I wasn’t there, but I can still report on it!<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Using Michael Aigner’s list of Northern California players, here is how our local talents did:<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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:<\/p>\n
Lenderman played an amazing “Swiss Gambit.”<\/strong> 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<\/em>.<\/p>\n Who is the odd man out?<\/strong> 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?<\/p>\n Two other good Swiss Gambits.<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n What happened to this guy?<\/strong> 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\u00c2\u00a0schedule the funeral some other time.<\/p>\n Another MIA<\/strong> 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\u00c2\u00a0she took half-point byes for all three rounds. Thus, after a 5.5\/6 start she ended with 7\/9 and finished in\u00c2\u00a0an 11-way tie for seventh place. For this (lack of) work she took home $110.<\/p>\n Caution pays.<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/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":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660","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=660"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}