Holiday Chess Blitz Tournament

The Holiday season is around the corner! Windy City Sports Club (WCSC, the Chess is #3 sport there after Soccer and Hockey) and Academy of Intellectual Games (AoIG) ran a Holiday Chess Bllitz (G5mins +2s) Tournament featuring a 100% payoff - as promised a guaranteed $800.00 prize money pool was distributed to 7 winners. It was our first tournament at a new venue: 718 S Milwaukee in Wheeling, IL.

In a very tough competition, GM Dmitry Gurevich (rated 2nd out of 35 participants) showed a remarkable result beating all his main opponents, but one (10 out 11). He lost only one game to his own student FM Sam Schmakel.

 

See cross table for details: http://www.aoigames.com/pdf/ACC-13.pdf

We had many exiting matches as shown in this photo album https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/116300177473334285743/albums/5687877559255188289

My personal favorite photo is *Analysis of Paul’s game by GM IM*. In my opinion, the postmortem analysis where the players reveal their emotions and general strategy for the game is the most interesting part of watching a live chess tournament. In the photo mentioned above, Paul Leyderman shows GM Mesgen Amanov and IM Viktoria Ni a position from his game with Spencer Lehmann, where his less experienced opponent trapped Paul’s queen in the middle of the board and subsequently won the game. On the background, you can see FM Aung Zin who shares his disbelief with IM Alex Stamnov in losing the game to GM Dmitry Gurevich in what appeared to be an even position.