ICA 2019 Summer Open Championship

This past weekend, we hosted our first annual Summer Open Championship at our location in Glen Rock. Many of New Jersey’s strongest chess players come out to the Open Section of the Dr. David Ostfeld Memorial tournament five times a year at Bergen Academies in Hackensack. Unfortunately, this space is not available during the summer, making for a three or four month gap between tournaments. While we do not have quite enough space to fit the hundreds of players at a normal Ostfeld tournament into our classrooms, we certainly have room for a small collection of the state’s elite players. This past weekend, we had 20 players. There were four masters and a further three experts. All but one of the said players shared first place in a massive six-way tie for first between Roman Malyshev, Yefim Treger, Boris Privman, Gregory Markzon, Fred Wilson, and Oleg Shevelenko. They each got $110.80 between the place, senior, and U2200 prizes. Shockingly, no player managed more than three points in four games. This was largely because of the many draws produced by close matches between the leaders in the later rounds. Given the consistently strong turnout at our open tournaments, we always have generous class and age prizes to give players under 2000 more incentive to play. Vedant Rautela happened to be the only player between 1800 and 2000, so he picked up the $70 U2000 prize with a respectable score of 2.5/4. U1800 was a bit more competitive, with Mao Nozaki and Lucas Bernui splitting the $70 reward with 2 points apiece. In a similar fashion, Jane Stripunsky and Valeria Malysheva each got $35 for their two-point efforts in the U1600 category. Notably, Jane, who was rated 1419, had the upset of the day with a round two draw against Ostfeld mainstay and co-winner NM Gregory Markzon. Two points was also enough for the $70 top junior prize, and it was split between Ian Nicholson and Aaron Li. For more information about results, check out the final crosstable. Thanks to everyone who came to play! We hope to see all these players and more at our next Ostfeld tournament in October. Be sure to check out our newly-released fall schedule for more chess events and opportunities!