Busy weekend: Downers Grove repeats as CICL champions

Congratulations to DGCC on their second consecutive win! Motorola Kings, DRW Trading, and the Rogue Squadron tied for second.

I had never been to Fermilab before: what a great site! After the event, I turned the wrong way and had the pleasure of tracing the cyclotron's path above ground.

Round 1 was played during the workweek.  This painful game (well, painful for me) was instrumental in Motorola's win over the Rogue Squadron. The sac on move 27 was dictated by the match situation (a draw was worthless), but Black had missed a convincing win a couple moves earlier with 24...Nxe2! followed by the fork on f3. Igor's game continuation was good enough:

Saturday was more fun for us.  In the final round match Rogue Squadron-Fermilab, I had the pleasure of kibitzing this interesting Sicilian Rossolimo battle between David Franklin and Dmitri Sergatskov.  David annotates:

"Chess X-Men Win USAT North"

Two smilers and three tough guys

Maret Thorpe reports on the ICA website.

Credit where credit is due for this great event: "The tournament was organized by Tim Just and Glenn Panner, directors were Just, Panner, Maret Thorpe and Keith Ammann. Bookseller was Checkmate Chess Supply and sets and clocks for the event were supplied by North Shore Chess Center."

US Amateur Team North - well, that was fun!

It's tax season, so this post is going to be far shorter than it deserves to be.  

171 players on 39 teams had a lot of fun this weekend!  GM Alexander Shabalov played for a team from Pittsburgh: GM Dmitry Gurevich (who won Saturday night's Illinois Blitz Championship) was a constant spectator.

GM Dmitry Gurevich 

2012 Illinois Blitz Champion

(swiped from Brad Rosen's Facebook page)

Full team results are here.  The event is already rated: MSA reports here.
Congratulations to the Chess X-Men (NM Mariano Acosta, MN Tenzing Shaw, NM Scott Allsbrook, and Dmitri Sergatskov) for keeping the USAT North title in Chicagoland!

Maret Thorpe was both an assistant TD and the sponsor of two Evanston Chess Club teams: her report is here. If you friend the South Suburban Chess Club of Greater Chicago, you can see lots of cool event photos! Thanks to TDs and organizers (who I'm not naming only because I'm afraid I'll leave a key person out!) for a very smooth and enjoyable event!

From the Illinois Open

It is good to draw a grandmaster in the first round!