Jim West On Chess: USATE 2012 Tie-breaks Challenge

Sunday, March 4, 2012

USATE 2012 Tie-breaks Challenge

Team Chess Mates of Rahway NJ is challenging their final standing at the USATE 2012. The NJSCF has ruled that Chess Mates of Rahway NJ finished in seventh place overall and was sixth out of seventeen teams with five points, defending its ruling in the following way:

The tie-break system which is used for the USATE tournament is based upon both board points as well as your opponents' scores, detailed in the USCF rulebook on page 203 (34G2 - U.S. Amateur Team System).

But the above chart tends to support the challenge of Chess Mates of Rahway NJ, as follows:

Using the alternative rule 34G2 on page 203 of the USCF rulebook, we ended up in fourth place.

"My study of chess was accompanied by a strong attraction to music, and it was probably thanks to this that from childhood I became accustomed to thinking of chess as an art, and have never regarded it as anything else, for all the science and sport involved in it. And, moreover, an art which in some ways is closer to music than it is customary to think. Perhaps chess and music are drawn together by laws of harmony and beauty which are difficult to formulate and difficult to grasp, or perhaps by something else." - Vasily Smyslov