After a decent night’s sleep – decent, not sufficient! – I awoke to breakfast with Nebraska’s brightest young female chess player and her mother. I took a quick jaunt to the Whole Foods to find coffee filters for my Hario V60 pourover, visited the bookstore with Jacey and her family, and meandered a bit after they left for shopping and their flight home.
(Pro tip: if ever you forget to bring your special V60 filters with you on a trip. you can jerry-rig Melitta #4s and still brew your delicious, non-hotel coffee. Don’t say I never did anything for you.)
Let me say something first about the bookstore, run this year (as last) by Chess4Less and the Rochester Chess Center. These guys do a great job stocking books, equipment, and swag. They are on-site for hours and hours, answering questions, suffering fools gladly, and letting bloggers like me take pictures. Lots of them are provided in a link below.
As part of my quest to preserve the game scores from this tournament, I also dropped by the Director’s Room. The Director’s Room is where pairings are done and where the gruntwork of running a big tournament like this takes place. I was tickled to learn that USCF directors have named their computers after world champions.
After a quick bite to eat, I dropped by the Scholastic Chess Committee meeting at 2pm. There was a bit of a kertuffle in Dallas this year at the National Elementary School Championship, as a team from WA were admitted to a section for low rated played for which they were dramatically overqualified. Their USCF ratings did not represent their actual strength, while their NWS ratings (local to the NW) did. Naturally, when they won the event, things got ugly. Chess parents are about as delightful as stage parents.
So there has been a push among certain verbose members of the USCF community to make radical changes to procedures for dealing with foreign rating systems. As I am the Nebraska delegate to the USCF, I thought I should learn about this issue and thus attended the Scholastic meeting.
What a mistake.
The meeting was filled with petty, backbiting nonsense from some of the ‘leading’ players in American scholastic chess. One eminent figure repeatedly whined that no one contacted him to access his vast knowledge at key moments. (Nevermind the fact that this eminent fellow is no longer on the the Council, etc.) Another started to shout – literally – because he had to have the last word when his alleged ‘facts’ were corrected by someone with first-hand knowledge of a specific matter.
I think institutional memory is invaluable, but man, the USCF needs some new blood in a desperate way.
I managed to grab a quick nap and eat before my round three game. As I took a half-point bye for the afternoon game, I started with 0.5/2. My opponent was a plucky 11 yr old from Florida, and I managed to defeat him without too much difficulty.
In other news, Jim Tarjan drew the top rated player as he continues his comeback to tournament chess, and John Watson won his game to take his score to 4/5.
As promised, here are about 60 pictures from Wednesday!
Chess Book Reviews 