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Turkey Open 2025

Turkey Open 2025

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Sometimes I feel as if the older I get, the less I understand. This goes for life and for chess. For instance, at the Turkey Open last weekend I felt great and very clear-headed, but I managed to score only 2.5 points and will see my rating plummet even closer to its floor. It's a mystery to me, but it's also a mystery how my rating ever got so high in the first place when considering my casual approach to the game. I just play, and whatever happens just happens. With that sort of approach I have to take the bad with the good and enjoy the ride, which I surely did. It was a pleasure seeing so many players converge on Missoula in one of our biggest tournaments ever (almost 60 players). I also had the opportunity to play against a grandmaster in a rated game for only the second time in my life, and it was in the first round! Better yet, I played one of my favorite openings, the Budapest, and learned how to improve it for future use (yes, I lost).

With a score of zero going into the second round, and with my commitment to taking a bye in the third round to have a nice dinner, I knew that my chances of doing well in the tournament were rapidly diminishing. It's oddly comforting when there's little hope, so I sat down with the goal of enjoying this game as much as possible. My opponent was a friendly, older gentleman who expressed his renewed enthusiasm for chess and claimed to be studying it regularly. He allowed me to play in a way that I relish, which is to lock up the board and focus like a laser on a single point (rather than blast it open like Pandora's Box and deal with all the threats coming out of it). 

In the fourth round on Sunday morning I confronted Ross Westfall, a talented young man who scored a nice win against former state champion James Skovron the previous month. I've played against Ross on numerous occasions, sometimes in person and other times online, and I know him to be somewhat tactical in his approach. Naturally, I chose a boring opening devoid of most tactics, the Philidor. Ross didn't let that stop him from mounting a wild attack that almost worked but fizzled out after the loss of two pieces.

In the final round I was paired with someone I've played many times and beaten every one of those times, Michael Muller, who is a good player but has had a bad string of luck against me. All that changed in this game, as I started strong but soon went completely blind and overlooked a wave of excellent moves he could and did make to hand me a painful loss. With no grand prix points to show for the tournament, and with an even lower rating, I'm the turkey again.