Corvallis MLK Jr Day Open
This year Dan Dalthorp started off by organizing the Corvallis MLK Jr Open Tournament & Scholastic Tournament. It had a much stronger turn out than last year, which was exciting. I guess you can find the Field of Dreams mantra applicable. "If you build it they will come." Nick Raptis and Steve Breckenridge came down from Portland. Corey Russell came up from Grants Pass (Medford?). And we had a couple players from the coast. MLK day was the only snowy day in Corvallis this winter, so I was worried turn out would be bad, but strong field and I think 12 boards in the open section.
The time control was G/45 with 5 second delay. Which is fast enough you can quickly get low on time, and slow enough you can think about most of your moves.
I played pretty poorly and scored accordingly. 2/5. I've looked at this games by myself, and am in a bit too much of a hurry to put much detail into the games here. But it is nice for me to have them all online and easy to look at, so these blogs are partially for my own archives, so too bad for you if you are upset that I don't include more commentary (this time).
Round 1 was against Moshe Rachmann (I spelled his name wrong). He's a strong A player from Israel who played in the Corvallis/Eugene match a few months earlier for Eugene. His rating was provisional because of the small number of games he has played since coming to the US.
A bad start- a faulty plan, poor development, and missing a simple tactic. And good play by my opponent.
I don't remember my 2nd round opponent that well, he was a teenager named Jack.
So now I was 0-1-2. A pretty disappointing start. But the joy of Swiss is that the worse you do, the worse your opponents are doing. Round 4 I was paired against Lisa, one of the TDs - she is heavily involved in scholastic chess also.
