Hello SGVCC Members – We’ll start the New Year Open, a six round tournament, on January 3, 2023. There will be three sections and the last round ends on February 7th. A registration link with more details is below. The Club is closed on December 20 and 27. On behalf of your SGVCC Board, thanks to our players, parents, and volunteers for a great year. Membership is open to all chess enthusiasts and we hope to see a lot of new faces in 2023!
Congrats to NM Larry Stevens who only gave up a draw in his march to first place in the Capablanca Open. “Mr. e4” scores a nice win over top seed NM Axel Müller along the way. The event only had 8 participants and we are hoping more of you will join us for the 5 round Euwe Open that starts on September 17th. It will be played at our usual LiChess SGVCC Site. You need to join SGVCC at that site and let us know if you need any assistance.
Our upcoming match against Borba Gato Chess Club of Brazil is tentatively set for Friday, July 16, at 7:00 p.m. The match is played on Chess.com and you can find updated info on Season 3 of Club League at our Chess.com San Gabriel Valley CC site. Just click on the Club link and then “ News.”
The pairings will be finalized on Tuesday evening, so for the moment these pairings you find there are preliminary.
The winner and the top <1800 player will get prizes. Since we might resume over the board chess games soon again we probably won’t have time for a tiebreaker this time.
Some of the players joining our online tournaments live too far away to join us for OTB tournaments and some players might not be ready yet for indoor meetings. If there is some demand I am more than happy to continue to offer online tournaments. We might have to opt for another time though. Please let me know what you think and send an email to: [email protected]
The first two rounds of the Louis Pasteur Memorial saw some exciting chess and some upsets. In round 1 David Faulkner narrowly missed a win and allowed Kevin Zhang to escape with a draw. In round 2 Kevin’s brother Arthur Zhang played a beautiful Italian and beat me quite convincingly.
Things obviously went wrong for me. How did Arthur finish the game in style?
Artem Aleksenko showed some good fighting spirit in both of his games. In his game against John Wright Artem kept pushing in a drawn rook ending and John, under time pressure, went wrong. In the second round Artem defended with a minute left against Gerald Ruiz assault and the game ended in a draw. Earlier Gerald, true to his name, sacrificed his queen and got very close to winning the game. Artem’s active defense muddied the waters enough to escape with a draw.
Larry Stevens is faithfully sticking to the Queen’s Gambit Accepted. Manu Prasad went for 3. Nc3
This is an inaccuracy. Larry treats us to a masterclass on how to exploit this.
The pairings for round three will be published on Tuesday evening at the usual place:
Manu played a close to perfect tournament. As usual he was one of the players with most games and he won almost all of them. Chris went berserk and almost caught Manu but fell one point short.
This Friday we have another blitz event, the La Bourdonnais Arena, the link is:
We are in trying to sort out things with the YMCA. But it seems they need some time to get up and running again. We will let you know when we can resume over the board tournaments. If there is sufficient interest we could have another G60 online tournament, perhaps three rounds in two segments. Let me know what you think.
