2001-02-19 - 23:59:42

U.S. Chess Teams, Day Three

Even though this was technically a vacation, it was a working holiday for me. For the last three years I have collected the games from the Amateur Team East, processed them, and put them on the Internet. This job is a lot harder than it sounds. In a large tournament like the USATE, there can be over 2,500 games played. A huge number of games like that would take me MONTHS to process. Luckily (or unluckily from the point of view of the historian) only about 7% of the players actually turn in their scoresheets. This means, at best, I get about 15% of the games. Because every game should have two scoresheets, get it?

It's a lot of work, and there's more to it than just putting in the games. A lot of scoresheets are hard to read. Some have errors on them or missing moves or just plain bad handwriting. Several years of reading chess scoresheets has given me a certain expertise at parsing them out (for example, I can read them in Russian) but it is rather time consuming.

So my goal for the final day was to play my two games, collect the scoresheets, and get Lily and myself back home.

Round 5: Joe (2,200) vs. Uberhamster (1,870)

With two points out of four, our hapless team was paired up again and now I was facing a master-strength (rated over 2,200) opponent. In fifteen years of playing I've beaten several masters, but I think I can count all my victories on my hands without running out of fingers. I was not hopeful.

However I was once again pleased to see my opponent playing into a line I knew very well. It was a complicated gambit line in the French defense that was one of my favorites. My record in this line wasn’t good, but it was a fun opening to play. However, shortly after my opening knowledge ran out, my position looked dubious. I began to use up a lot of time on the clock trying to figure my way out of my difficulties. Eventually I was almost a half hour behind on the clock.

I thought I saw a clever way to activate my pieces, but he replied in a way I didn’t expect and I lost more material. However, suddenly my pieces came to life and his king looked stricken and exposed. He was forced to give back material to quell my attack, but his position was still better. My time situation was growing critical: I had less than 10 minutes to make 23 moves while he had well over a half hour.

Then, for some reason, he began to falter. He had what I felt was a winning position, but he kept making small inaccuracies that gave me hope. What's more, he was using up gobs of time.

I felt sorry for the guy. When you've been sitting and thinking for nearly four hours, sometimes your brain just fills up with goo. At the time when you need to think and move quickly, you just can't manage it. With twelve moves to go I was down to three minutes, but suddenly he only had two, then one. He made his fortieth move just as the flag on his clock fell. He thought he had made the time control, but I reminded him that it was at move FIFTY not move forty. It wouldn't have mattered anyway, he was lost on the board as well as on the clock.

So, I beat a master! Maybe I wasn't so rusty after all!

The rest of the team did not do as well. Richard on board four had managed to draw his opponent, but Harvey (Board 2) and Ken (Board 3) both lost.

Scores: Uberhamster: 4 1/2 out of 5, Team: 2 out of 5

Round 6: Uberhamster (1,870) vs. Michael (1,564)

The last round was something of an anticlimax. We played a weak college team from Queens, NY. Everyone else seemed to be struggling with their opponents, but Lady Luck smiled on me again. My opponent played a line in the French Defense (ANOTHER French! My fourth in six games!) that I thought was inferior. I quickly built up a nasty attack, and when he misplayed the defense I easily wrapped him up.

So I finished with 5 1/2 points! Not in my wildest dreams did I expect such a good result, I think my best ever in 15 years of team play. There were board prizes for those that went 6-0, but I was disqualified for those because of my first round draw. I think this might have been a good thing because I probably would have cracked under the pressure of maintaining a perfect score.

However there was a sorry tale on the other boards. Richard and Ken had already lost to their lower rated opponents and Harvey, who was still playing, looked lost too.

I had to stick around to get the games, and I watched his position slowly improve. Now, instead of being lost he was just worse off. It looked like he might draw it with difficulty. I went away to talk to Lily and when I came back, Harvey was packing up his pieces. To my astonishment Harvey had managed to win his bad position when his opponent overreached in the ending. So we managed to draw our last match, 2-2.

Final Scores: Uberhamster: 5 1/2 out of 6, Team: 2 1/2 out of 5

As far as I'm concerned, the good part of the weekend ended when I finished my last game. Things went straight downhill from there.

After our team finished, the tournament concluded quickly. I only needed one thing before I could leave: a copy of the tournament crosstable.

A crosstable is simply a list of everyone who played in the event, and who they played. This makes my job of putting in the games MUCH easier. I can check the correct spellings of the names and who they played and what their ratings are. This seems like a trivial thing, but more than a few people don’t put their names on their scoresheets. They put their initials, or just simply say "me." One guy put a frowny face as white and a happy face as black. Thanks a lot, pal!

The trouble is that for an enormous tournament like this, the crosstable runs to seventy pages. However, the tournament was completely computerized, so all they had to do was press a button and one would print out, albeit very slowly. They'd printed it out for me the previous year and they promised to do the same for me this year. No problem, or so I thought.

Lily and I were kind of hungry, but I decided to wait until I got the crosstable printout. This turned out to be a mistake. I was afraid to leave to get something to eat because once they handed out all the trophies and awards, the tournament would shut down very quickly. I had an image of coming back from dinner and finding everyone gone.

So I waited, and I waited. The tournament directors' room seemed to be in utter chaos will dozens of people wanting to know their team standings and so on. Other people wanted printouts, too.

I've never been good at being the squeaky wheel. I wanted to get the printout and get out of there, but I felt my position was at the end of the line. It had been a hard tournament and I was tired and hungry.

Finally they started printing out the crosstable. I went to tell Lily, who'd been patiently waiting in one of the smaller playing rooms nearby, that we were almost ready to go.

This turned out to be another mistake. When I got back to the tournament room they'd stopped to printout to do something else. Because there was no way to continue it, that meant that they would have to start ALL OVER AGAIN.

I was so angry, but I didn't dare to vent my feelings. These people were doing me a favor after all. I felt like bursting into tears over it. That was actually a sign that I needed food immediately. It meant that I was having a low blood sugar episode, something diabetics are liable to.

Finally, finally, with the tournament directors room nearly empty, they started my printout. But about 60% of the way through the printer stopped, its lights blinking. It was out of toner! Since all the computer stuff was packed away and nobody was willing to unpack it, that was all I was going to get. Fine. Great. Grinding my teeth I tore the old crosstable from two rounds previously off the wall. I'd have to use that for the teams on the lower boards.

In a foul mood, I went to get Lily. Our next mission: to find food.

We decided to find a place to eat on the way back, but there was a problem. It was 11:30 p.m. on the Monday night of a three day holiday weekend. Nothing was open.

I was practically crazed with low blood sugar. Not the best frame of mind to be driving in.

After exiting from the interstate in search of an all-night Burger King that didn't seem to be there, I decided to hit one of the rest areas along the Thruway in New York State. They were open 24/7, so they seemed to be the safe bet for the weary traveler.

We pulled into the first rest area we saw once we crossed the border. There were very few cars parked out front. In fact, it was as close to closed as I've ever seen one of those places. Of all the food stalls there only one was open: Dunkin' Donuts, far from my first choice for nutritious food. And it seemed to be staffed by people who didn't understand English, although this might have been my fault since I was probably growling like a bear at this point.

To cut to the chase - we had to wait in an interminable line for practically inedible overpriced food that wasn't exactly what we ordered. This didn't do anything to lighten my black mood.

Lily made the mistake of getting a cup of coffee. Actually, she wanted cocoa, but they didn't seem to understand that. She's really not a big coffee drinker, and she remedies this by adding many, many packets of cream and sugar, essentially making a vaguely coffee-flavored milkshake. Even THAT didn't seem to help this foul brew. After taking a couple of sips she just threw the damn thing out.

Our hunger somewhat abated, we hit the road again. With single minded determination I drove the rest of the way back without a break, arriving home at around 2:30 a.m. Exhausted, we just fell into bed.