Last night, as players returned from competition and let me know their results, I heard lots of good-sounding things. One player would say, "I played a 2100 and won one and lost one" Pretty good. Another would say, "I have won 7 of my 10 games". That sounds great. Another said "I won 6 and a half". Very cool. However, I've never scrutinized the results of high school blitz tournament before, so I wasn't confident to say what this would mean for the team -- in fact, none of us was entirely sure that there would even be a team ranking for blitz. Then, the ballroom full of players emptied out. Northsiders, for their own geeky reasons, stayed around and played against each other - analyzing their games, looking forward to the start of the long tournament the next day. While sitting around, someone quietly snuck up behind us and started stapling sheets of paper to the bulletin boards which had posted the pairings earlier. Then someone noticed that they were team results, and that Northside was listed THIRD! What? No-one had seen that coming. Yeah, I thought that 7 out of ten, and 7.5, and 6.5, sounded remarkably strong, but the kind of scores that place third in the nation?? Whoa!
By the way, some of the other teams well down the list, you might recognize - Niles North, Hinsdale Central. Yeah, mighty tough!
One more note: Liang sort of led our team to glory by accident. He just registered for the blitz tournament because I told everyone that they were supposed to. He didn't really want to play blitz, because it's really not his strong suit. He wanted to unregister, but I had no idea how to do that, so he just went along with it. Likewise, Ryan could have enhanced his individual standing, because he was eligible to compete in the 9th-grade division, instead of with all the upperclassmen.
Thanks guys for inadvertently leading us to glory!!
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