Today, we broke our post-pandemic record for the number of competitors on a Super Saturday: in all, we had 76 participants: 50 for the Glen Rock Quads and 26 for the ICA Open.
In our Open Section, Brian Pang was our undisputed first-place winner with a perfect 3 points out of 3! Just behind Brian, Luke Mulvey, Roman Malyshev, Gary Leschinsky, and Timothy Xie also finished the day undefeated, with 2.5/3 points each! Our top senior prize goes to Yefim Treger and Fred Wilson. Timothy Xie also won our top junior prize.
The best game of the Open Section came in round one between Alexander Wang as white and George Chen as black. Alexander had a big attack but could not capitalize because of the solid defense that George created. Normal people would try to add more pieces to attack, but not Alexander! He boldly sacrificed his pawn to create several weaknesses in his opponent's queenside. The effect of sacrificing this pawn is akin to the effect of a bomb exploding: George's defense greatly opened up as a result of capturing the pawn. As a result, Alexander quickly won material to justify his sacrifice.
Section 1 of the Quads finished with a three-way tie between Andrew Cerami, Mark Kogan, and Dzmitry Kharchykau! Going into Round 3, Andrew had a perfect 2/2 points while Dzmitry had 1.5/2 and Mark only had 1 out of 2. Mark had to defeat Andrew to have any chance of winning first place. During the match, Mark played two bishops against two knights game and ended up finding a tactic to win an exchange. Mark kept this advantage throughout the game and was able to win after Andrew resigned. Dzimitry's draw against Albert Sadykov meant that three players split first place!
Our Section 2 winner was Andrew Goldfarb with a solid 2.5 points out of 3! In his third game against Christopher Corcoran, both sides played very aggressively. When the dust finally cleared, one player had a queen and the other had two rooks in what seemed like the beginning of the endgame. Both players agreed to a draw after a few more moves, which made Andrew the clear winner of Section 2.
For Section 3, Prasad Ramaradj was our clear winner with 3/3 points! For one of his games, Prasad found a beautiful fork against his opponent and was up a rook for a knight. Prasad proceeded to open up the game, and his opponent could do nothing but defend himself. Prasad still broke through after a couple of moves easily giving him the victory.
In this final section of the report, I want to highlight Section 11 and Section 12. Most, if not all of the players in those sections played their first ever tournaments! After blazing through Round 1, they then took their time for their final two rounds. As a result, the quality of their games improved. Afterwards, all of the players from Section 11 received a crash course on how to properly notate their moves. Many of those players will improve dramatically and fly through the sections if they keep coming to our tournaments and playing whilst recording their moves!
Congratulations to all winners! You can see rating reports by clicking on Open or Quads.
All results can be found at Open or Quads
We will NOT be having a tournament next week due to the Thanksgiving break. We wish everybody a very Happy Thanksgiving!
The next edition of the quads will be held December 3rd: CLICK HERE TO REGISTER!
Thank you to everyone who came to the ICA Open (1600+ rating)! The next edition will be held December 17:
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER!
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Stay tuned for a report on how ICA Players performed
in the New Jersey Grade School Championship!
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