancing algorithm. In the meantime, congratulations are due to Clyde Taylor and Gustavo Chau for winning their board groups with perfect 5-0 scores, and to Team E (Alex Chin, Andy Shih, Cameron Rampell, Atul Dhingra, Benjamin Sergeant and Clyde Taylor) for sweeping the other teams with a 5-0 match score, as well. All team and board results are in the images below and I’ll work out a better way to share this for the next event.
Thank you to everyone who played chess with us last night (including the many who visited for casual and bughouse), who put up with the missteps and who provided feedback during and after the tournament—I really appreciate it! Regards,
The Menlo Park Chess Club will hold two consecutive team blitz tournaments March 9th and 16th, part of a long-promised experiment to see if this format works for our membership. The first event on March 9th will offer free entry and will include either eight teams of 4 players (32), six teams of six players (36) or ten teams of four players (40), depending upon the number of registrations, with a bias for the middle option. The second event on March 16th may include a $5 entry fee, all of which will be returned to the top two or three teams as prizes. If there are six or eight teams the tournament format will be round robin (five or seven rounds, respectively). If there are ten teams the format will be a five-round Swiss. The time control is tentatively G/5 d/2 and may be slightly shorter if there are seven rounds (G/4 d/2).
Sign up individually using the Register button, above, and teams will be crafted using a patent-pending, proprietary algorithm known only to ChatGPT, with the avowed goal of making the event as equitable as possible where rating and/or skill level are concerned. Given the fixed team nature of this event there is little flexibility where the number of participants is concerned, so if you wish to play please sign up early. That said, please do not sign up if you are on the fence about playing next Thursday, as nothing causes more swirl in a team event than late withdrawals or, worse, no-shows.
Shortly after registrations close team rosters and pairings will be shared with all participants. If you need to withdraw for any reason please let the tournament director know as soon as possible, so that a replacement player may be found and the teams rebalanced, as necessary. The first round will begin promptly at 7:00pm so please arrive by 6:45 Thursday to check in. The US Chess Rules of Blitz Chess will be followed for both events with the lone exception that we will observe clock move rather than touch move (the distinction will be shared before the start of the first round). Please send any questions or comments to info@menloparkchess.club and we look forward to seeing you at one or both of these events!
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.
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,
