Musings from the USATE

Tom and I ventured off to the snowy landscape of Northern New Jersey to participate in U.S. Amateur Team East, one of the largest annual chess tournaments held on the East Coast. USATE is a six round event held over President’s Day Weekend (and Valentine’s Day OBTW for all you married folks) with a luxurious 40/2 SD/1 time control which has participants ranging from GM’s to little, little kids. Rather than recap the weekend (others have done so far better than I ever could), here are some stray thoughts (sprinkled liberally with attempted humor):

1. 4545 play (or any online chess activity) is a good complement but no substitute for Over the Board play (OTB). My first 2 rounds were pretty rough as I shook off my recent OTB chess inactivity (Hey, I got a wife & 2 young kids, a fairly demanding job and I coach soccer pretty much year round. I am happy I can disappear for a whole weekend to do something as esoteric as play chess even once a year). However, I will say that slow online play does provide benefit to your tournament chess, but you must play over the board in a slow time control in order to avoid be rusty – for me it was readily apparent in the early rounds. HOWEVER, I will say that once I shook off my rust, I played fairly error-free and quite well, largely due to all the work and studying and playing I have done on the computer. In fact, as I saw lots of other players apparently suffer from “chess fatigue”, I began to get into a rhythm, improving with each game. Therefore, in my estimation (and Tom’s as well) the best path to no kidding, real chess improvement involves both forms of playing.

2. Kids. I watched more of my contemporaries (and teammates) get mowed down by kids this past weekend than I think I have seen in a looooonnnnnnng time. It was amazing. I actually don’t mind playing the under-18 (or actually under-12) crowd as I think my style really suits playing hyper-aggressive, super-tactical little balls of energy. Having said that, two things really bother me about playing kids.
• Kids are super underrated. Nothing worse than sitting across from some IM-trained, mega-booked up kid who has a played a billion scholastic games against other super underrated IM-trained, mega-booked up kids. Talk about an incubator of chess-killing machines. One of my games from USATE with a SEVEN YEAR OLD went ~ 18 moves into theory. When I was seven, I couldn’t even SPELL theory – much less know the moves. I would recommend to the USCF that you might look to have an alternate rating calculation when kids are playing that enables them to earn/lose higher ratings points when they play while also minimizing the points their opponents gain/lose. I believe this would more accurately reflect the true nature of the situation when a kid sits down to play a game, and most importantly cushion the older generation’s collective egos after we get crushed by a kid who isn’t even in middle school yet.
• (The following is meant tongue in cheek and with a grain of salt) Kids don’t know diddly squat about Chess Etiquette but should. Note to you all you chess trainers – take 15 minutes and teach your kids a little chess etiquette vice spending it on the latest Theoretical Novelty on move 15 in the King’s Indian Bayonet. No kidding, after the fifth time your star pupils, who is sporting your Chess Academy’s T shirt, asks for a draw (on my move for the 5th time) when he is 600 points lower rated and down material with no compensation, don’t be surprised if I don’t react politely (as opposed to the first four times I declined the offer with replies like “Hmmm, let’s play on for a while” or “No, thanks”). And hey all you kids, I know you are taught to play to the bitter end in scholastic events, but give us old codgers a bit of credit that we can mate your solitary king with a queen, a rook and a whole plethora of minor pieces. Really, we might be sporting more hair on our backs than on our heads nowadays and drooling at the chess board, but we still can muster that capability between naps during the game. This is not some scholastic event and we do not have a rating possessing only three digits.

3. There were noticeably less GMs/IMs and other hugely strong teams. I might be wrong about this, but I guess one of the unintended consequences of the economic downturn is the fact that GMs/IMs are less apt to spend precious money to play in a tournament that offers little financial reward (I would venture the Ebay market for chess clocks and USATE plaques is probably as “depressed” as a house in South Florida). Another side effect of the lack of strong teams was the fact that there were a higher percentage of kid’s teams, and therefore a greater chance to play kid’s teams. We in fact played kids teams in three successive rounds.

4. Steven Doyle & his crew have created a tremendous tournament and chess environment that truly captures the adage “We play chess for the fun of it,” which stands in direct opposition to the many events that require large entry fees in order to offer huge prize funds to attract folks to play. Although Steven may not in fact use the term “Festival” to describe USATE, I think “Festival” perfectly describes this wonderful event.