Buffalo chess odyssey

I won the top section of the Buffalo Quads on Saturday, but unlike many chess tournaments, the battle began long before the first move was made. I arrived at the tournament site, the University of Buffalo's Educational Opportunity Center, ten minutes before the scheduled close of registration. Much to my surprise, the front and side doors were locked. The tournament director and a couple other participants were waiting on the street as well, and the TD mentioned that this had happened at the last tournament also. Thirty frigid minutes later, there was still no sign of the UB security officer tasked with unlocking the center. With the crowd of chess players growing in number and discontent, the decision was made to relocate to the food court of the Main Place Mall, two blocks away.

The Main Place Mall is the site of Michael Mc Duffie's third Saturday tournaments, so chessplayers are well acquainted with the mall and vice versa. When the TD went to apprise mall security of his plan, he was told that he could not hold the tournament there because the mall hadn't received advance notice. This decision was met with surprise and disappointment by the assembled chessplayers, now numbering almost forty, who pointed out that the mall stood to make quite a bit of money by allowing twoscore hungry and thirsty people to spend several hours in its otherwise deserted food court.

Frantically wracking his brain to come up with an alternate location for the tournament, the TD tried calling a local library but to no avail. Just as he was about to cancel the event, the coach of one of the scholastic teams in attendance offered to open up his school for us to use. Some of the players grumbled that the school was too far away and the tournament had already been delayed too much, so they declined to relocate a second time, but approximately twenty of us got back in our cars for the ten-minute drive south. At last, the tournament was on!

One of the biggest challenges I faced was refocusing myself for the games. I had to approach the event as if it had always been scheduled to start at 11 am. If I viewed it as a 9 am tournament that was starting two hours late, I would risk getting flustered by the morning's delays and setbacks. Instead, I just concentrated on starting the event strong and trying to play three good games of chess.

The rest of my quad consisted of an expert, a Class A player and a Class B player. The Class A player and I had played in the same local club when we were in high school, so it was nice to see her again. As for the games themselves, I won two and drew one (against my high school friend), defeating the expert (actually a National Master whose rating had dipped) in a tight final-round matchup.