ICA Dr Ostfeld Memorial Spring Scholastic Championship Results

With Spring in the air and  flowers causing all sorts of Claritin requiring allergies it was once again time for students, parents, and players of all sorts alike to get on over to Hackensack for another ICA Dr. Ostfeld memorial.  There were over 120 players in the scholastic section this time around and with the amount of trophies, medals, awards and snacks not many of them left disappointed. 

Section One

In section one only Jonathan Pruchansky managed to win all four games to claim first place.  Respective second, and third place winners, Ben Mitlitski, and Joey Grasso faced off in the third round, and though Ben had a decisive material advantage he stalemated his opponent and thereby missed out on first place by that very half point. 

Thirty children competed in section one.

Section 2

Nobody scored perfectly in section two thereby creating a tie for first among three players.  On tie-breaks Sohum Sharma claimed official first with three and a half points though in part this was because his opponent, and official second place winner Arjun Bidani missed a mate in one early in the game and a tougher mating attack later on, and was thereby forced to salvage the game with a perpetual check.  Henry Huang drew his first round game and won the rest to tie Arjun and Sohum for first place.

Twenty-two people competed in section two.

Section 3

Sophie “the Trophy” Rasol, Timothy Lee, and Grant Goldman won all four games to top the leader boards in section three.

As usual this was the most populated section and included forty-three players.

Section 4

Nikita Popov who regularly uses our Saturday Quads in Fair Lawn as training for the larger tournaments was the sole winner of section four, winning each of his games.  Tied for second were Ilan Katz, Justin Lee, Roman Brustein, and Yuvanshu Agarwal in tie-break order from second to fifth place.

Twenty four kids competed in section four.

Section 5

Section five was dominated by Irina’s students from the advanced classes on Wednesday and Sunday.  The first place winners were Zachary Lyandres (who comes on Wednesday), and Jiahao Shen (who comes on Sunday), as well as Vedant Rautela (a Saturday morning class attendee).  All three scored three-and-a-half points with Jiahao, and Zachary drawing their third round game.   Also of note was a strong performance by Irina’s Wednesday class  attendee Nastasia Klevak who had her best Section five tournament to date as she won her first three games and only lost to first place winner Zachary Lyandres in the last round in the game for the gold medal.  Nastasia finished fourth overall. 

Twenty four people competed in section five.