Ashburn Chess Club is pleased to announce a new Grand Prix tournament format in addition to the monthly quads currently in place. It will not be on the same Saturday as our usual quads and will be held approximately monthly. It will be in the Individual-Team format and will consist of one round of G/90 time control. This should give everyone a chance to get a game with a longer time control that we usually play at Ashburn.

The first of this GP90 event will be October 30th at Sakasa. The line starts at 3PM and closes at 3:30PM for a start at 4PM after we have fun picking the teams.

In the Individual-Team format, two teams are formed each time and they play against each other. Your personal raw score from that Saturday is the sum of team points and your personal win/loss/draw. Say you had 12 people show up so there would be 2 teams of 6. Team A won 4 games and Team B the remaining 2 games. A player in team A that won his game gets a raw score of 4 + 1 = 5. A losing player in team A gets a raw score of 4 + 0 = 4 points. The lowest score would be the losing players of Team B who get 2 points each. The winning players of team B would get 3 points.

The teams are formed by team captains that are "drafted" on that day. The team captains then take turns to select their team on a turn-by-turn basis. The TD will sort the teams by rating to create pairings although there may be some flexibility if a particular pair has played each other the previous time or family members are paired against each other. Therefore board assignment is generally by rating.

The time control would be G/90 for these games so you'd start playing at 4PM and end at 7PM at the latest.

Over the period of this Grand Prix seris, the raw scores are normalized due to different number of boards from week to week and the highest scorer (who may have lost all his games) has a chance of winning the whole thing by having been on the winning team a lot. First expert or higher to register gets in free. The fee is $3 per event with $100 going to the winner for this grand prix series. There are also possibilities for 2nd and 3rd prizes depending on response etc. I'd guarantee at least 6 such events over the next 10 months or so. We will also try to stabilize to the same Saturday for each month but that cannot be guaranteed due to personal scheduling as well as major tournaments held in the area.

Questions on this new GP series are welcome - such as 'How is a team captain picked?'

Oh, Carver Center will also be having an unrated Christmas Blitz tournament. USCF membership will not be required for that one. See:

http://www.meetup.com/Purcellville-Chess-Club/messages/11419494/