Saratoga Open, Feb. 26-28, 2010

Greetings yet again,

Wow, look at this, three posts from me in one day! But it takes an amazing amount of work to get these things prepared in some kind of coherent form. Remember, I can only do this because I have the day off. :-) I'll have to be more sparing with posts in the future.

Well, I wanted to say something about the Saratoga Open that took place this past weekend. I played only three of the five rounds due to commitments, but the games were interesting. There was very low turnout, unfortunately--only about a dozen players in each of the two sections, Open and Under 1800. I contemplated skipping the tournament because I knew I'd have to take two byes, and it seems extravagant to play just three rounds considering the entry fee and all, but every bit of practice can help, and I think the CCA events that are coming to this area deserve support. We have the State Championship and the New York State Open pretty regularly from them right now, and if we can have one or two others during the year, especially in as nice a location as downtown Saratoga, so much the better.

Your author of the moment was the top seed in the entire tournament, if you can believe it. The only other Expert was Lee Battes. There were better players at the site that weekend--Deepak Aaron, James Hiltunen, Alexis Paredes, Michael Chiang, and some others--but they were all playing in the much larger State Scholastic championships held in other rooms concurrently. I suppose if one of them had been feeling particularly ambitious, he could have played in both events, almost as a simultaneous display. :-)  Actually, I forgot to mention in my post on the Amateur Team that I heard there was one guy that did precisely that--he played on two teams at once for the whole weekend! Hopefully they didn't get paired against each other....

Of the dozen or so players in the Open section (I must confess that I didn't follow the goings-on in the Under 1800 all that closely), it seemed like anyone's tournament, but in the end a fellow we don't see much of around here, Darwin Nyberg of Saratoga, ran away with it, winning his first four games and only finally taking a draw with Peter Henner of Clarksville in the last round, after having already sealed up clear first place with a round to spare. I found it of personal interest that Mr. Nyberg and I are originally from the same region of the country, a ways away from here (I will say that that took a little bit of the sting out of losing to him--but only a little).

Besides Mr. Nyberg winning first prize (scoring 4.5/5), there were quite a few other contestants that got some kind of money. Alan LeCours won the main class prize for Under-2000, young Jonathan Richman from the Kingston area tied with Henner for 2nd-3rd places overall (scoring 3/5), and Battes and I tied for 4th-5th at 2.5/5.

Update: Looking at the crosstables after the fact, I see that things in the Under-1800 section were more tightly contested. Andrew Crotty of Massachusetts got a huge rating bounce in tying for 1st-2nd, going from 1295 to 1512! The other top finisher in the section was Miss Kavana Mallanna, who now has a provisional rating of 1813, according to the final wallchart. (Hmm, the Battle of the Nations in the Napoleonic Wars! And the raid on Washington. I can't help but think history when I see such numbers.) Here as in the Open section, a high proportion of the contestants got a little something for their efforts.

The games looked pretty interesting throughout. I've posted analysis of my own little efforts on this post on my own blog, to accommodate the game viewer.