Reported by Hanniegn Pitre

The Green Open at Seattle Chess Club was held September 13 and 14, 2008. It featured only four rounds of chess over two days, and also Fischer time controls. I would recommend to the tournament directors of the Northwest that they consider these two aspects for their tourneys: shorter playing lengths for the rounds with a time control that is still long enough for a quality game, and fewer rounds in a weekend. Many players have digital clocks. It’s time to investigate the Fischer settings. We provided some instructions for setting both the Chronos and DGT XL clocks before round one began. We still had a few problems, but not many, and I am sure the education process will continue, so that a higher percentage of the players with digital clocks will be comfortable with both setting and demonstrating the correctness to their opponent.

With this different tournament offering we were able to attract thirty-two players to compete for a guaranteed prize fund. We also offered two lectures designed for the under-1800 rated players. The lectures were given by Masters, John Readey and Bill McGeary. Each had about ten players in the audience, and I heard words of appreciation and approval of this feature of the tourney.

We offered incentives for players to carpool, or take public transportation, or walk, or bike to the site. I also obtained some support from the nearby Hotwire Internet Cafe in the North City neighborhood, as they gave us some discount coupons on their coffee, pastries, and sandwiches. I think we were successful in offering a lot of little features that improved the tourney ambience.

The prize winners of the Open section: 1st Viktors Pupols, 2nd Dereque Kelley, 3rd and U-2000; Alex Guo, Sean McLaren, Ben Calpo, Drayton Harrison, and Nathan Lee. For the Reserve section the winners were: 1st & 2nd: Hugh Long and Jesse Breneman; 3rd & 1st U-1600: Catherine Smith and Ethan Bashkansky; 1st U-1400: Anthony Guo, Patrick Wang, and Jiayi Hu.

The Seattle Chess Club leadership provided the site. Drayton Harrison, Jerome Buroker, and Ben Calpo helped me clean up the place, and Drayton also helped with some registration details. Thank you all.