2013 Okoboji Open - Part 4

  As we were driving home from Okoboji on Sunday night, I had that rare satisfied feeling like I get sometimes after finishing a programming project or playing great and winning the last chess game of the day. A successful outcome with no immediate worries on the horizon gives me a feeling that is as close to being high as when I used to get high a half a lifetime ago. I think Jim Bouton put it best in his very funny (and very profane) baseball diary "Ball Four" when he talked about the stress of being a starting pitcher and knowing you would have to live with your performance until the next time you could take the mound:

"He [Johnny Sain] used to say a pitcher had a kind of special feeling after he did really well in a ballgame. John called it the 'cool of the evening', when you could sit and relax and not worry about being in there for three or four more days; the job was done, a good job, and now it was up to someone else to go out there the next day and do the slogging. The cool of the evening."

  Enjoying my own ‘cool of the evening’ didn’t mean I was done with the tournament, however. The week before the tournament a reporter from the Worthington, MInensota Daily Globe (Alyson Buschema) picked up on a press release Sam had written about Awonder Liang’s appearance at the tournament and called Jodene for more information. Jodene was still cleaning up from the snowstorm and asked me to talk to Alyson. We talked for about a half hour about chess in general, the tournament in particular, and especially Awonder Liang.

  Alyson could not attend the tournament because she had to cover a gun show but sent a photographer to get some pictures and asked if we could talk on Sunday night after the tournament so she could put the results into her Monday article. I told her that I’d ask Jodene about having a gun show along with the chess tournament next year so maybe she could attend and on the way home I borrowed Tim Harder’s phone (because my Virgin Mobile phone didn’t work in Okoboji) and called Alyson to report the results. She seemed disappointed that Liang lost his two games on Sunday after starting 3-0. I don’t know if any chess players decided to come to Okoboji to see the 10 year old master in action, but his attendance raised the visibility of the tournament to the non-chess playing public beyond everyone’s wildest imagination. I got to see the article on Tuesday (you can see it here) and I may possibly be the most quoted person in Worthington, Minnesota. It was a good article and Alyson made sure to mention Sam’s Jackson Open in August so hopefully some of the area's casual chess players will take note and play.

  I dropped Tim Harder off at Ames and arrived at Marshalltown a little after midnight. Tim Mc Entee headed back home in his car and I brought my computer inside and turned it on to be greeted by an email from Sisira congratulating me for the tournament but also letting me know that I had the results wrong in two of the extra games (the players would have pointed out an incorrect result in the main sections as soon as I posted the next round's pairings). Ironically, both games involved Tim Harder – I had the game he won marked down as a loss for him and the game he won marked down as a loss. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the first time this happened so I was well prepared to write to the USCF office and ask them to correct my mistake. After that, I put the pictures of the prize winners on my web site and called it a night around two.

  I had arranged to take Monday off from work, but Daisy and Baxter didn’t know that I went to bed at two and so I woke up at 4:30 as normal, took them for their 5:00 walk and then took a nap until around eight. When I got up, I spent the morning writing the final article for my website and the first part of my blog and taking walks with Kathy to take Daisy and Baxter for beef stick treats. I spent the afternoon napping and putting more games in the computer. I added a few games each day and was finished by Saturday, letting Okechukwu Iwu know so he could reformat the games with the proper names and opening notation for me to repost.

The heart of the Okoboji Open: John Flores, Jodene Kruse, and Sam Smith. What these three have gone through on and off the board would make lesser people quit on the idea of having an annual chess tournament, but these are NOT lesser people.

  If these last few posts sounds like a lot of work, that’s because it was a lot of work. But if helping Jodene, John, and Sam wasn’t something I wanted to do I wouldn’t be doing it. When I stop and think about what they have created in a very sparse area I have to say ‘WOW’. There just aren’t very many chess players in this area and while most tournaments in Iowa get over a third of their participants from within 30 miles and over two thirds from within 100 miles, the Okoboji Open gets over two thirds of their participants from over 100 miles away! And they come year after year. When I see how hard these three work and how much they have overcome I can’t not want to do as much as I can to help them succeed. And people like Riaz and Sisira and many of the players see the same things and feel the same way.

  Four years ago, Sam tried to get a write-up of the Okoboji Open printed in the USCF’s (United States Chess Federation) Chess Life magazine. Sam is an very talented writer and his article had a great story line that read almost like a mystery story. The USCF had him do some rewrites and then they had him get some games and then they had him get some of the games annotated and after all that it never got in the magazine. The story of his article would make a great blog post in a ‘Catch-22’ sort of way. This year Sisira said I should write an article not for the printed Chess Life magazine, but for the USCF’s website news portal ‘Chess Life Online’. Sometimes when people tell me I ‘should do’ something, I reply in my very nastiest New Jersey sneer honed from over 30 years of practice ‘Yeah, and if you think of anything else I should do, I’M SURE YOU’LL LET ME KNOW!’ , but this was a really good idea so I said I would when I got some time.

  I thought about what kind of story would work for a national web site on my hour long commute for a couple of days. My normal tournament reports are in the Dragnet vein (‘just the facts, ma’am’) and I’ve had three of my National Chess Day write-ups make it into the USCF web site as part of larger stories using that same style but I didn’t think that would work for a ‘feature’ article. When I blog about tournaments I try to write so non-chess players can feel a little of what the chess players find so great about the sport, but this would be written for chess players. I looked on the USCF web site to see what kind of tournament reports get used and it seemed to me that most contained a short summary of the tournament, a picture or two, and games with analysis by players much stronger than me.

  Eventually, I decided to write about what makes the Okoboji Open special - the people. I wrote about Jodene, John, and Sam and their ups and downs over the seven years of the tournament. Then I talked about Riaz getting so many top Minneapolis players to come to Okoboji and Sisira’s help this year with his online registration website. To finish, I talked about Russ Swanson and how his widow donated two of his chess sets. Once I was all done, I mixed in a condensed version of my normal ‘Dragnet’ style tournament report (including the final round game for the championship between John Bartholomew and Andrew Tang without analysis) and I was done. I picked out nine pictures and emailed the whole package to the Chess Life Online editor on Thursday night.

  I didn’t know if the article would get on the website and I didn’t worry about it either. I considered it a long shot because of the US Championship starting on the same weekend I submitted it. But on Monday afternoon, there it was - an article about the Okoboji Open on Chess Life Online, neatly sandwiched between stories about Gary Kasparov giving out trophies at the National Girls Championship in Chicago and a 93 year old chess teacher in Reno, Nevada. The article included three of the nine pictures, the game, and was lightly edited in a way that showed me how to make my writing a lot more readable. It was cool to have a byline on a national website and I hope the 26 players whose names I got in the article will think having their name on the national chess website equally cool.

My article on the USCF website.
And for inquiring minds...YES, I did get permission to show it on my blog!

  The 2013 Okoboji Open was the biggest ever with 63 players. Where will it go from here? Jodene already booked the Arrowwood Resort for next year and the Iowa State Chess Association (IASCA) has scheduled their annual meeting for three weeks before the tournament instead of the week after. If the IASCA Class Championships are held with their meeting it should be a big help for the Okoboji Open. While most everyone was very happy with the tournament, I saw half a dozen young players from the Minneapolis area less than happy when they had to play mostly against people they compete against in local tournaments. I don’t expect the entire IASCA membership to all of a sudden head to Okoboji en masse but even an extra five players as well as the maturation of the players from Jodene’s monthly tournaments at the Sibley Pizza Ranch would go a long way to alleviating this problem. The visibility afforded by having the country’s youngest chess master compete has opened the door to donations from local and statewide businesses so there should be plenty of money to work with. It is great to see the hard work of Jodene, Sam, and John pay off but at the same time it’s a little scary to see this tournament heading into the unknown as they attempt to figure out where it goes from here. When things seem to be going great the quote ‘Nothing recedes like success’ always comes to my mind, but I think that the best chapters of the Okoboji Open story have yet to be written.

2013 Okoboji Open - Part 3

  After the Saturday night Okoboji feast, I got to bed around midnight and without any beagles to walk I was able to stay asleep two hours past my usual wakeup time of 4:30 and at seven I was back in the breakfast room of the Arrowwood Resort enjoying a free breakfast of free coffee, free fruit juice, and free English muffins with free butter and free jelly. In between free sips and free bites (did I mention the breakfast was free?), I continued entering games in the computer and posting them on line. Even though many of this year’s players were entering their games in journals and not providing me their game scores and there are always plenty of unreadable scoresheets, all told I was able to enter in 97 of the 154 rated games.

  While I was at my computer, many of the players came wandering in and out of the breakfast room. I got to talk to Lynn Adams, Dave Wagle (the father of the father/son duo I had mistakenly paired on Friday Night) and Dan Buck, the father of the young man I played an offhand game with on Saturday, Luke. Whenever someone talked to me, I stopped entering the games since that was mostly busy work for me and there was no way I was going to get them all in by the end of the day anyway. After a bit Luke, his mom Lynna, and his older brother Finn came to the breakfast room and joined me at my table. Finn was one of two players (Dave Wagle was the other) in the reserve section with perfect 3-0 records and would clinch a tie for first if he could win his fourth round game. Finn didn’t show any signs of nervousness and he reminded me a little of my son Matt. Finn was rated a little higher than Matt was in the fifth grade, but in the summer before he went into the sixth grade, Matt had a breakout tournament at the 2003 Western Open in Milwaukee; beating a 2100 and a 1900 and drawing a 2000 rated player to finish 3rd in a very strong tournament as the lowest rated player (you could look it up). Before I knew it, it was after eight and time for me to get back to the tournament room.

The 2013 Okoboji Masters (l to r) - Front : Jodene Kruse, Awonder Liang. Middle: Okechukwu Iwu, Tim Mc Entee, John Bartholomew, Andrew Tang. Back: Prasantha Amarasinghe, Bob Keating, Jim Ellis, Kevin Wasiluk.

  The fourth round of the tournament was paired the night before and with no one withdrawing from the tournament we were able to start almost on time after letting the three tournament organizers in attendance promote their tournaments and continued the tradition Sam Smith thought up last year of taking a picture of all the master chess players in attendance. The round itself was uneventful with no problems of note. Finn Buck won his game to clinch at least a share of the reserve championship and John Bartholomew drew his game with Prasantha Amarasinghe while Andrew Tang won to go 4-0 to set up a final round matchup where top seeded John Bartholomew had to win against Tang in order to finish first.

  In the reserve section Finn Buck had four points and there were 5 other players with three points, 2 of whom Buck had already defeated. I expected that Buck would play the highest rated player he hadn’t already played but the computer spit out different pairings. Normally I let the computer make all the decisions but in the final round of money tournaments closer attention is required. I was tempted to change the pairings but I was lucky enough to have Tim Mc Entee nearby. In addition to being a master chess player, Tim is a senior tournament director, has always done his pairings by hand, and understands the rules about pairings better than anyone I know. I explained the situation and what matchups I thought were correct. Tim looked everything over and said my pairings seemed reasonable and didn’t have any mistakes (like having a player with the same color three times in a row or matching the same opponents twice) so I made the adjustments and posted the Reserve pairings. I then printed out the Open pairings, saw no problems with them and put them up also.

  I didn’t have the Open pairings up more than a few minutes when Sisira told me the pairings were wrong and I needed to turn off the teammate feature. I took the pairings down and removed the games from the computer, turned off the teammate feature, redid the pairings and sure enough the pairings were different. BUT on further review I noticed that when I removed the games I also removed the players who told me they were leaving early and they were included in the new pairings. So I then removed the early leaving players, redid the pairings without the teammate feature, and they were exactly the same as before. I told Sisira, thanked him for the heart attack (which got a laugh out of him), and put the pairings back up.

  Since most of the players had a long trip home, having the pairings for the final round available as soon as possible allowed some of the games to be started early, which the players appreciated since it meant a little extra daylight on their drive home and a little extra sleep that night. Even so, most of the games ended up starting at the regular 2:30 time.

Show me the Money!!

  On each the first seven boards of the Open section, one or both of the players were competing for some of the cash prizes and all of the games were still underway at 4:30. Tim Mc Entee commented to me that he had rarely if ever seen a tournament where all the top boards were still playing well into the third hour of the final round. The Reserve section was also going strong. Finn Buck lost his final round game to Gokul Thangavel (a sixth grader from Iowa) to create a two way tie and also gave four other players a chance to claim a share of the championship by winning their last round game. Two of the players (Dave Wagle and Louis Leonard) did indeed win their games to force a four way tie. There was only one game left in the reserve that had no bearing on the prize money, so I figured out the prizes and Jodene gave out the cash while I got pictures of all the players with their awards. Many of the prize winners were kids who weren’t used to getting cash instead of trophies, so instead of telling the kids to say ‘Cheese’ or 'Smile' I told them to say ‘Show me the money!’ which got them all laughing. The last game to finish was going to have an impact on who was going to get the trophy so we had to wait to give it out. The Bucks decided not to wait and headed back to Madison, Wisconsin while the other three players hung around.

  After getting a draw in the simul, Sam was having a sub-par tournament and in the last round was in all sorts of trouble against this little seven year old girl that beat a 1400 in the first round of the tournament. Sam was had 2 pawns and a knight to his diminutive opponent’s 3 pawns and a bishop, but had managed to a neat blockade to create a drawn position, except that his opponent wouldn’t agree to a draw and wanted to keep playing. Sam caught ahold of me ourside the tournament room and explained that he had a dead drawn game but his opponent wanted to play. I told him (and he already knew) that he had no legal claim to a draw and had to keep playing until he had a valid claim by the 50 move rule or a repetition of position. Sam went back to battle and the little girl’s parents asked me if they should instruct their daughter to accept the draw. I advised them to let her play and not offer any advice and she did offer a draw a few moves later. All’s well that ends well, but I hope I don’t see her across the board from me at the Jackson Open!

  During the next to last round, Lynn Adams brought over two nice wooden chess sets and told us that Paulette Swanson, the widow of 2011 Reserve Champion Russ Swanson wanted these sets to go to the winners of the Open and Reserve championships. Russ passed away suddenly in October of 2011 and Jodene named the 2012 Reserve trophy after him. Lynn was Russ’s good friend and was happy to drop off the sets to keep Russ’s memory involved in the tournament. Lynn left early but gave me free reign to decide who was going to get the sets in case of a tie with his only wish that the Open champion get his choice of the sets. The Open wasn’t going to be decided anytime soon and I needed to decide which Reserve player was going to get a set so I made up a 3 man blitz tournament between Gokul, Louis, and Dave, which Gokul won handily. I then challenged Gokul to a couple of blitz games. I won a pawn in each of the games but then faded fast and barely managed to get a draw in the second game. I was enjoying myself playing but had to excuse myself when I was called into the tournament room to solve a dispute on the last game still going on in the Reserve section.

  In the last game of the Reserve section the player of the black pieces was a pawn down in a rook ending with 40 minutes on his clock while the player of the white pieces had 36 seconds on his clock. The player of the black pieces claimed that his opponent’s available time was going up instead of going down (the clock belonged to White). I handled the situation as poorly as I possibly could have because I had seen this model of clock in action (Saitek) and thought I knew how it worked. At first I thought that White had run out of time and the time was running up instead of down (this situation occurred to me at the State Fair speed chess tournament). I started punching the clock and the time wasn’t running up. Then I thought the clock was set to add the delay afterwards and if the player only used two seconds, two seconds were added back to the clock so I started punching the clock again, but no it wasn’t that either.

  So after playing with this clock for a couple of minutes, I realized that it was indeed set to add five seconds back after each move (Saitek must have added this feature recently). I got one of my clocks and set it to 36 seconds for White and 40 minutes for black with the proper delay and told them to continue. The Black player was very upset and thought I should at the most forfeit White since he would have run out of time if the clock had been set properly and if I was going to continue the game Black should have had no more than 26 seconds. At this point White decided to offer Black a draw, which was accepted and the situation was over.

  I made a number of mistakes in this situation. First, I should have gotten both players to agree on what was on the game clock and written it down before I did anything else. Then, I should have gotten the rule book out instead of relying on memory so I could explain why I had made my decision. And third, I should never have touched that game clock unless I knew exactly how it worked instead of thinking I knew and then continiued guessing even after I had convincingly demonstrated that I had no clue how this clock worked.

  Having said all that, after looking up the situation in the rule book I think I got the call right. I could have disqualified White if I thought the clock had been intentionally set wrong, but I believe it was an honest accident. I suppose I could have given Black a couple of extra minutes but since he already had a 40 minute to 36 second advantage it probably would have been more insulting than anything else. Getting the correct decision is important but getting it in the way a school child gets that two times two is four because they don’t know how to multiply and will tell you in the next breath that three times three is six is less than optimal. The Black player seemed quite unhappy with me, but having someone upset with you is as much a part of directing a tournament as people telling you what a great time they had and what a good job you did.

  
John and Gokul

  As soon as that situation got resolved, Gokul came up to me and wanted to know when he could get his chess set and go because he and his dad had a long ride. I told him that once John’s game was over they could get their set and go. I had looked in on John’s game and while it looked like he was winning against Andrew Tang, Andrew had some passed pawns so I couldn’t tell for sure. I took a walk into the tournament room and John’s game had just ended and he was walking to the pairing sheets to post his score. I asked him if he had won and when he told me he did, I explained Gokul’s problem and asked if he could pick out his chess set. It could have been seen as a pretty rude request coming immediately after a long struggle, but John once again showed why everyone thinks so highly of him. He smiled and came into the room where the sets were. I introduced him to Gokul and John told Gokul to pick out the set he wanted and started comparing notes with Gokul about their respective tournaments, making Gokul feel like a million bucks! Then a young player from the reserve section who was playing in his first rated tournament and lost all his games came up to John and asked him to autograph his chessboard. John signed his board and stuck up a conversation with this young player and started encouraging him and made him feel like a million bucks also. I’ve seen a lot of GM’s and IM’s at a lot of tournaments and I’ve rarely seen them treat lower rated players like that, but for John it’s just a natural part of who he is.

  Slowly but surely, the top boards finished up and the last game to finish was Eric Bell’s big upset over the youthful Awonder Liang. As soon as the game was over, I quickly had the prizes calculated and had Tim double check my work. Sam and Jodene counted out the cash and gave it out, the remaining players said their goodbyes and filed out and at 7:15 Sam, Jodene, Tim, Tim Harder, and me were the only ones left. I told both Tims when we started out to Okoboji that Jodene and I were the last ones to leave so it was no surprise to them when I sat down at the computer to put a small blurb about the final results on the website and send the ratings in to the USCF office so the tournament would be rated before most of the players got home. Normally getting the ratings into the USCF office is a no brainer, but they upgraded their website and because the tournament had two and three day schedules with different time controls, I had to enter the time control for each round in each section and enter which schedule each player competed in. My tournament software was no help meeting these new requirements so I had to enter in which schedule each of the 63 players competed in manually. It took me an extra 20 minutes to do this and at 7:50 I said goodbye to Jodene and Sam until August when I'll see them at Sam's Jackson Open, loaded up my car with both Tim’s help, and left Okoboji 55 hours after we arrived.

2013 Okoboji Open – Part 2

  The Friday Night round of the Open passed by uneventfully with only one problem. I forgot to turn on the feature of the pairing software that tells it not to pair ‘teammates’ unless necessary. I try to assign traveling partners and family members to the same ‘team’ so they won’t have to play each other unless it is for first (or last) place. A father was paired against his son in the reserve section and the father asked me if something couldn’t be done about it. I agreed that it made no sense for a father and son to travel four hours to Okoboji to play each other so I turned the feature on, redid the pairings, and the round started right on time. The first round is a quiet time for me since many of the players opt to play in the two-day section, playing two shorter games on Saturday to make up for missing a game on Friday night. I have time to watch the games and chat with the players that arrive late Friday night. The last games finished around 10:30 at night and I was alone in the tournament room.

I received many compliments for quickly having pictures of the players available on line. The kids enjoy it and for the adult players it is a rare chance for them to see themselves as their fellow competitors do. And believe it or not, a timely news item (mentioning as many names as possible) is always welcome.

  One of the things I like to do to give this tournament a ‘big-time’ feel is to post small round by round reports along with the pictures and games on my chess website (www.centraliowachess.com), so once the games were over I sat down at my computer and started working. Whenever I have my monthly youth tournaments I don’t go to bed until I have an article written for my website including links to pictures and the results. Then the next morning I send the participants an email thanking them for attending the tournament and a link to the article. For a day or two after I send the email I get hits on my website from all over the country as grandparents and aunts and uncles get to see their relative at the chessboard. It would be easy to put this task off till the next day but things that get put off for a day tend to get put off for a week and then two weeks and then not done at all.

  I quickly wrote a small tournament update and uploaded that to my web page. I had already taken some pictures of the players so I loaded them to my computer from the camera, cropped them, shrunk their disk space size (an important step – if the pictures are too large, the web pages take a long time to load), transferred them to the internet, and updated my database to reference the pictures to the web pages. Then I started entering games and uploading them. While I was doing this five or six players came in to sign up for the tournament so I got them entered. I was all done around midnight, but the extra players meant that there weren’t enough tables set up so I took around 30 minutes to set up some more tables and rearrange the playing room. I’m not mentioning all this so I can look good; I’m mentioning it because that was how my I spent my evening and it is a good example of one of my strengths as a tournament director that I talked about last week -- an ability to work harder than most. If you ever go to a tournament and wonder why there weren’t enough tables set up or why you can’t find the results or an article or a picture afterwards the answer is that someone didn’t do it and it probably wasn’t a tournament I had much to do with.

  I got to bed around one on Saturday morning and since I didn’t get to walk Daisy and Baxter in the morning I managed to sleep in late, wake up at six, and was in the hotel lobby by 7. The Arrowwood Resort has added a continental breakfast room this year so I got a free breakfast of juice, toast, and coffee which I ate with Sisira Amarasinghe and Bill Broich. I’ve known Bill for about 6 years and I first met Sisira when his son Prasantha and Matt were the High School chess champions of Minnesota and Iowa in 2010 and helped with a ‘champions chess camp’ that Sam Smith and John Flores put on. Sisira and Bill are both accredited tournament arbiters by the International Chess Federation (FIDE) and Sisira is also an accredited tournament organizer, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that we talked mostly about organizing and directing tournaments. By 7:30, I was back in the tournament room for a full day of chess.

  
Luke Buck

  Saturday is the busiest day of the tournament for me. There were four separate tournaments going on in the morning: the continuation of the three day Open and Reserve sections from Friday and the start of the two day Open and Reserve sections. I had three main concerns : a) make sure I didn’t miss anyone who signed up and that I got everyonre in the proper section (something that eluded me last year) b) make sure I didn’t overlap board numbers on the sections so that four people wouldn’t try to sit at the same table and c) try to get games for all the players in the sections with an odd number of players. Somehow, I had all the players assigned to their proper sections and even got the board numbers right (including making sure the top players in both open sections had the roomier tables by the windows), and when there was an odd number of players in each open section I got them to agree to play each other. That left only one young player in the reserve section without a game. Jodene had agreed to sit out if there were an odd number of players but since she had won her first round game I wanted her to keep on playing. The young player without a game was seven year old Luke Buck and I had him wait with his mom while I took a walk around the tournament room (taking pictures of all the players I’d missed so far) just in case a late arriving player needed a game. When no one arrived, I decided to play Luke an unrated game for fun. Luke and his brother Finn (who tied for first in the reserve section) are from Madison, Wisconsin and study with Will Liang, the father of the youngest US chess master ever, Awonder Liang. Here is our game:

pgn4web chessboards courtesy of pgn4web.casaschi.net

  Luke was pretty impressive. He kept looking for the initiative even when he was behind and only made the two mistakes. I expect him to be rated higher than me in a short time and in a few years he may be giving the simuls at the Okoboji Open! It was nice to take a break, play some chess, and talk with Luke and his mom Lynna. As the tournament director and more specifically a tournament director that normally doesn't play when I direct, I'm always the one person not playing so part of my job as I see it is to be available for the other players or parents to talk to or play a quick game of chess with. While Luke had a good nature about the bye and was happy to get the free point (He got a win and a draw from his other four games to get 2.5 points and win a $50 class prize), I think this way he and his family had a better experience at the tournament rather than if I had just left him as the only player without a game. I got some help from my travelling companion Tim Harder in the other two rounds when he played some extra games to even things out in the sections.

  There were a couple of problems on Saturday morning. While I was playing Luke, a player’s cell phone started ringing in the tournament hall and another player came to get me. Since one of the selling points of the Okoboji Open is the quiet playing hall, I take advantage of the USCF rule allowing me to proscribe penalties for cell phone use in the tournament hall. I came into the hall and was about to take 10 minutes off the clock when Sisira’s son Prasantha told me he already had enforced the penalty. Sisira had asked me if Prasantha could serve as assistant TD in order to get some experience and I was OK with it. Even though I wanted him to concentrate on his playing, I was glad that he took charge of the situation. The other big problem was when a little girl (who beat a 1400 rated player on Friday night) made a blunder that cost her a piece and started crying uncontrollably. Her opponent asked me to see if I could find her parents. I went to the front desk and they called the parents room. The parents came to the tournament room, settled their daughter down, the opponent told me what a great tournament director I was and the games continued. I moved my computer into the tournament hall and entered games until the end of the round. Then I paired the second round of the two-day section and got to spend some time catching up with my friend John Flores after his game ended.

  Once the second round ended it was time for me to merge the two and three day sections. As adept as I am with a computer, I find this particular operation scary because any mistake that I may have made in the previous rounds are magnified and difficult to undo. I backed up my data, did the merge, triple checked everything and printed up the pairings.

  I posted the pairings, the players all started filing in and sat down, and then I heard my name being called by Awonder Liang’s dad Will. I came over and Will told me the pairings were wrong and that Awonder should be playing the higher rated FIDE Master Kevin Wasiluk instead of the National Master Okechukwu Iwu. I looked over the pairings and Liang was right except that I had set up the 2 players who traveled together 350 miles from Duluth (Dane Mattson and Okey Iwu) to not play each other unless necessary. These two would have had to play each other in this round, but because I had set the ‘team’ feature after my first round misadventure the computer switched Liang and Mattson. No one had to play White or Black twice in a row so I explained the situation to Will and I also said that I didn’t consider it any different than not having his two sons play each other unless necessary. Will accepted my explanation and play resumed, with Awonder winning a thrilling game against Okey as Black. Awonder had just a few minutes on his clock with a cramped position, but he kept on blitzing out moves, Okey got in time trouble and made a few mistakes, and the ten year old master won the game with a couple of dozen chess players looking on in amazement.

I used to be able to fit the Okoboji feast in one picture, but not this year...

  After the last games ended, it was time for the traditional Okoboji feast at a nearby Mexican restaurant. When Riaz Khan first instituted this tradition, there were only a handful of us and we just sat at a table like a large family. This year, almost thirty chess players descended on the restaurant and the staff had to rearrange almost the entire restaurant to fit us all. I sat by Tim McEntee, Drake law student Nathaniel Arnold, and Minnesotans Eric Bell, Louis Leonard, and William Murphy. I met Eric at last year’s Jackson Open when he defeated me in the third round en route to his victory and $300 prize but only got to exchange a few words afterwards when we were both still wound up from our game but this day we got to relax and talk (Eric makes a living as a piano teacher!) and have a great time.

  Once the feast was over, we headed back to the resort and I saw some of the players checking out the next day’s pairings. There was Sisira, Will Liang, and John Bartholomew among others. We got to talking about my decision to not have Okey and Dane play each other unless necessary. Sisira stated that this is not allowed under FIDE rules where you must play who the pairings dictate, while some of the other players thought it was difficult decision for me or maybe I was even pressured into it. I surprised some of them by saying there was no pressure and that the decision was a no brainer for me.

  At last year’s Open I didn’t know (or maybe I forgot) that these two players travelled together and I had them playing in the third round. The result of the game was a three move draw. I didn’t like it but once I knew they were traveling partners I understood it (even though I still didn’t like the short draw). When I went with Jaleb from my chess club to a CyChess in 2009 and we were paired in the first round, I took a zero point bye since there were an odd number of players. That was only a 40 mile drive but i didn't see the point in playing someone I play every week while another player sat out. In 2010, we were paired in the last round and we went at it hammer and tongs because there was money on the table and we each really want to win against each other. Last year we were scheduled to play in the first round but the TD switched the pairings around so we didn’t have to. It seemed like the right thing to do then and it seemed to me the right thing to do now.

  There’s also another solid reason that made this a no-brainer to me. The last five years attendance at the Okoboji Open was 41, 38, 53, 44, and 63 this year. That is a total of 239 players, but there was at least one free entry each year so let’s assume 230 paid entries. Okey has played all five years and Dane has played in three of the five, which means they represent 3.5% of all the paid entries over the last 5 years and at least $400 in entry fees over the same period. If I make them play each other and they decide to not come to Okoboji any more, where will those entries and that money be made up from? It’s not my tournament but it seems the idea behind any venture is to keep the customers happy and these are two good customers. Just because there were 63 players this year is no guarantee that there will be 64 or even 34 players next year and in 15 years of working with shoe store owners I've learned that it is easier to keep an existing customer that to get a new customer. It would be a tough decision if I had a group of players tell me they wouldn’t play unless I allowed travelling companions and family members to be paired against each other, but I haven’t had anyone tell me that and if they did I’d pass the buck to Jodene to make the final decision. I didn’t see any unfair advantage and if there were no valid alternatives I would have paired them against each other and I think they would have understood. I understand that the international rules are very firm and they exist for legitimate reasons because there are a lot of unscrupulous people that do manipulate pairings and results for their own benefit. In the tournaments I direct I prefer to think that the human element can come first and anyway I wouldn't enjoy being an automaton with every move governed by rules and regulations.

  It was a healthy discussion to end a long day as we all got ready for the final day of the tournament.

2013 Okoboji Open – Part 1

Just like last year, the Okoboji Open kicked off with a simultaneous exhibition by
International Master and 2-time defending Okoboji Open champion John Bartholomew.

  I headed up to Okoboji, Iowa this past weekend to direct the tournament for my friend Jodene Kruse. Normally I help by directing and providing a little advance publicity but this year I did extra work because I had helped convince her to use the online registration website developed by Sisira Amarasinghe. The registration website (you can see it here) was a boon because in our instant gratification based society the same people who will procrastinate about writing and mailing a check to enter a tournament until the early entry fee expires and then pass on going because it’s too expensive have no problem with clicking a mouse and entering their credit card information because they can pay on a convenient monthly basis with no messy checkbook or bank balance to deal with. A super feature of Sisira’s website is that players can go there to see who has already entered. This can create a ‘snowball’ effect because when enough strong players are signed up, other strong players will notice and possibly sign up themselves.

  All this convenience ended up coming at a cost to me. While Jodene is more than capable enough to handle a computer and play chess despite having cerebral palsy, she didn’t learn to use the online registration website. This created a situation where if someone had a problem with their entry I would be called upon to help them. When Jodene got an entry in the mail instead of putting the entry in the website so other users could see the new participant, she would send me the entry and I would put it in the site and when she needed to get a list of the players who entered on line she would ask me and I would create the list and send it to her. These things are no big deal but I’ve been so busy at work that the extra duties were unwelcome and I’ll admit there were times I regretted recommending using the online registration site. I thought it would make it easier for Jodene to have people enter directly but I didn’t realize it would make it easier on her by giving me responsibilities that are best left to the tournament organizer. None of that really mattered because I am used to working pretty hard to help with the Okoboji Open and after a rough stretch at work and the countless emails of the past weekend with the IASCA, I was looking forward to having a great time with some great people.

  The tournament got a boost when Will Liang, the father of the youngest US Chess master in history wrote to say his two children (Awonder and Adream) Liang wanted to play at Okoboji. Once he signed up, I put up a blurb on the state website to announce their attendance. Ten year old Awonder is an amazing player (you can see here) and was going to be fifth or sixth highest rated player in the tournament. I’m not sure that his attendance attracted other chess players but it was a drawing point and got tournament the attention of an area newspaper who wrote a nice article about it along with Sam’s contact information. John Flores helped out by getting an article on the Susan Polgar website. I don’t know how much it helped, but I do know it didn’t hurt.

  By Thursday night, it looked like the tournament would have at least 53 players which would not only tie the record set in 2011 but would mean a full prize payout since they were based on 50 players. A bigger concern was the massive snowstorms that had hit the Okoboji area the week before and the 2-4 inches scheduled to hit Thursday night. I wasn’t worried about this year’s attendance since most everyone had already paid (another point in favor of online registration) but bad weather would probably keep people from attending next year. I certainly wasn’t looking forward to driving in the snow.

  
Cylinder, Iowa!

  On Friday, it was finally show time. With no classes at St. Francis, I had no need to drive to Des Moines for the chess club like the last two years and left from Marshalltown. Tim Mc Entee, the three time state chess champ and my co-coach at St. Francis was going to car pool with me. He arrived at nine; we headed over to Ames to pick up Tim Harder (who traveled with me to the Jackson Open last year) and were on the road to Okoboji by ten. It is always nice to have people to talk to on a long drive and it made the time pass quickly. I was worried about hitting slow traffic and snow as we got closer to Okoboji, but while there was snow in the fields and ditches, the roads were clear and except for being slowed by a road crew that was pouring tiny rocks from a small bucket into cracks in the highway for a five mile stretch, we made excellent time. I even had time to get out of the car in Cylinder, Iowa. Cylinder is a small town with about 10 houses, an RV and camper dealer, a bank, a restaurant with a Mountain Dew sign, and a boarded up Post Office. It may be the only town in the US with more campers and RVs than people. I’m sure Cylinder has a police officer that writes speeding tickets since there are 2 45 degree turns that have 15 MPH speed limit signs. I’ve always wanted to breathe the fresh Cylinder air and now that I have, as soon as I make a bucket list I can cross off at least one entry and if I had actualy found a Cylinderan (Cylindette?, Cylinderite?, Cyllys?) to talk to I could have crossed two entries off!!

  We arrived at the Arrowwood resort at 1:30 and Jodene was already there. I couldn’t get my room until four so Tim Harder took a nap on the floor while I set up my computer and then worked with Tim M. and Jodene to set up the tournament room so that there would only be one chessboard per table. A big part of what makes this tournament special is that the playing room is extremely quiet and extremely large, and that allows the competitors to have their own table which makes them feel like this is a big time tournament which it has become.

  The players slowly started filing in around 4 and then International Master John Bartholomew showed up for his simultaneous exhibition in which he would take on all comers. John was also planning on playing in the tournament and was the two-time defending champion (sharing the title with Matt Dahl last year). Not only does John bring some of his students to the tournament, he is a great guy who has time to talk to everyone. It means a lot to us lower rated chess players to be able to have a chat with a super chess player like John who is happy to have that chat. I'm no chess groupie, but I am a big fan of John's and I watch his games whenever he is playing in a big tournament and root for him.

  At first I was planning on playing in the simul, then some players who hadn’t registered showed up and I had to take care of them so I decided not to play, but then it quieted down so I decided to play at the last minute, but as it turned out I had plenty of time to take care of the entrants since I was the first to lose to the International Master.

pgn4web chessboards courtesy of pgn4web.casaschi.net

While everyone else was still playing against John,
I got to stare at my checkmate position for a long stretch.

  Bummer! Part of the problem was while last year I could set up right outside the tournament hall and was in the same room as the simul, this year I was as far away as I could be from the tournament room and in a different room than the simul. As soon as the new arrivals showed up I was going from room to room and I felt like I was giving the simul! The other part of the problem was that John is a pretty good player. He beat everyone except Sam Smith who played great and earned a draw. After my loss, I figured that since I had Riaz Khan take a picture of me and Sam after I defeated him at Jackson last year, I’d get him to take a picture of me after my defeat this year.

  After the simul was over for me, I resumed checking in the players and started to focus on directing the tournament. There was $2,000 in prize money and nine masters playing so I would have to be on my ‘A’ game anyway, but also in attendance was FIDE (the world chess federation) arbiters Bill Broich and Sisira, Minnesota’s premier tournament director Dan Voje, and Noel Skelton. Noel isn’t a tournament director – he is a chess player who funded his own tournament (the Noel Skelton Open ). And I didn’t even mention all the people that Riaz Khan and Sisira convince to make the long trip to play by telling what a great tournament site it was and what a well-run tournament it is. I’m a good tournament director but my strengths lie in my mad good computer skills, an ability to work harder than almost everyone else, remembering names, and getting along with the kids and parents that attend my youth tournaments. Those are great skills but in a tournament like this the central skills are making sure that the players are paired correctly, that all the pairings the computer software is making can be explained, and that any problems on the tournament floor are handled quickly. None of these are especially my strong suits, but at 5:55, I got a player from the two day section to do me a favor and play the odd numbered player in the three day open section, took a deep breath, printed up the pairings, and the 2013 Okoboji Open was underway….

'And here we go...' - The Joker from 'Batman - The Dark Knight'

What's mine is mine and what's yours is....

“The freedom of the city is not negotiable. We cannot negotiate with those who say, "What's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable."” John F. Kennedy

  I was listening to the radio on my commute home last week when I heard the old Joan Jett song ‘I Love Rock ‘n Roll’. When I got home, I decided I wanted to hear it again so I used my Rhapsody application on my amazing iPod to bring up a Joan Jett song sampler. Joan Jett was an early 1980’s punk rock singer who was a favorite of my listeners when I had a punk rock/ new wave college radio show and a part time DJ business. I listened to a quite a few of her old songs in the last few days and don’t think her first big hit ‘Bad Reputation’ has stood the test of time but many of the others like ‘Do You Want To Touch Me (Oh Yeah)’ and ‘I Can’t Stand Myself For Loving You’ sound as primal and hard driving as they did 30 years ago.

  I hadn’t listened to the song ‘I Can’t Stand Myself For Loving You’ for many years and as I was listening to it I was struck by how much the song sounded like the Sunday Night Football Song that is currently being sung by an underdressed Faith Hill just before game time, presumably to make the men of America feel better about the fact that they are about watch three hours of sweaty oversized men in tight pants shove and grab on each other. In any event, I went trolling on the Internet to see if I was the only one who had noticed the similarity between the two songs and I found plenty of posts (like here and here) also noting the similarities and NBC and Jett's web site acknowledge as much so I assume that the rights to copy the song was purchased at some point.

  A big part of pop music’s popularity is being able to follow a beat or sing along so it isn’t very surprising that many artists are accused of stealing a melody for their own songs. The most famous lawsuit I remember was when George Harrison was accused of copying the Chiffon’s song ‘He’s So Fine’ for his number one single ‘My Sweet Lord’. Harrison was assessed a judgment of $587,000 and found guilty of ‘subconscious plagiarism’.

  As a programmer (or 'software developer' as the young people call themselves), I am especially sensitive to unauthorized use issues. I’ve had customers give copies of software I’ve written to their friends and then call me to help with their friend’s support issues (pretending that the problems were their own). I don't put copies of games or songs on my computer and I don’t give them out either. In fact, my most recent article for the Chess Journalists of America (CJA) magazine, The Chess Journalist, (you can see it here) was about the whys and hows of putting pictures in blog posts. In the article, I included the following:

“I want to close this discussion of pictures with a note of caution. It is easy and tempting to grab a picture off the internet and place it in your blog. Please remember that even if an Internet picture has no copyright notice you have no way of knowing if it was copied from another site where a notice was posted. Every picture is owned by someone who has copyright protection whether explicitly stated or not.”

  These are nice words and I was hoping they would be read and taken to heart by the members of the CJA who get the magazine, but I know at least one who paid no attention to it. The editor of En Passant, the IASCA’s (Iowa State Chess Association) quarterly magazine is named Mark Capron. Mark is an officer of the IASCA and a member of the Chess Journalists of America. The En Passant has won numerous CJA awards under Mark's stewardship and he is the most professional tournament director in the state. I received the most recent En Passant and there on the cover was a picture of 2012 Iowa Correspondence Champion George Eichhorn. You can imagine my surprise when I immediately recognized the picture as one I took at the 2011 Iowa State Fair speed chess tournament and posted on my blog over a year and a half ago.

  You might say it’s just one picture and what’s the big deal and normally I’d agree, but the IASCA board has lately shown a marked propensity for doing what they please without regard for anyone or anything. Jodene Kruse has run the Okoboji Open for the last 5 years in April. The tournament has been the first tournament of the IASCA qualifying cycle and this year’s date was set last October for April 19-21 of this year after Jodene got permission from the state clearing house director (an IASCA board member). The IASCA has scheduled their year ending state championships for the week after the Okoboji tournament just like last year. The last tournament of the IASCA cycle was on February 2nd and advertised as the “final Iowa State Chess Association Closed Championship Qualifier for the 2012-2013 year”. So with most of February and all of March and some of April to choose from, the IASCA has chosen to have their year ending tournament and the only other IASCA sactioned tournament from February 3rd to June 30th the week after Okoboji just like last year instead of giving the tournament (held on the date approved by the IASCA in the first place) a couple of weeks to have the state’s spotlight.

  There was 24 emails (YES!! 24) this past weekend regarding the advertisement on the IASCA web site of a blitz tournament in Iowa City on the Sunday night of the Okoboji tournament to honor the visit of chess writer J.C. Hallman to Iowa City. In the very first one of these dozens of emails I was asked whether I was OK with the website announcement. Why me? I don't know, maybe to see if I was going to express the same outrage that came my way when I posted announcements of my youth tournaments on the same day as IASCA events in days gone by. I pointed out that the Okoboji tournament was Jodene Kruse's and I just helped by directing and this might be an opportunity to open a dialog between the IASCA and the Northwest Iowa organizers (Jodene, John Flores, and Sam Smith). After eight more emails that all dodged the point about the state championships being so close to Okoboji that I wrote email #11 and asked why this was the case. One of the responses from a board member (whom I know is a great guy) was “It may not seem like it, but we do try to be very accommodating with Okoboji.“ I couldn’t stop laughing and might have had to go to the hospital with a laughing fit if it wasn’t such a condescending comment considering the only way they could be LESS accommodating was if they were to have their state championships on the same weekend as the Okoboji Open. I was overtaken by a sudden bout of impishness. I knew I shouldn't and I tried to hide my mouse, but in the end I couldn't resist and I hit the little ‘Reply All’ button to send my observation which was quite possibly the best one-liner ever written in a chain of chess emails. This prompted a reply that the original comment was the 'honest truth' and I know that it was which to me is a sad commentary on the current state of said organization.

  As I was looking through the En Passant magazine with the unauthorized photograph from my blog on the front cover, I noticed that the inside back cover had an absentee ballot for the upcoming IASCA elections that would be held during the state championship tournament. I haven’t voted in an IASCA election since the time my absentee ballot (among others) was disallowed because I gave it to a board member instead of mailing it to the IASCA secretary (I would note that this had been an accepted although illegal practice for many years). I did notice that the only people who were running for election were people who already held an IASCA office. This made me curious and I searched the IASCA websites and the previous state magazines for any call for nominations. There were none that I could find and while I’m sure there is no rule requiring a call for nominations not calling for them is certainly a way to promote a ‘lack of discourse’, although sometimes it is as easy to be elected to the board as showing up at the annual meeting and raising your hand. In any event, only a policy wonk would have been able to figure out how to get on the IASCA ballot that was printed in the magazine and it's hard enough to get volunteers without making it as easy as possible to get involved.

  I have a lot of respect for and enjoy the company of all but one of the IASCA board members and I understand that volunteer work is oftentimes a thankless task, but there is something about their decision making process that makes everyone who isn’t part of the ‘crowd’ get the short end of the stick. I've served on the board and I’m sure they feel like they are being unfairly criticized for being willing to serve and I regret that my comments might sting a bit but I also see a group whose idea of working together is having their own way and letting everyone else work around them. In the next half-dozen or so emails there was a serious discussion about cutting a little space out for Jodene's (IASCA sanctioned) tournament and the IASCA president made a sizable donation to her so maybe my time at the 'email firing range' was well spent.

  Last week (before all the emails hit the fan) I wrote to the three officers of the IASCA (including the editor of the En Passant) to let them know that the cover photo of the latest issue of their magazine was taken from my blog without permission or credit and I asked how we could resolve this situation of unauthorized use. I got an email the next day from the editor telling me that he was sorry but he didn’t get the picture from my blog and didn’t know the picture was from my blog. He did offer to give me credit for the picture in the next edition of the magazine. That sounded OK except credit is not the same as permission. The information of where the picture came from was not volunteered or asked for but George Eichhorn is a former state representative and a statewide figure. If you Google him you can get a lot of pictures (here are the pictures with the one that was used highlighted) including 2 from my blog and they all say ‘Images may be subject to copyright’ when you click on them.

  I didn't need a pound of flesh, but I felt I needed something for the use of my picture. When I made the decision last May to not advertise my youth tournaments on the IASCA website, the president of the organization wrote to me to ask that I put them back on so people in the Des Moines area who looked on the IASCA website would find my tournaments. I suggested that he put a link to my chess website on the IASCA site and my tournaments could be found that way. The President said he would take care of it as soon as he got access to the site. It never happened. Did the President forget about it, make a halfhearted effort, or was he just talking? Probably a little of all three and I'll never know for sure but this past week I told the IASCA officers that if they would put a link to my blog and chess website on the IASCA site, I’d consider the matter closed. The links were up the next day and I sent along an email giving my ‘permission’ to use my picture on the cover of the magazine. And to me the matter is closed except for my writing about it since it has a surrealness that makes for good storytelling in the cautionary vein of the shoe store customer of mine who always bragged that he was an IT professional because he worked for IBM while I was a small-company programming hack -- but he never backed up his data and lost his entire mailing list when his computer crashed.

  I mentioned how I handled the picture situation at the Marshalltown Chess Club. They were a great group of men and women to ask because their lack of dealings with the IASCA give them an an unbiased perspective. One person said I handled it just right, another said I should have sued or gotten money, and another said it was no big deal and I shouldn’t have wasted my time. Someone else said that my links would probably be taken off the website in a short time and everyone thought that the magazine editor grabbed the picture from my blog and never thought I would recognize a picture from over a year and a half ago. I admit that that feat is pretty impressive and am wondering if massive coconut juice consumption leads to enhanced memory capabilities. I’m pretty comfortable with how I handled the situation and if time shows that I was hoodwinked I’m sure time will also provide another opportunity and if nothing else I have a great topic for my next CJA column on blogging.