Gambito #319

Gambito #319   May Super Gambito on  5/05/07

Turnout: 28 players       Total Prizes Paid: $600

Varun Krishnan Has a HUGE Day!

 

Young Varun does not look too interested in his encounter with chess master Ron Bruno, the 2006 San Diego Chess Club Champion.

The young man is small in stature but he is growing very large in chess players minds, almost to giant size proportions. Today he defeated Expert Dimitry Kishinevsky in the first round and followed that upset with another one - Expert Jorge Balares in Round 2. But the best was yet to come! In the fateful third round he defeated National Master Ron Bruno in yet another amazing upset. I know Varun has drawn with Masters several times before, including Ron Bruno and Romeo Ignacio, but I don't think he has actually beaten one before, although I could be wrong, I will try to check my records. Regardless, today was his best performance ever.

See Cyrus Annotates to view the game Krishnan-Bruno.

Varun has lifted his rating by a whopping 80 points, from 1897 to 1977. I didn't get a chance to see any of his games except the last part of the game with Jorge, when it was still about equal, but then Varun won a pawn and was also winning on time by a large margin. But Jorge made a fight of it, nearly earning the draw, but his time was so low and the pressure so great (a large crowd was watching) that he lost even more material and then failed to take advantge of a few mistakes by Varun in the scramble to beat the clock.      

Finally, in the last round, Varun was paired with his instructor, IM Cyrus Lakdawala, who was apparently planning on offering Varun a draw at some point, but due to his strong integrity, Cy did not want to just play a 6 move "grandmaster draw" (besides Varun might have turned down the draw, as Cyrus has instructed him to do in the past!) and as the game went on, Cyrus found a winning line and could not turn it down. Still, Cyrus is so much higher rated that the loss did not really hurt Varun's performance rating at all.      

Open Section (18 players)  First Place: Cyrus Lakdawala (4)  $125

2nd Place/BU2200/BU2000 tie: Varun Krishnan (3), Ryan Richardson (3), Dimitry Kishinevsky (3)  $75 each

2nd U2200: Jacoby Johnson (2 1/2) $25   

2nd U2000 tie: Ben Barquin (2), Hercules Madriaga (2), Richard Jensen (2) and Ed Baluran (2) $6 each

Reserve Section (10 players)

A stellar performance by the new player Roberto Rivera, who was unsure of his playing strength, having only played online. He thought he was about 1600, so we put him in this section, but apparently he is much better than that. As an unrated player, he could not win cash prizes, but next week he will be able to, but he will have to play in the Open Section. Based on the 4 wins, the computer gave him an estimated rating of well over 2000.

Best Unrated: Roberto Rivera (4)  Book Prize

BU1800 tie: Chuck Ensey (3) and Jesse Orlowski (3)  $50 each

BU1600 tie: Pratik Khanna (2) and Michael Chen (2)  $35 each

Best Game Prize Open Section $15  Varun Krishnan

Best Game Reserve Section $15  Jesse Orlowski