Amateur Team Fever Hits the Bay

(The photo at left shows the 2011 Amateur Team West champions, USC captained by IM Jack Peters. On the right is the 2000-01 Stanford chess team at the Pan Am Intercollegiate, with FM Philip Wang playing against GM Yuri Shulman of UT-Dallas.)

For more than 35 years, the President's Day weekend has been dedicated to the People's Tournament. Unfortunately, the traditional venue at UC Berkeley no longer was available for the past four years. Local organizers tried to find a viable replacement.

Now I can recommend a unique national tournament on February 18-20: Amateur Team West. Instead of playing just for yourself, join a 4-player team (plus an optional alternate). If you score 2.5 or more, you win the match and your team earns a point. Pairings each round are done by team, not individual players. (The individual scores contribute to the first tiebreaker.) The team that scores the most out of 6 rounds wins the tournament and advances to an internet playoff against champions from East, Midwest and South.

Sound fun? Yeah! Here are the details:

• Event: Amateur Team West (there's also East, Midwest and South)
• Dates: Feb 18-20 (no 2-day schedule)
• Venue: Santa Clara Hyatt Regency ($109/night)
• Rating: Average of top 4 < 2200 + board 4 within 1000 of board 3; use January ratings
• Format: 6-SS (team), all teams in one big section
• Rounds: Sat/Sun 11:30 and 5:00, Mon 10:00 and 3:30
• Time control: 30/90, SD/60 (max 5 hours per round)
• Prizes: Team Trophy and four Commemorative Clocks: top 3 overall, top U2000, U1800, U1600, U1400, U1200, top family, top all-junior, top school, top company plus board prizes
• Playoff: 1st place team faces winners from East, Midwest and South in an internet playoff!
• Entry: $188/team or $47/player by Feb 14
• Flyer: http://www.bayareachess.com/events/12/usatw12.pdf
• Info: http://www.bayareachess.com/events/12/usatw.php
  

If you are trying to win the tournament and thus qualify for the internet playoff, then you will probably need a team with average of 2100+. No doubt, whoever is on board 1 will face strong masters, probably a few IMs and maybe a GM. There are two common strategies to build a winning team:

• Balanced team, meaning everyone between 2050 and 2300
• Stack team, meaning two (or three) high rated masters and a low but underrated board 4 to keep the average under 2200 (note: the 1000 point rule prevents a team of 2600, 2500, 2400, 1299)
  

I prefer a balanced team, but the stack lineup can be very successful if board 4 is a B player who draws against experts. Keep in mind that this event uses the January rating list, generated shortly after Thanksgiving, so December and January tournaments do not count.

How to find a team? If you can play with your family, school, or long time chess buddies, then that always seems the most fun. Although everyone plays in the same section, there are plenty of class prizes (by rating) so a high average is not mandatory. If you can't find anyone, or have just 2 or 3 players, then register and get onto the "Looking for" lists.

Finally, make sure to pick a creative team name--there are special prizes! The 99 percent have already chosen to "Occupy FIDE". The "ChessPunks" (see photo at right from a year ago) may sound like a rap team from Da Hood, but instead they study the openings of classical composers like Taimanov, Reti and Philidor. And the organizer Salman Azhar asked me if I knew of any "fPWNers". Regretfully, I will not be able to attend, so my students will have to PWN for me.

10th Anniversary of Kasparov Talk at Stanford

(From left to right: NM Jordy Mont-Reynaud, FM Philip Wang, NM Vinay Bhat, GM Garry Kasparov and the Karnazes twins. Photo from ChessCity.)

Never in my life will I forget the events of April 21-22, 1999. For two days, I had the honor to meet the reigning World Champion Garry Kasparov as he visited Stanford University. The world's top player was a guest of the Stanford Presidential Lecture series, although much of the job of hosting him fell to the Russian department and the nationally ranked Stanford chess team.

My chess teammates picked up Kasparov and his manager, former tennis pro Owen Williams, at San Francisco International airport and even stopped for ice cream on the way to the Westin Hotel on El Camino at University Avenue. That evening, Stanford officials and chess players met for a formal dinner at Spago's in downtown Palo Alto. Kasparov discussed everything and anything not related to chess, from world politics to the Yankees to restaurants in Rio de Janeiro. He was friendly and quite talkative, but while dessert was served, Kasparov abruptly announced it was getting late and he had to return to the hotel to finish his speech. He literally walked out while everyone else shook hands and exchanged pleasantries. I was the first to see the World Champion nervously pacing up and down Lytton Street. He politely pointed out to me that none of the passerbys identified him, something that he found odd for such a highly educated community.

On the next day, Kasparov met with the Russian department in the morning and then he had two events with chess players scheduled for the afternoon and evening. The first was a Q&A session with many of the Bay Area's elite juniors at the time, including masters Jordy Mont-Reynaud, Vinay Bhat and Philip Wang. Vinay and Kasparov bantered back and forth, analyzing crazy variations in the spectacular double rook sacrifice game Kasparov versus Topalov that was played just two months earlier. Kasparov said then that was the best game that he ever played. It was a pleasure to see the event go off successfully as I organized much of the publicity, including inviting the kids to attend. Nervously, I introduced Kasparov to the young audience as the greatest chess player of all time, a statement that I still agree with today.

The highlight of the visit came on the second evening. Stanford University's Science and Engineering lecture hall, usually filled with Biology students, was jammed packed with well over 500 Bay Area chess enthusiasts. Nobody reckoned with such an enthusiastic turnout and, unfortunately, the fire marshall ordered dozens of people sitting in the aisles to leave. Chess club President FM Adrian Keatinge-Clay introduced the World Champ.

Kasparov lectured for about 45 minutes on the "Limits of Human Performance" in chess and sports. According to Kasparov, chess can be a long and cruel game determined by time constraints and sometimes one crucial move. "If you lose psychologically, then you will lose on the board," he said. Later Kasparov took questions from a panel that included computer science professor Terry Winograd and Stanford football coach Tyrone Willingham. One controversial topic was the famous match that Kasparov lost to IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in 1997 (see photo at right), the first time that a computer defeated the top chess player in the world. Check out two articles in Stanford publications about this exciting evening: the Stanford Report and the Stanford Daily.

I can say this event was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for me. I wasn't yet a master, but I met the strongest player in history. I only wonder if Kasparov would still recognize me today. Unfortunately, I didn't get to meet him at SuperNationals earlier this month.