Category: Chess Tournaments

The Rubinstein Open concluded with a 2h Arena Blitz with G6+1 games. The final standing of the blitz tournament can be fonud here:

https://lichess.org/tournament/LQjjpCDp

Hamlet and Armen had already secured first and second place. Gerald, Larry, and Kevin were fighting it out for third place. In the under 1800 section Arturo won (again) outright and Steve, Manu, and Artem were tied for second, third, and fourth.

Gerald left his competition behind and finished 4th overall scoring twenty points, thus securing his third place in the Rubinstein open. Manu showed again a very strong blitz performance and finished second with 25 points. This gives him the second place in the under 1800 category. Artem finished 6th place with 11 points and securing his third place.

Winners, please contact me to make arrangements regarding your prize money.

Our next tournament is the Petrosian Open. It starts Friday, April 2nd. The modalities are the same as in the last few tournaments. G60+10, 5 round Swiss, and so on. Details can be found here

https://caissachess.net/online-registration/index/995

This is also the place where you can register.

This tournament will feature a 50% discount. More and more businesses are opening up again here in Southern California. So far we don’t know when we can resume OTB chess again. Dependent on how things develop we might be able to resume playing chess before this online tournament concludes. Consider the discount a preemptive reimbursement in case we don’t get to play all the rounds of this tournament.

Also, given that not everybody attending our online tournaments lives locally, we can consider continuing these tournaments post-lockdown. Leave a comment below to let us know what you think.

The other important point to stress is: Register before Thursday 6pm if you want to be paired in round 1. Due to my non-chess obligations I won’t be able to consider people signing up late for the first round.

19 players signed up for the Rubinstein open. That is a new record for our online tournaments. As some of you may have noted we are running a Swiss tournament with accelerated pairings. As a consequence we saw highly competitive pairings in round 1 already.

This time I got help from John Wright with the game annotations. Here is his game against Larry Stevens

The rest of the games are annotated by John or me. You can find them here.

If anyone would like to annotate their game or any other game please let me know. We all can learn from each other.

I will post the final pairings for the next round tomorrow night. Just keep an eye on our tournament website:

https://caissachess.net/live/960

As you may have noticed this link is the same throughout the tournament. I just posted preliminary pairings. Unless I get a bye later today or somebody else joins the tournament the pairings won’t change.

Congratulations to Raymond Armagnac for winning the second edition of the Sierra Madre Open. Starting with three wins it was enough to draw the last two games to cruise to first place. Lawrence Stevens, Arthur Shao Zhang, and Arturo Armagnac tied for second and thus giving us an exciting tiebreaker this Friday.

As in our last tournament we have cash prizes for the top two players overall ($50 and $30) and the top two players under 1800 ($30 and $20).

The battle for second prize will decide how many under 1800 prizes will be available. If Arturo Armagnac repeats his fantastic blitz performance Rafi Andranigan will clinch first in the under 1800 category and Artem Aleksenko second.

Make sure you all sign up for the blitz arena:

https://lichess.org/tournament/KaTMtSlb

The password is: sgv

It might be a good idea not to wait till the last minute for sign up. I might not be there for the start of the arena to help out. It might also be a good idea to read the rules for the arena, if not you might be surprised why some people only get half of the time playing you.

Here are the annotated games from round 4:

And here are the games from round 5:

The pairings for the next round, standings, and results can be found here:

https://caissachess.net/live/910