Introduction Part 4: Provisionally Rated

A few months after my success in the Paso Robles Winter Open, I signed up to play in their Spring Open tournament. The turnout was a little disappointing but not as discouraging as my play. In the first round, I took on Randy Hough but contrived to get my knight trapped in a drawish looking ending. After a couple of routine wins against lower rated players, I then lost horribly to a 1600 and finished on only 2/4. This took my provisional rating from 1772, earned after the Winter Open, to 1761. Hardly a huge drop but I was more annoyed by how I had played than any rating points lost.


Chatting with Tim Forney at the
2004 Paso Robles Spring Open tournament.

On the plus side, I did make some new acquaintances, including the very amiable Tim Forney and strong expert John Williams (who I would finally get to play years later in the Amateur Team West). John tied for second with Arthur Wang (sadly now deceased), half a point behind winner Danyul Lawrence.

My appetite for tournament chess had been whetted and, just a couple of weeks later, I played in my first ever two day tournament (the Paso Robles tournaments had both started and finished the same day). The Blacknight Memorial Day tournament was held in San Jose, which was a bit of a distance so I stayed overnight at a hotel near the playing venue. It took me a while to find exactly where the playing room was because the tournament was at a large, sprawling school that had nobody around I could ask for directions.

When I finally found the playing room, I noticed that the top seed was FM Eric Schiller, famous (or infamous?) in chess circles for his prolific writing. I also recognized him from the Kasparov-Kramnik World Championship match in 2000, where Eric was the arbiter. I had attended two of the games in the match and Eric was always on stage when the games were starting and ending. I was secretly hoping I would get the chance to play him, despite the likelihood of being soundly beaten. Sure enough, when the pairings were posted, I had white against Eric. My first ever game against a titled player was about to be very interesting.