2004-02-14 - 11:42 p.m.

U.S. Amateur Teams, Day One

Look, he's updating again! What's THAT mean?

Anyway, today was the start of the President's Day Weekend, and that also meant it was time for the U.S. Amateur Team East, a huge chess tournament, played annually in central New Jersey. This is something like the eighteenth straight year I've gone to this event.

Unfortunately, today also happened to be Valentine's Day, which was also the first anniversary of our engagement. Now, I ask you, what could be more romantic than taking your girlfriend to a chess tournament? Am I Rico Suave or what? Seriously, I'd cleared it with Lily beforehand and she was just happy to get out of town for a weekend since she's been working hard on her senior thesis. I also gave her a nice flower arrangement yesterday.

We got up early and piled into the car, but were not in a huge hurry. The first round didn't start until 1 p.m. and the tournament was only about 2 1/2 hours from home. The arrangement was that Lily and I would travel down together and I'd meet my other three teammates in the hotel lobby about an hour before the round. Everything went without a hitch, in fact I even spotted on of my teammates in the parking lot as we pulled in.

The plan was for us to check in at the hotel, and then go grab something to eat before the round however, it seemed to take forever to get registered, so all we had time to do was grab a (very expensive) sandwich at the concession stand outside the playing hall.

The U.S. Amateur Team East is part of four tournaments played on the same weekend - there's also a Team South, Midwest and West, too. However, the East is where it started back in 1970 and it habitually dwarfs the other three events in size. Because I'd had such a hard time getting a team together I'd assumed that attendance would be down this year, but I was dead wrong - the turnout was 276 four-player teams - a new record. As far as I know this is the biggest chess team tournament that has ever been held in the Western Hemisphere.

Round 1, Mr. Hamster (1,820) vs. Asian College Student (2,170)

This year not only was our local chess club only fielding one team, but we were fielding the weakest team that I can ever remember. My rating is currently at a low ebb, and I was playing second board. Because of how the pairings fell, we wound up playing a fairly strong college team. My opponent was a skinny kid with a very Chinese name. It made me sorry that I wasn't able to remember any Chinese curse words from my trip to China a year ago.

And that wasn't all I couldn't remember - my opponent decided to play a variation that had been the main subject of debate in a match I'd played a couple years ago, but I could hardly remember a thing. As soon as we were out of the opening I started using up gobs of thinking time, wracking my brains. I played well for a while, but as time got short I began dropping pawns, and soon was lost.

Score: Me: 0, Them: 1

Team Score: 0-1 (0-4 game points)

What then followed was probably the most irritating part of the whole trip. I'd decided that I was going to take Lily out to a nice restaurant, and I figured that this wouldn't be a problem since we had over two and a half hours until the next round. What I'd forgotten to take into account that this was Valentine's Day, which is the equivalent of Xmas for restaurant owners. Every place we checked was absolutely packed with patrons and there was a wait of nearly an hour for a table. Frankly, I consider cooling my heels for an hour in a crowded waiting room a not terribly romantic experience, but that's just me. A candlelight dinner of pizza at home would be far better, but that wasn't an option here.

Adding to the frustration was the fact that we were wandering around a part of the world we weren't familiar with and that New Jersey roads have some annoying peculiarities. For example, you can't make a left-hand turn on a major road, instead you have to go around a "jug handle" or some other confusing nonsense. A couple of times I just said "screw it" and made illegal left turns anyway. The net result was a lot of turning around and back-tracking, adding to my irritation.

Eventually, the two and a half hours melted away to less than an hour, and getting any sort of food became imperative, so we hunted down a Subway and had some sandwiches. I was not happy with this turn of events, and I think that the stress involved with this wild goose chase contributed to what happened next round.

Round 2: Young Republican (1,400) vs. Mr. Hamster (1,820)

When you are organizing a chess tournament with nearly 1,200 players one of your chief concerns is: where the heck are you going to put them all? The venue was a huge hotel in a corporate park in central New Jersey, near a major freeway, but it seemed to be close to capacity. The largest ballroom held the top 66 boards, and the next 20 or so was in a smaller ballroom nearby. The rest of the players were in the smaller meeting rooms in the northern part of the hotel. Our goal as a team was to stay in the big ballroom, and not to be exiled to the "suites of shame" in the other part of the hotel.

This round found us in the small ballroom, facing a team of rather clean-cut looking college students. Still, considering their rating they should have been easy pickings for us.

I started to get a bad feeling when my opponent chose an opening variation I'd learned to despise. I have a favorite opening when playing black, but there is one variation that white can choose that tends to lead to a boring, drawish game, especially irritating if played by a weaker player. My attitude toward this variation used to be that it was mainly played by weaker players, or people afraid of the opening main lines. I used to be able to routinely win games in this line, but recently I've been having some frustrating experiences with it. I keep saying that I need to study it and figure out how to remedy this problem, but I never seem to get a chance to.

So once again a weaker player was trotting out this variation. I tried my best to figure out a way to keep the game interesting, but it ate up a lot of clock time. I kept pressing and finally got a good position, then managed to win a pawn. Then fatigue and time trouble brought me low - I lost a piece then wandered into a knight fork which cost my queen.

Later, when I looked up my opponent's rated I groaned: a 400-point upset, just like last year! Even if I won the rest of my games it would be hard to make up this rating deficit.

Happily the rest of the team did much better, our first board drew while boards three and four managed to win, giving us a narrow victory, 2.5-1.5.

Score: Me: 0, Them: 2

Team Score: 1-1 (2.5-5.5 game points)