Jan-02-15
 | | FSR: I swindled this guy in the ACU-I tournament once. He's a more experienced player than I, having been born eight days earlier. |
|
| Jan-02-15 | | Granny O Doul: Bronx boy. Second place in the National High School; 1978, maybe? Behind the misnamed Greg Small. |
|
Jan-02-15
| | FSR: Correction: I swindled him in the Pan-American Intercollegiate Team Championships. |
|
Jan-02-15
 | | perfidious: <FSR> Played Mitch once, in the 1981 New Hampshire Futurity; was worse, if not losing, when I pulled off a swindle of my own in a Modern Benoni against him and managed to win. That was the one high point of an otherwise depressing event. Guess my nineteen days' edge in experience told in the end. |
|
| Feb-03-25 | | Granny O Doul: https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obi... . He was my almost-teammate in high school (we didn't quite overlap) but for real when I occasionally played for the Bronx/Yonkers club. Scrolling through his birthday messages last summer, I noticed a couple of "heavenly"s mixed in. Apparently he had had some heart issues in recent years. Probably his best result was in the 1992 World Open, but it seems cold to post a crosstable as a memorial. Aside from the high school championship that I may have slightly misreported above, he was second behind Patrick Wolff at a futurity event in Boston 1982-ish, though he went up there (he said) mainly for the ice cream. |
|
Feb-03-25
| | perfidious: There was indeed a futurity at the old Boylston Club in summer 1982, but I have none of the back numbers of <Chess Horizons> which might have covered the event and did not play myself. I also remember Mitch from the National HS in Cleveland, the year before his near-miss in 1978. Was he on the Bronx Science side that we beat out for the team title, along with Garfield High of Seattle, led by Seirawan? Sorry to read of Mitch's passing. I still remember the ten of us crammed into that house in the village of Antrim, New Hampshire, playing that futurity during those cold December weekends of 1981. |
|
| Feb-03-25 | | Granny O Doul: Bronx Science, yes. The Spartans then but they later changed their name to the Wolverines(!). An embarrassing miss for my team when the question came up in a local pub quiz. |
|
Feb-03-25
| | perfidious: Entering the last round in Cleveland, we were trailing Bronx Science by a half point but went 4-0. I was in difficulties vs one of Seirawan's teammates, but pulled it out. Here is the report for 1977: Mitch finished second on tiebreak of three players on 7-1. https://uscf1-nyc1.aodhosting.com/C... |
|
| Feb-04-25 | | Granny O Doul: Thanks, perf. Let me take a page from Tom Landry and say that Burlington wasn't better than we but the tournament ended at the right time for them. It was nostalgic, though, reading the story of the tourney, though I wasn't receiving Chess Life until October of that year. It's hard to imagine today the national high school championship getting quite so much round-by-round coverage in both the individual and team competition. |
|
Feb-04-25
| | perfidious: <Granny>, as the article noted, we were top-seeded going in (for what that was worth), with two of the top ten seeds, but form is tough to predict in these scholastic events. Each of us on the BHS team had one loss in eight games, with our first board and I taking it on the chin in the first round. The kid who knocked off my teammate was D Russell Wada, who went on to become a strong master. |
|
Feb-04-25
| | FSR: <perfidious> A blast from the past. I see from that 1977 magazine that Andy Lerner, the top-rated player in the Elementary Championship by over 100 points with a towering 1548 rating, won that tournament with a 7-1 score. (These days we have Abhimanyu Mishra becoming a GM before age 12 1/2.) Robert Ferguson, rated just 1241, tied for second. He is now the governor of Washington. |
|
Feb-04-25
| | perfidious: <FSR>, I met Lerner sometime during the 1980s, by which time he had made master, but reading back the top ten finishers in the Elementary gave me a start: <Elementary School Championship: 1st Andrew Lerner, NJ 7. 2nd Bobby Ferguson, WA 6 A. 3rd Tim Radermacher, MN 6~A. 4th Michael Tierney, CA 6. 5th George Kinsler, PA 6. 6th Timothy Pellant, CA 6. 7th Dennis Olson, MN 6....> Timothy Pellant likely became the strongest player of 'em all here, but cystic fibrosis cut his life even shorter than the usual brief life span. |
|
Feb-04-25
| | FSR: <perfidious> As you doubtless know, it is a horrible disease. The afflicted person ends up basically choking to death on his/her own mucus. |
|
Kibitzing
