Congratulations!

My apologies for introducing myself, since we’ve played in the same tournaments - I’m in the B section and played in the Western States and scored 4.5/6 - I hope to make my push to 1800 next year!

Please let me know if there are going to be any upcoming tournaments in Santa Cruz! I grew up in Salinas and played at the Monterey Chess Center back in the 1980s! After a hiatus due to work and law school, I finally returned to tournament play while balancing work at Townsend and Townsend and Crew, LLP.

I had a game against Pablo Pena when I was in high school at the Monterey Chess Center - he had me busted and I got him on a dumb cheapo for my first win against and expert. I ended up 3-1 in that tournament. What is your email address - I’ll send the pgn to you:)

Hopefully our paths will cross in the Bay Area.

Keep up the great work with the blog! Perhaps you can set something up on Facebook?

Best regards,

Cesar

I hate to be nit picky, and perhaps you’re purposefully using a more recent reference, but the “do or do not” quote above is one I would have attributed to Yoda lecturing Luke Skywalker in “Empire Strikes Back” when Luke doubted the Force could lift the sunken X-wing fighter out of the swamp.

I only helped relieve one demo board person for four hours in round 3 and I post info on the website. I’m afraid my retreat from chess has been on many fronts including tournament directing, club organizing, and games bulletin editing. The task goes to my friend Grant this year with me in a technical advisory role.

Looking forward to your game annotations.

Thanks for the correction. I should’ve known that, but when I wrote this entry I was going on the basis of the prize distribution that was posted on the walls, which didn’t explain about the $100.

Were you helping with the tournament this year? I didn’t see you there. If you’re still on sabbatical, who is going to put together the games bulletin?

I wanted to correct one fact, though. The G/10 playoff for first and second is over a stake of $100. The prizes are distributed normally except with $100 deducted from the top pool of cash. So Ibragimov and Khachiyan would each get $2950 before the playoff and Khachiyan would get an extra $100 for first. At least that’s how I think it gets done. But I’m certain that the stake isn’t more than $100.