Sunday, July 27, 2008

Colias Field

The field for the 4th Colias memorial is now set. We will be drawing lots tomorrow. The field for the top 2 sections are:

IM Emory Tate 2367
FM Peter Bereolos 2323
FM Aleksandr Stamnov 2239
NM Steven Tennant 2216
NM Tony Cao 2208
NM Tim McEntee 2200
NM Len Weber 2200
NM Glen Gratz 2133
Adam Strunk 2113
Robert Loncarevic 2048
Eric Rosen 2038
Larry Cohen 2022

For our class section, here are the lots and pairings:

1. Fred Gruenberg
2. Leo Kirsch
3. Sevan Muradian
4. Theo Poulos
5. Vladimir Djordjevic
6. Ryan Richardson

The pairings will thus be as follows:
Friday August 1 at 7PM:
Gruenberg - Richardson
Kirsch - Djordjevic
Muradian - Poulos

Saturday August 2 at 10AM:
Gruenberg - Kirsch
Djordjevic - Muradian
Richardson - Poulos

Saturday August 2 at 3PM:
Muradian - Gruenberg
Richardson - Kirsch
Poulos - Djordjevic

Sunday August 3 at 10AM:
Gruenberg - Poulos
Kirsch - Muradian
Djordjevic - Richardson

Sunday August 3 at 3PM:
Djordjevic - Gruenberg
Poulos - Kirsch
Muradian - Richardson

More to come.

G

Saturday, July 26, 2008

Changes

Ok, so it has been nearly a month since my last post. If people are still out there reading, let me tell you about some changes. I have gotten truly a little tired blogging about chess. There isn't much to talk about in regards to scholastic chess over the summer, and there are other things that I would like to talk about.

First, the 4th Billy Colias Memorial is next weekend. I will try to post updates on that each day while it is going on. For those of you not familiar with Billy, he was perhaps the strongest player to be homegrown in the midwest. He also was an outstanding chess teacher, and one of the more fun, interesting, and gregarious players I ever met. My favorite thing about Billy was watching him analyze games. I saw one game where he played an 1100 who blundered a queen horribly and went over it with the player. they got to the position where the queen was dropped, and Billy paused for a second. He then said wow, this is interesting, was your idea to do this? He then constructed a kingside attacking plan that was viable. The opponent perked up as Billy started talking about how creative an idea his opponent had. The opponent walked away feeling like a million bucks, and thats how many of us felt hanging out with Billy.

One of my absolute favorite things to follow is baseball. I am a bit of a junky, so I watch a lot of it. So this week when I read one of the dumber things ever by analyst and broadcaster Joe Morgan, I wanted to share it. According to Joe, on his ESPN chat, run differential is an overrated statistic. Yeah, it is really overrated to score more runs than your opponents. That has nothing to do with winning.

Glenn