Six teams entered the GNT Championship Flight opening round today to play 50 boards in a round robin. They played 10 rounds of 5 boards each, which allows for more match awards and more flexibility or the 5-handed and 6-handed teams. That’s different from the way Flight A operated 3 weeks ago, where we played 8 segments but treated the day as 4 longer 12-board matches.
The defending champions last year consisting of Mike Lipkin, Mustafa Cem Tokay, Erez Hendelman, and David Gurvich finished in the lead with 130.57 Victory Points. Technically, this team is a repeat of last year’s championship flight winners and qualify for favorable seeding. However, it was irrelevant due to the round robin format and clearly not necessary. They won 6 out of the 10 matches.
Close behind was Team Eisenstein with 126.07 Victory Points, who actually won more matches with 7 out of 10 wins (but apparently fewer landslide wins). First seed Lipkin chose to play against Team Baseggio in the semi-finals tomorrow, leaving Team Eisenstein to play Team Miniter.
Salute to the Three-Flight Players
It is especially rare to find players who are willing to play in three different flights of GNT in the same year. Four years ago we had a list of 10 such players. This year, it seems to only be two: Kari Tetzlaff and Jack Boge.
Note that one must be in the 0-2500 range to even pull this off; with our careful scheduling, one can only play Champ-A-B or Champ-B-C, because A and C are held on the same day, disallowing A-B-C. There were also some concerns about playing Championship and B in the same year. If a team plays in the opening round and survives until the 2nd day, then the conditions require that they continue playing Championship and abandon any Flight B ambitions.