Roger That

Roger Gotschall (1938-2016) on the left awarding Tim McEntee his 2008 Iowa Chess Championship trophy and on the right receiving some Italian sausage with me at the Marshalltown Salvation Army in 2011. Even into his 70's Roger had a full head of hair that made me wonder why he ever wore a hat.

  It was a cold Saturday in January of 2002 that warmed up enough to have me make a spur of the moment decision to take my two children (5 year old Ben and 8 year old Matt) 40 miles west to Ames, Iowa so they could play in a chess tournament. It was their 4th tournament. I’d never been to Ames before and had a little trouble finding the school but arrived with a half hour to spare. This was the days before readily available internet and I had my cash and sons’ membership cards in hand. I found the tournament director and handed over the boys’ membership cards and cash. The tournament director asked me why I hadn’t signed up beforehand and before I could say I wasn’t planning on going if it was too cold or snowing this tournament director got real loud and angry, telling me that he was sick of people showing up at his tournaments unannounced and that from now on he wasn’t going to let latecomers play in the first round of his tournaments. I had paid an extra $10 for not pre-registering and the thought crossed my mind that I should punch this guy in the mouth but my kids were there and besides this guy was a lot bigger than me (although I was younger and I suspect faster) so I quickly got me and my kids away to get ready for the tournament. That was my first of many meetings with Roger Gotschall from Ames, Iowa who passed away last week at the age of 77.

  Since Ames was the closest town to Marshalltown that had any chess tournaments and all the chess tournaments in Ames were run by Roger we ran into each other frequently in next few years. I never got yelled at by him again but I also pre-registered for his tournaments if at all possible. One thing that was unique about Roger was that he was and is to the present time the only tournament director in Iowa to regularly hold tournaments on Sunday afternoons which is an outstanding chess tournament time for me personally and any parents or children involved in youth sports or school activities.

  In 2006 I took on the task of reviving the Iowa State’s Chess Association’s disintegrating scholastic program and got to deal with Roger on a more or less equal footing. As the coach of five scholastic chess clubs in Ames Roger rightfully wanted a lot of input into the scholastic process. We didn’t agree on everything and quite often didn’t agree on anything. Roger could be incredibly helpful like when he double checked 20 new membership forms for missing birthdates or addresses (saving me days in getting the tournament rated) and also incredibly infuriating like the time I thought he was going to schedule the high school championship tournament but he wouldn’t answer my emails even though I could see him playing on the Internet Chess Club every night.

While most of the successful scholastic teams I've observed in Iowa rode the strength of a few top talents, Roger's teams tended to rely on a deep roster of competent players that found themselves in the winners circle more often than not.

  By the end of my second year of running the scholastics Roger and I understood each other a little better and got along a lot better as well. Roger was a strict traditionalist and a believer in procedure and the chain of command. This manifested itself in ways I sometimes found silly although it gave his clubs and tournaments a rock-solid structure for decades. What Roger had that I appreciated most was that he was the genuine article. He was who he presented himself to be, an old-school guy of integrity. If I asked Roger a question I could count on a straight answer and if he didn’t want to answer a question he didn’t answer it instead of making up a lie. I suspect Roger didn’t appreciate my unconventional approach to running and publicizing tournaments but he had an appreciation of my work ethic and technical savvy as well as the rising Iowa scholastic attendance after years of decline. Whether one of my unconventional ideas worked out well or poorly Roger would be the first (and many times only) person to let me know his approval or disapproval but always with insight into why he arrived at his decision.

  Roger was an engineer by trade. I later learned when working with dozens of engineers at Fischer Controls that engineers perform their job by following the physical laws. For example, a valve made of a certain metal that has to transport a specific liquid at a particular pressure must have thickness and couplings and screws within certain tolerances or else it won’t function properly without exception. In the engineering world there is little to no room for negotiation of physical law. And Roger was like that in running his chess clubs and tournaments – there was a proper way to do things and little to no room for negotiation. As a self-taught software programmer I have been trained to live in a world of chaos. I can write a great program that does exactly what the user wants it to do but it may stop working because some anti-virus program refuses to let my program write to the hard drive or an operating system change hides the printer information or serial port or the computer just goes haywire and makes my program go haywire also. And I’m like that in running tournaments – I expect chaotic things to happen that I have no control over and just try to be flexible so I can stay afloat if a tidal wave hits.

  Roger and I were such polar opposites that it naturally took us awhile to get each other but I believe we respected each other a lot. I can offer proof of my respect by noting that since 2010 I have played in one Iowa tournament that wasn’t run by me or Roger. I infer Roger’s respect by noting that 7 of the 9 Iowa tournaments since 2010 that Roger played in that he didn’t run were my Thursday Night blitz tournaments. When I came to one of Roger’s CyChess tournaments or Roger came to Marshalltown to play in a blitz tournament I would say ‘Hi Roger’ and Roger would say ‘Hello, Mr. Anzis’ (he did always call me Hank after the initial 'Mr' greeting). Roger had a deep bass voice and he spoke slowly with grave intonations and Pinteresque pauses that made you think we were discussing matters of world importance instead of the Cyclone's shooting guard or whether a pawn belonged on a6 or a5 in a particular position. Roger's voice and cadence was so distinctive I was able to imitate it well enough to be able do a one-man stage performance although I would have needed to manufacture a full head of hair and get some inserts for my shoes to properly play the part.

  There were a couple of ways where Roger and I were alike, but even in our similarities we were dissimilar. I am a die hard Yankee fan (the most successful American League team) while Roger was devoted to the St. Louis Cardinals which is the most successful of all the National League teams and all baseball teams except for the Yankees. Our chess styles were opposites but similar in that they are opposites of our personalities. I accept chaos and unpredictable change as a given but over the chess board I like the simplest positions possible and will go to great lengths to avoid complications. Roger was a traditionalist in every sense of the word but over the board loved to sacrifice material and play for the attack and wild positions where the normal guidelines of chess are almost useless. We played four times in tournament chess: two Marshalltown blitz games, a 45 minute game in Urbandale in 2008, and last July in a chess.com online blitz tournament. By the luck of the draw I had White in all four games. All our games followed a familiar pattern of Roger getting a better position before making a big mistake to allow me a technical win. Roger had a lot of chess knowledge, won his section at the 2004 U.S. Open, and has had a number of very instructive winning middle game attacks and endings. I don’t know if the mistakes were him trying to make something happen against my simplistic play or part of old age since I didn’t play him as a younger man but he was a dangerous opponent who scored a lot of upsets and could beat anyone if he was on.

In his later years Roger's constant companion was Cypher the Boston Terrier. Someday they will be walking together again...

  One thing Roger and I had unconditionally in common was a love of dogs. Roger read my blog and knew all about my beagles Daisy and Baxter. In 2011 Roger showed up to play blitz in Marshalltown on a Thursday night and was beaming like a little kid when he told me he had gotten a dog. He then told me his dog was named Cypher and that Cypher was in his car waiting for the tournament to finish! It wasn't an especially hot or cold day but I told Roger to bring Cypher in to the chess club since the Salvation Army majors had a dog that had run of the facility and dogs were not uncommon in the building. Roger brought Cypher in and I have to say Cypher was the best-behaved dog I’ve ever seen. He sat down at Roger’s side and never made a sound. Cypher came with Roger to Marshalltown two other times and I saw Cyper in Ames whenever I played there.

  Roger and I were more chess friends than friends although more than casual acquaintances. I enjoyed our occasional encounters once I got past our rough beginning. I haven’t seen him since 2012 when he stopped his CyChess Sunday tournaments and I stopped my Thursday night blitz tournaments. I’m glad I got to know Roger and I’m better off for knowing him. Hopefully we’ll have another chance to play chess someday and when we do I imagine it will be his turn to have the White pieces.

Memorability

  Based on the responses I’ve received and my own eyes, the Expert Open, Broken Pawn Reserve, and chess.com meet-up chess tournament in Marshalltown last week was so successful I’d put it on the top shelf with the Okoboji Open among the best and most memorable tournaments I’ve ever been part of. I think I did close to as a flawless job as tournament director as I've ever done. There were no mistakes with the parings, an even number of players in every section for every round, the rooms were arranged with enough space for the players, and except for starting the tournament with one player still en route and losing ten minutes off his clock there was no controversies and I didn’t have a difficult decision all day.

It was a great tournament and a successful day, but if I ever get a swelled head about it just mention this scoresheet on the left from the Broken 'Arrow' Reserve...

  A large part of the reason that everything ran so smoothly is that tournament organizer Tim Mc Entee and I have a good working relationship and our styles complement each other. Tim knew what kind of tournament he wanted to attract the expert and higher level players and I didn’t get in the way by making suggestions so I could have my fingers in the process. I trust Tim’s judgment and know he’s been organizing these elite types of tournaments for over ten years. When I offered the idea of having a reserve tournament for non-experts (which was meant for traveling companions), Tim knew I wouldn’t let the side tournament affect the playing conditions for the experts and masters (by putting everyone in one room, for example) or else he would have asked me not to have it.

  There’s also some planning involved in having a smooth tournament. For example, we arranged to have a house player for the expert section to ensure an even number of players and I imposed on Jon McCord from the Marshalltown Chess Club (who has been coming to club for over 12 years) to be the house player in the reserve and chess.com sections. Jon was the perfect house player for those sections because while he can play with anyone below the expert level he is equally happy to hang around and watch all the games. Kathy and I arranged the playing rooms the night before so on the tournament day the only thing I needed to do was put tables and chairs in the hallways for parents to hang out and players to go over their games after they ended.

Most tournaments in Marshalltown end up being special (click here for the account of my last one), but when the World 10-year old champion Awonder Liang(l) and the Team Iowa group from chess.com (admins Sir Benjamin, Spacebux, and Merlin-Pendragon are shown on the right) have a meet-up, you have a truly memorable occasion.

  I've run plenty of smooth tournaments but for a tournament to be memorable there's probably going to be some luck involved and this tournament got lucky on a number of counts. First, we lucked into the chess.com Team Iowa group wanting to have a meet-up dinner and/or tournament and willing to have it with the reserve tournament. Not only did it open up a new avenue of players, it gave me an unrated section which was perfect for some of the players from my club who didn’t have USCF memberships or the ten dollars for the reserve entry or the desire to play in a rated tournament. Ben Tessman and the rest of the chess.com guys were great to have around and since a lot of the players in the other sections were also chess.com members it gave a commonality between the sections that wouldn't have been there otherwise.

  Another lucky break came 10 days before the tournament when Will Liang told Tim and I he wanted to bring his son Awonder to play in the tournament. I wrote about Awonder at length when was at Okoboji last April. At that point he was the World age 8 and under champion and in December he successfully defended his title and is now the World age 10 and under champion. His participation made the tournament a lot more interesting but the lucky part was that since we were having the reserve tournament Will’s three other children were able to come and play. They all had a great time playing chess and hanging out with the other teenagers and younger children that were playing in the reserve tournament and all the players got a kick out of how pleasant and affable the whole Liang family was.

  I don’t know if having the ten year old world champion at the tournament attracted a lot of players but I know it got the Marshalltown chess players pretty hopped up to come and see him in action. Chris used to come to my club when his mom worked at the Salvation Army and he’d play chess while she was working. When his mom changed jobs eight years ago Chris stopped coming to club but returned two months ago because he’d been playing chess with his fiancée’s 12 year old son and caught the chess bug. Chris played in the chess.com tournament but when it ended at 6 he stuck around to watch Awonder’s last game against Rob Reynolds. The game was a fighting draw that lasted until 10:30 at night and Chris stuck around to watch every move. There's an 11 year old player that comes to club but his family doesn’t have a car so he walks. If the Salvation Army building was more than the three blocks away that it is from his house I doubt we would have ever have met. So how cool was it for this kid whose family doesn’t have a car and walks to chess club to be playing in the same building with the best 10 year old player in the world? Pretty cool if you ask me and I know all the Marshalltown players felt it was pretty cool having this champion playing chess in the same building where we have our club every week.

  I’ve seen Awonder Liang play in two tournaments (three if you count the 2009 US Open where I played his brother Adream in the last round) and the thing that strikes me most is he is a fighter who was able to battle his way out of inferior positions in Marshalltown just as he did in Okoboji. I don't know what makes a prodigy or world champion but I find Awonder's fighting spirit and resourcefulness more impressive than if he was some sort of opening book automaton that gains an advantage out of the opening and presses it home for his victories. Will pointed out after the tournament that playing three long games in one day against strong players is a brutal schedule especially for a young player but Awonder went through almost 10 hours of chess only surrendering a final round draw en route to a first place tie. I don’t know what the future holds for this young player but I know almost all the players at the tournament will be following his progress and wishing for his success and won’t soon forget playing with the world champion and his family.

  Among chess players, the predominant images when it comes to chess prodigies is either the Polgar sisters who were trained to be chess masters from a young age by their father or the insular Bobby Fisher who seemed to only live for chess. The Liangs seem like a normal family who just happen to have a super chess talent as one of their members and have embraced that responsibility. I tried to treat him like the rest of the chess players but I fell short when Andrew Potter from the local paper came and wanted a picture of Awonder in front of a board for his story (You can read it here). The only problem was that Andrew came in between rounds so Awonder wasn't at the board. Will had Awonder pose at a chessboard that we set up but he didn’t seem too happy about it and I wasn’t either although I suppose it comes with the territory of being a world champion.

  I have one special memory of the tournament from after it ended. Tim was helping me put away the tables and setting up the rooms for the next day's services and all the Liangs were helping. I had moved two large round tables from the meeting room where the experts were playing over to the lobby where the parents were hanging out. I folded up one of these tables and was rolling it on its edge over to the meeting room. Adream and Awonder were fascinated by the sight of me rolling this five foot round table on its edge and wanted to try it. I didn’t think too much of it since Adream is pretty big and seemed well able to handle the table. We put the table on edge, folded it up, and I watched them roll the table through the hallway. Then I saw the table start to wobble one way and then the other and Awonder was on one side of the wobble. I had visions of the next issue of Chess Life with the headline ‘World Champion injured in Marshalltown’ and ran over to steady the table saying ‘Sorry guys, this isn’t the way you want to get on cover of Chess Life!’ They thought that was pretty funny and started laughing and if Awonder Liang becomes THE world champion I am going to claim some of the credit for not letting this big round table in Marshalltown, Iowa fall on him when he was ten years old.

  Aside from luck and stories to tell a big thing that makes a tournament or event memorable is when people step up and invest their unique talents in unexpected ways. Cliff Yates’ wife works at the Salvation Army and Cliff is a chess player who came to my club once ten years ago. Cliff keeps up with chess and knew about the tournament and decided to get a USCF membership and play in the reserve section after a 15 year hiatus from tournament chess. Cliff is also a photographer and brought his camera (which had at least a three foot lens). After his games, Cliff took pictures of the players and that night assembled this incredible video of the tournament. I’ve never seen anything like it and think Cliff could make a living making videos of chess tournaments. His video captured the main thing of what made this tournament so memorable - a great bunch of people getting together having a good time at a chess tournament!

The first thing my wife told me when she saw this video was 'Where are you?' and then Cliff told me on Thursday that he wished he included a picture of me in the video. I told them both the same thing - 'I'm all over it'.

Reelin' In The Years

  I tried to get to bed last Friday but tossed and turned all night anticipating the next day’s three chess tournaments at the Salvation Army: the $1150 Expert Open I was directing for Tim McEntee, the Reserve tournament for non-experts which I named the Broken Pawn Reserve, and the meet-up tournament I offered to host for the chess.com Team Iowa group. I wrote about how rare it is for plans to work out last week but the one thing I did not plan on was not getting much sleep before I rolled out of bed at 4:00 to take Daisy and Baxter on their beef stick walk to the Jiffy.

  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.

Dan Brashaw through the years.

  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!

  Jeremy Madison is almost Daniel’s chessic polar opposite. While Dan was always the best for his age, Jeremy didn’t start playing in tournaments until he was in High School and had to climb up the ladder to become one of the best scholastic players in the state. He went to many of the same tournaments as Matt and I got to spend a lot of hours outside the playing halls of chess tournaments with his parents Steve and Diane. Jeremy always struck me as pretty shy but he knew how to stick up for himself also. In 2005 he missed out on being in the final six for the High School championship by the slimmest of tiebreak margins and went on the message board decrying the process by saying he lost out on a ‘coin flip’ which was metaphorically if not factually correct. This ruffled just a few feathers but Jeremy stuck to his guns and it got the people talking about and reforming the process. Jeremy has had epic battles over the board with Matt, Ben, myself, and Dan Brashaw for that matter and won the Iowa State Fair speed chess championship in 2007. After graduating from college, Jeremy found himself working in Wisconsin and didn’t play in a chess tournament for a year and half. Since his comeback he attained the expert rating and I barely got a chance to talk to him because his games are hardly ever the first to finish and he hardly ever left the tournament room where he was one of the four players to not have a loss.

Aaron Anderson(l) and Andrew Smith (r) - The team picture is from the 2005 High School team championships.

  While the experts were battling it out, two of the Marshalltown High School chess legends from the past decade were ten feet over in the reserve section. I wrote about Aaron Anderson and Andrew Smith at length in my Christmas post so I won’t belabor the point except to say that except for Andrew heading to Ankeny for a quad in 2010 and a handful of my blitz tournaments the last time these two played in a rated tournament was when the three of us and Jaleb Jay headed to Des Moines in 2008. We had a great time playing and when I lost to John Herr in the last round I was harassed all the way home by being asked ‘How could you lose to HER?’ It was a fun day with a fellow group of chess players and I was glad to see these two playing again. Aaron was lights out and won his last three games after losing to Edin (NOT EDDIE as I learned during last years’ Time Odds Blitz tournaments), the top ranked player in the first round while Andrew is working the third shift and arrived halfway through the tournament after getting his sleep, winning both his games to leave these two friends with a combined 5-1 mark.

Bethany Carson - A perennial champion.

  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!).

  The Golden Teapot had a ping-pong table and I played Tim a few times in between rounds at the tournaments I held there. On Saturday, Tim asked me if there was a ping-pong table in the Salvation Army building and I said I believed there was one in the gym. Then Tim pulled out a pair of paddles and a handful of balls out of his coat pocket and asked me if I wanted to play. After the reserve tournament ended us two 50+ year old men snuck into the gym like a couple of 8 year olds and turned the lights on. The gym wasn’t heated so it was freezing but we headed over to the stage and moved this incredibly heavy pool table to the middle of the stage and put the ping pong table top over the pool table and proceeded to play ping pong in the freezing cold of the gym for about 45 minutes. It didn’t matter that we couldn’t find a net – we were having a blast just batting the ball back and forth. I think Tim got the better of me but I gave it my best shot and it’s lucky I’m almost bald because I wouldn’t have been able to lift my arm over my head the next couple of days to comb my hair if my life depended on it! By the time we were done playing I was a sweaty mess and when we got back to the playing area people were staring at me because I looked like a piece of wet laundry that just got pulled out of the washing machine but I didn’t care because it was the most fun I had in a long, long time.

Kushan Tyagi - A testament to talent, persistence, and hard work

  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.

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 everyone 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.