WA Junior Open 2016

It was the day after the end of the Seattle City Championship, or the day I beat Matthew Hwang. I was going to play in another tournament. Except this time, it was a non-SCC one. The venue was Interlake High School(One of the top 5 high school in WA) in Bellevue.

There were 2 types of sections (scholastic and uscf) and 7 sections (5 scholastic and 2 uscf). In the uscf sections (I won't talk about scholastic), NW rating was used to determine placement, while uscf was to determine paring. At 1614 NW, Your's Truly played in the open section. 

This time, there were 5 people tied for 1st place in the open section, Nikita Chetrari(2302-2298 USCF), Anthony He(2134-2135 USCF), Neo Olin(2019-2028), Arjun Thomas(1898-1922), and Petar Spasic(1585-1656). An armageddon styled playoff was to determine who was the event champion (who would get seeded into this year's state premier chamionship and next year's WA Jr. Closed). The winner of the playoff was (drumroll...) Anthony He. For his victory, he is seeded into the WA state premier championship, and the 2017 Jr. Closed.

In the tournament, there are a few honorable mentions of upsets. In the 1st round, Minda Chen (1377-1532) upset Masayuki Nagase(2019-2000). In the later rounds, Minda beat Addison Lee(1715-1666), drew Trevor Jung(1659-1666), and lost only to Vikram Ramasamy(2009-2010), having an accumalative score of 2.5/4, and upping her rating by 155 points! In contrast, Your's Truly(1614-1580 NW, 1158-1124 USCF) crashed and stumbled throughout the tournament posting only one last round win against an 800 USCF. 

After this round, people in the scholastic sections were already getting lunch. The open sections had to wait because the next round was 11:45 AM. My game was one of the 1st to finish in open/U1600 NW. However, there was only 1 box of pizza left.

After eating lunch, I had to wait approx. 3 hours just for the next round to start. Another notable upset took place during that round. Kenny Chen(758-946) beat Surya Gorantla(1530-1474)(who also stumbled) having a 772 point upset!

Anyways, on to the 3rd round.

The final round only had 2 players with scores of 0.0, Your's Truly, and Lorenzo Patton(815-804). This is why I played him in the last round. I beat him, marking that I finally won a game.

I was disappointed to have a shambling 1 point score because both of my ratings went down after my Matthew Hwang win. But I played in open, so I wasn't as surprised.