After a 2-session round robin with 12 teams on Saturday, the championship flight District 24 GNT field continued Sunday with the round of 8. Similar to the Flight B format, a seeding committee created two balanced groups with four survivors each. The winner of each group chooses an opponent from the 3rd / 4th place team of the other group.
The four surviving teams are now 102 boards deep into the 2020 GNT-Championship tournament. Unlike Flights B and C, only one team will represent us in Montreal, and they will need to pay their own way, as they do not get the $1000 Grass Roots Fund subsidy.
Team Miniter
As defending district champions, Team Miniter was automatically given the most favorable seeding (between us, I suspect the seeding committee might have given it to them regardless). Last year they represented New York and Long Island at the Las Vegas NABC, going all the way into the national finals for 2nd place!
Team Koeppel
Another all-star team. Lynne Koeppel, Max Rotaru, Erez Hendelman, Radu Nistor, and Mustafa Cem Tokay. Sadly, we don’t have a full team photo, but we do have the SF NABC victory shot from the Nail Life Master Pairs. They will face off against Team Miniter in a 52-board match sometime prior to April 25th, at an undisclosed location (probably Honors, backup location the Midnight KOs during Columbus).
Team Trenka vs Team Herman
Peter Trenka, Igor Savchenko, Giorgia Botta, and Ahmed Soliman will face off against Ira Herman, Allen Kahn, Jeffrey Rothstein, and David Rosenberg .
I would try to sad something intelligent about the lineup, but I’ve run into a classic Good Will Hunting problem: I can’t distinguish between Will Hunting and professor Lambo. To me, they are all world class players who can consistently depend on me to gift them cold tops at the club.
Quarter-Final Recap
Team Miniter defeats Team Moss (David Moss, Kerry Kappel, Cathy Nathan, Marc Nathan, Raluca Dobrescu, Jesus Arias)
Team Herman defeats Team Eisenstein (Glenn Eisenstein, Magnus Olafsson, David Gurvich, Michael Radin, John Rengstorff, Michael Lipkin)
Team Trenka defeats Team Rosenthal ( Andrew Rosenthal, Chris Willenken, Aaron Silverstein, Jan Jansma)
Team Koeppel defeats Team Parrish ( Adam Parrish, Dana Berkowitz, Franco Baseggio, Adam Kaplan, Craig Ganzer)