Normally I only shave on Friday mornings before I go to teach chess at St. Francis but I had cancelled chess club because it was the weekend of the parish auction and there weren’t going to be any tables and chairs available for chess. I was looking pretty scruffy and I wanted to be clean cut for the tournament so I broke out a brand new BIC razor from its package and started to hack away at 10 days of beard. I don’t whether it was the tiredness or the newness of the razor or both but in the process of shaving I proceeded to slice away enough of my face that I could be an extra in a chain saw massacre movie so if you know of anyone that is making a chain saw massacre movie in the next week or two please pass my name around.
While Kathy and I were taking the beagles to the Jiffy in single digit temperatures, my face stopped bleeding but the very light snowflakes glittering in the night air started getting thicker and thicker as we arrived. I got my coffee and beef sticks and paid Vince my $2.06. When Vince saw my face he said “You should sharpen your lawnmower before you shave with it, Hank!” I thanked him for his advice, fed the beef sticks to Daisy and Baxter, and Kathy and I made our way in the ever thickening snow back home.
When someone wrote that Yogi Berra was ugly he replied “It don’t matter if you’re ugly in this racket. All you have to do is hit the ball and I never saw anybody hit one with his face” and the same could be said about directing a tournament with enough cuts on your face to start a blood bank so I stopped worrying about whether people would think I lost a fight with an electric mixer and started thinking about the tournament. The snow on the ground was a more serious matter since all but a handful of the players were traveling anywhere from 40 to 300 miles to get to the tournament. I only had three blocks to travel so I checked my email for the last time (I would have no internet at the Salvation Army building) and slid the three blocks over to the Salvation Army building at 8 to get ready for the tournament’s 10am start time.
I had a small group of Marshalltown players that I knew would be there and Will Liang emailed me to let me know that he and his four children had made it but other than that I had no idea how many people the weather would keep away from the tournament. A few minutes after nine I had my first player arrive: Joey Kelly from Kansas. Joey’s dad Mike said they had driven four hours and all the roads he went on had one lane clear and the traffic was going a little less than the speed limit so I stopped worrying about the weather. Tim had asked for the players to arrive at 9:30 so even though I got a few calls from players saying they were running late and one cancellation the tournament started right on time.
A few minutes before the tournament started Major Paul Fleeman arrived. Major Fleeman is the district commander of the Salvation Army for Iowa and Nebraska and is also a chess player and a chess blogger who wrote a series about comparing correct chess play and Christianity called ‘Life Lessons From Chess’. I had invited Major Paul to attend the tournament and maybe even play. When he arrived I took him around to introduce him to Tim and Bethany Carson (who recently wrote her own blog post comparing bughouse chess principles to Christianity. Paul wanted to meet Awonder Liang but the 10 year world champion was getting ready to play so I introduced him to his father Will and they chatted for a bit. Major Paul thinks chess is a great activity for both kids and adults and was so taken by the sight of 40+ chess players he called the Marshalltown Majors Ben and Beth Stillwell to come over to the building and check out the action and stayed around to watch most of the first round before leaving for other meetings he had scheduled for the day.
This was such an interesting day and tournament that I could probably write for three months about it but I’ll limit myself to two or three posts. One thing that struck me the most was that there so many players who I first met years and years ago when they were just kids and here they were all grown up and playing chess in Marshalltown. It was brought back a flood of memories and was almost like being in a time warp.
Years and years ago Iowa’s high school championship was a 2-stage affair – first there was a qualifying tournament to determine the top six high school players who would play in a round robin with the winner being the high school champion who would represent the state in a National tournament of High School champions. Ten years ago the qualifying tournament would have dozens of players and being in the top six was a big deal but as time went on it was difficult to get six players to the qualifying tournament so the round robin went away and the championship became a single day. In 2006 the organizer of the round robin went into radio silence and as the serving state scholastic director I piggybacked the round robin onto the State Championships in Grinnell. Only four qualifiers were willing to play so I made the tournament a double round robin over two days. Two of the players were Jeremy Madison and Daniel Brashaw.
Daniel (he went by Dan then) was always the strongest player for his age in the state. He is two years older than my oldest son Matt and they would play in a lot of the same tournaments and had epic battles for the High School Championship (Daniel winning in 2008 and Matt in 2009). During these and other tournaments I got the chance to get to know Daniel and his mom Jeanette. I got along real good with both of them because we’re all pretty direct people that say what we think. I remember Daniel watching me play a blitz game where I gave up a piece for an attack that didn’t work. After the game Daniel was almost laughing as he said “You gave up a piece to give ONE CHECK”. I wasn’t especially pleased at the time but I knew the teenager was right and I always tried since to get more than ONE CHECK when I give up a piece. Daniel hadn’t played in Marshalltown since the 2007 High School Championships but in the meantime he started and finished his studies at the University of Iowa. After only playing in a handful of tournaments each year Daniel started playing more frequently in 2012 and is now the state chess champion. We got to talk quite a bit on Saturday and he has the same sharp memory and fun-loving self-confidence. He asked me if I had still had the pictures of him eating a Sub City sub at the 2007 Marshalltown tournament and I did still have the pictures of Dan wolfing down this giant sub during a game! On Saturday, Daniel insisted on playing a game in the chess.com tournament and it didn’t matter to him that he was playing Tim Mc Entee in the expert section so I just paired him up and he spent the next hour walking between rooms playing two games at once. I offered to put him in the Reserve section so he could play three games at once until he pointed out that he was rated too high to be in that section. Daniel won his chess.com game and lost to Tim but he had the same fun loving attitude after the games that he had before.
The many looks of Jeremy Madison.
If you look closely you can see Dan Brashaw and his Sub City sandwich!
Aaron Anderson(l) and Andrew Smith (r) - The team picture is from the 2005 High School team championships.
Another pair of players in the Reserve was Tim Carson and his daughter Bethany. I first met the Carsons (there are 6 including mom Betty and chldren Daniel, Charity, and Sarah Faith) when I ran an AmericInn tournament in Grundy Center in the fall of 2003. They started coming to my chess club in Marshalltown shortly thereafter and in 2006 Bethany played in her first rated tournament in Marshalltown when I hosted the state Girls Championship. Bethany finished second that year but went on to win the title five times and almost beat Matt for the High School championship in 2011. Bethany is not only a champion chess player – she is a great writer who writes for truthfulpolitics.com as well as her own blog, Liberty or Death. I consider Bethany’s father Tim a friend and when he says something I listen carefully. When I was running youth chess tournaments at the Golden Teapot in West Des Moines half a decade ago, Tim mentioned that while he liked the tournaments for his children it wasn’t much fun for him because he wanted to play also. So at my next tournament at the Teapot in May of 2007 I had what I believe to be the first parents and friends tournament ever held in Iowa and I have offered one in every youth tournament I’ve ever run since.
Tim Carson likes watching his children play chess but he likes playing just as much himself (that goes for Ping-Pong too!).
When I first started running scholastic tournaments one player that I could always count on to attend was Kushan Tyagi from Ames. His brother Nirvan is Matt’s age and they would have an annual battle in the state grades championship but while Nirvan would only play in the official state scholastic tournaments, Kushan really loved chess and his parents would take him anywhere and everywhere to get games in. He played in almost all my Golden Teapot tournaments and had the bad (or good) fortune to play the top seed in the last round of almost every one of them for a chance at first place. It was just the luck of the draw but Kushan never hesitated to let me know about it. I don’t think he won even one of those last round teapot matchups but he kept coming back to play which told me he was going to be a really great player since I do believe that in the words of the prophet Rocky Balboa “It’s not how hard you hit…It’s how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward…cuz that’s how winning’s done!”. I’ve seen a lot of young players that get off to great starts in competitive chess but are kind of like bicycles in that they are easily knocked off balance by a bump in the road and fall and fall down hard while Kushan was more like an all-terrain vehicle that can handle any road conditions. Combine that mentality with supportive parents and a lot of brains and chess ability and you have the makings of a champion which Kushan has become. He is the state high school champ three years running and came with a hair’s breadth of winning the state championship as an eighth grader in 2011. In the Expert Tournament on Saturday he tied for first. I didn’t get to talk to Kushan very much on Saturday but I did get to spend some time talking with Akhilesh, with whom I’ve had many long conversations at tournaments while our kids were competing. Akhilesh is savviest traveler I know and whenever we found ourselves at the same tournament he always seemed to pay half of what I paid for a room. We got to spend some time talking and Akhilesh was nice enough to help me put away a lot of the tables after the Reserve tournament ended. Kushan hadn’t played in Marshalltown in three years and as long as I’ve known him he would write down ‘No Idea’ in the part of the scoresheet reserved for marking down what opening was played (a rarely if ever used part of the scoresheet). After his first game ended I made it a point to look at Kushan’s scoresheet to see what he wrote in the box and sure enough it said ‘No Idea’.
It was an amazing tournament for a lot of reasons and I’ll get into some of them next week but having said that it was so cool to see so many of the players I’ve known for years and who I consider friends playing in Marshalltown after 3 or 5 or 7 years I wanted to make sure I got it written down before the good memories of the weekend and the past got washed away by the grind of daily living.
2 comments:
The chess.com Team Iowa folks were very excited to meet 'officially' at your tournament. Thank you again for the extra work you did hosting us on this busy day.
One of our teammates was coming from west on Hwy 30 and going to stop along the way in Ames to pick up another player, but on his way down the exit ramp, his SUV hit a light pole, which fell on his vehicle and crumpled the hood and smashed his windshield.
He was stuck, and a tow ban prevented him from getting his car unstuck for over 4 hours; he killed the time by calling the guy he was going to pick up who came to his rescue, and they waited for the tow trucks assistance by playing guitar and chess.
It was an unfortunate situation but we are very thankful he was physically unharmed. It goes to show you that chess is something that people will risk life and limb to participate in. This is truly a game of passion and friendship with life-long stories and adventures.
Hi Bentoons,
I'm glad no one got hurt in the accident and was very surprised that almost everyone who said they were going to show up showed up. It was a busy day but also an incredible one and the chess.com group had a big part in making it an incredible tournament day!
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