Cambridge Springers took home the gold, winning on tiebreaks over youth teams, one featuring GM Robert Hess.
Team standings are posted here.
EVENT IS RATED – crosstable here. (Thanks to Greg K for finding.)
Congrats to Bill Kelleher, Joe Fang and company. All prize results listed at uschess.org. Joe Fang went 6-0 scored 5.5 (not 6-0 as initially reported) and I caught a bit of his last game – a very interesting opposite-color-bishops ending where his passers were on the flanks and his opponent had passers in the middle (easier for Fang’s king to stay in touch with). (Game posted in uschess.org writeup – link in next graf.)
Good blogging by Jim West, who has lots of pictures and whose team we played in the last round; Michael Goeller, who played on the top board in round 5; Polly at Castling Queenside - I saw Polly briefly at the tourney and was sorry to see her on crutches; Elizabeth Vicary, whom I met briefly for the first time after The Beer Round. Add: Lengthy coverage by Jen Shahade now up at uschess.org.
Quotes of the weekend:
1. “Are you sure?” Jim West’s second board lost his queen FOR NOTHING by move 20. He continued to play against Charles (rated 2400) for many, many moves thereafter, without a shred of counterplay or hope in sight. Even in the team context this seemed a little ridiculous. Finally he resigned, and West on the adjacent board immediately turned to him and deadpanned “Are you sure?”
2. “I didn’t even consider it.” A few weeks ago I played Denys at the local club here outside Boston. Afterwards we talked about the game and of my early move f3, he commented “This move is so bad I didn’t even consider it.” Nothing personal, just a fact! Matt and I found this quite hilarious and took to repeating it this weekend in Parsippany. Then in the last round Matt played Nd4+ instead of Nxe5+, passing up a free pawn. I asked him afterwards why he didn’t play Nxe5, and he said “This move was so GOOD, I didn’t even consider it.” A true mantra for us patzers.
3. “We’re cruising on all four boards.” Outside the playing hall someone asked Greg how his team was doing, and I thought that’s how Greg replied. “Famous last words,” I responded, and I was kidding. But Greg’s team got killed that round – they scored one-half point out of four games. Afterwards I asked what happened – turns out he said LOSING, not CRUISING.
Denys grinds out 2Bs versus Jim West's rook - round 6
Top teams by average rating - see how tough it is to win this event?
Three of the Jackson Four: Charlie Mays, Greg Kaden, Carey Theil. Seeded 7th overall, finished 5-1 (like us).
Oh, come on, it’s not that hard to win this event. All you have to do is perform better than everyone else.
Every year, your posts remind me that these events look fun…and one of these years, I have to make it to one of these events.
Seriously, make it so. It’s unbelievably fun, and gets better when you go back the next year and see people you played before, etc etc.
Derek on 1, Donnie on 2, Egg on 3 and Egg Fu Yung on 4? You could call the team “Reassembling Humpty Dumpty”.
Brilliant!
The other phrase heard often from Denys was “the seventh best move.”
:)
Jim West posted my final round loss. My near bamboozlement was thwarted by an nice twin knight and pawn mate. http://jimwestonchess.blogspot.com/2010/02/usate-2010-recap.html
-Matt
The official chart had Joe Fang at 6-0. I had the official results in my hands for a while (I read the winners to Steve as he typed), so I’m pretty sure it was correct.
The only problem with Reassembling Humpty Dumpty is that only two of the team members would actually know the rules of chess.
LEP – very similar to my team this year.
Anon – Somebody named a specific game & claimed Joe drew that opponent – I’ll just wait for the rating chart and make a final update as necessary. Thanks! — p.s. thanks for your work & all volunteers. Great tourney!
The event has now been rated:
http://www.uschess.org/msa/XtblMain.php?201002150251
Derek — congrats on being one of the few people I know who actually gained rating points during this event.
Actually I’m the only one. Everyone else went down.
How do you get that URL? I see everything within their stupid frame/wrapper that obfuscates the URL of any individual page.
I access all USCF tournament reports and member info through http://www.uschess.org/msa and have had no such problem.
I suspect the problem you might be having arises from trying to link to the reports from http://www.uschess.org. If so, try going directly into http://www.uschess.org/msa and using the links there. It is much more user-friendly.