\u2026 Unless, of course, you get three! <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was reminded of this today in a roundabout fashion. Emmy and Ryder P., the sister and brother combo from my chess club in Aptos who came to watch me play a tournament in January, today got their first taste of tournament action. The event was a one-day unrated tournament, called a Rising Star tournament, held at Bay Area Chess in San Jose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Rising Star tournaments are a great idea that lets\nkids experience what a tournament is like without having to jump all the way in\nand get a USCF membership. Simultaneously they have a seminar for the newbie\nparents to acquaint them with the chess tournament scene\u2014what is a Swiss\nsystem, how do ratings work, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The good news is that both Emmy and Ryder went 3-0, won trophies, and are interested in playing in the state scholastic championships next weekend. That, of course, is a rated tournament, another step up in seriousness for then, but not a big leap. I think they are ready for it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
All of this took me back to the year 1972, when I played in my first tournament \u2026 three times. Ordinarily I tell people, if it comes up (which it seldom does), that my first tournament was the Indiana Closed Championship that June. It certainly felt <\/em>like my first tournament; it was the first time I left home to play chess. But there are two reasons it wasn\u2019t really my first. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s fascinating to read my diary entry for April 15, 1972, the day of my long-forgotten debut in the South East Indiana high-school tournament. My school, which was called Park-Tudor, had all sorts of bad luck. Our #1 player, a 1600-strength player, was not able to play that weekend. So I had to play top board. (I was perhaps 1400 strength on a good day.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our #3 player couldn\u2019t come either, so our team consisted of our #2, #4, #5, and #6 players. To make things worse, our #4 player got sick after the first round (he was having some inner-ear problems) and couldn\u2019t play any more. So we played round two with only three players. For rounds three through five we got a substitute, the younger brother of our #3 player, but he was way overmatched and lost all three games. So for all practical purposes we really had only three boards for the last four rounds, and they were far from being our three strongest players.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And still, we did pretty well! We won our first match, tied our next two, and won the fourth. I won all four rounds, thus giving me a lifetime tournament record of 4-0 up to that point. So we went into the fifth and final round with an actual chance to finish in the top four, which would have qualified us for the state high-school team championship. We were paired against a team from West Lafayette.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I remember how\nintimidated I was going into that final game, because their team had rated<\/em> players. It was probably the first\ntime I had ever heard of ratings, and they were a strange and mysterious thing\nto me. How do you get a rating? How good do you have to be? Here is how I\ndescribed the game in my diary: \u201cI lost a pawn early. This lost the game,\nbecause it came down to the last pawn!\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Hmm. Well, there was\nprobably more to it than that. Anyway, West Lafayette whipped us, 3-1, and they\nqualified for the state scholastic championship. The other teams that qualified\nwere North Central, Warren Central, and Shortridge. What happened in that\nchampionship is unknown to me. I don\u2019t even know if you could find\ndocumentation of it anywhere, as it was not an official USCF event.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In spite of all the bad\nluck and the ultimate disappointment, my diary entry is just brimming with\nexcitement. Typically for beginner chess, the games seem to have had wild\nswings of fortune. In round one, \u201cmy opponent handled the Scotch Game very\npoorly. There\u2019s only one defense to it, which people usually see intuitively,\nbut he missed it and I demolished him.\u201d I think what this means is that after\n1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. d4 he didn\u2019t play 3. \u2026 ed. In round two I queened a pawn\nand then \u201cnearly blew a Queen but he didn\u2019t see it!\u201d In round three I won my\nopponent\u2019s queen with an attack, but \u201cI once again almost blew it. Tossing away\npawns like pebbles, I almost let him queen a pawn before mating him.\u201d In round four,\n\u201cA rook and a pawn down, I desperately pushed my center pawns, my last hope.\nAstonishingly, he completely neglected my threat, which he could have thwarted\nwith ease, until too late, and I queened both pawns and won! This lucky turnabout\ngave us the round, 3-1.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Having seen about a\nmillion kids\u2019 games now, I\u2019d say: Not so astonishing, not so lucky. That\u2019s\nscholastic chess. Fifty percent of the time, if not more, the kids don\u2019t see\ntheir opponents\u2019 threats, and often they don\u2019t even look for them. It\u2019s part of\nlearning the game. But certainly, all of these mistakes make for a wild and\nentertaining battle. You can see why I fell in love with it. Grown-up chess is\nso boring by comparison! (But nevertheless wonderful in its own way.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n I see some of this same\nexcitement in Emmy and Ryder today, so I am hoping that they will go to the\nstate championship next weekend and make memories that will last forever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u2026 Unless, of course, you get three! I was reminded of this today in a roundabout fashion. Emmy and Ryder P., the sister and brother combo from my chess club in Aptos who came to watch me play a tournament in January, today got their first taste of tournament action. The event was a one-day […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":80,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[37,171,12],"tags":[182,85,4295,109,409,4294],"class_list":["post-5750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chess-clubs","category-ruminations","category-tournaments","tag-fischer-boom","tag-ratings","tag-rising-star","tag-scholastic-chess","tag-state-championship","tag-swings-of-fortune"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5750","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/80"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5750"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5750\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5751,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5750\/revisions\/5751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}