I wasn’t there, but I can still report on it!
The U.S. Open ended today with a six-way tie between Alex Lenderman, Sergei Kudrin, Alex Yermolinsky, Jacek Stopa, Jesse Kraai, and Dmitry Gurevich. Lenderman and Kudrin drew in the last round — I’ll bet that game didn’t go over 20 moves — while the other four all won to catch up with them at 7.5/9.
Using Michael Aigner’s list of Northern California players, here is how our local talents did:
- Jesse Kraai — 7.5 and a tie for first
- Emory Tate — 6.5 and a tie for 3rd/4th master
- Paul Gallegos — 6.5 and a tie for 3rd/4th master
- Evan Sandberg — 5.5
- Kyle Shin — 5.5
- Ruth Haring — 5.0
And I’ll stop there because I don’t know any of the others. Getting into the prize money looks as if it was really tough. I would have thought that a class A player who scored 5.5 points (i.e., Kyle Shin) would be a shoo-in for a prize, but believe it or not, four class A players scored above him.
There’s no article yet on the tournament at the U.S. Chess website, so I am reduced to studying the crosstable for interesting factoids. It’s kind of like looking at a baseball box score. Here are some things I noticed:
Lenderman played an amazing “Swiss Gambit.” That’s when you lose in an early round and then win a bunch of games in a row to catch up. Lenderman was upset by Texas expert Matthew Michaelides in round two, then won six games in a row before agreeing to a draw against Kudrin in the last round. Meanwhile, Michaelides started 3-0 and then got hammered, ending with only 4.5 out of 9. Sic transit gloria.
Who is the odd man out? That’s the one key question the crosstable doesn’t answer. There were 5 spots in the U.S. Championship available. But 6 people tied for first place. Who gets left out, and why?
Two other good Swiss Gambits. Out of 456 players in the tournament, there were two (2) who managed to win their last three games in a row. One of them was David Friedman of Ohio, who turned a 3-3 start into a 6-3 tournament and was one of the four prizewinners in class A. The other was Jose Gatica of Kansas, who turned a 2-4 start into a 5-4 final, which earned him nothing except perhaps the satisfaction of having an okay tournament instead of a disastrous one.
What happened to this guy? Another good mystery is what became of Dereque Kelley of Washington, an expert who started 5/6 (!) and then withdrew (!!). Wow. If I started 5/6 at the U.S. Open, there would have to be a heck of a good reason to make me leave. Your mother/father/pet hamster died? Puh-LEEZE. Tell them to schedule the funeral some other time.
Another MIA in the last three rounds was grandmaster and women’s world champion Alexandra Kosteniuk. However, at least she knew before the tournament that she couldn’t play, so she took half-point byes for all three rounds. Thus, after a 5.5/6 start she ended with 7/9 and finished in an 11-way tie for seventh place. For this (lack of) work she took home $110.
Caution pays. In general, the way to win at the U.S. Open is not to lose. Of the top six players, Lenderman was the only one to lose a game.
