2019 Big Sky Country Open
Congratulations to 4.0 co-champions, Josep Maria Companyo Pagerols, Wilton Strickland and Dustin Sneeden who split the 1st & 2nd prize money.
The upset prize went to Daltri Freitas for his 251 point upset.
The under 1500 prize went to Thomas Walthall who scored 3.0 with his 3 wins.
The new MCA members who joined before or at this event are Jordan Gibbs from Billings, Mick Mattie from Bozeman and new Junior members Noah Kimball from Missoula and Aden and Toren Fisher, brothers from Corvalis, MT.
There were 23 players in the tournament.
Some demographics:
• Daltri Frietas, with a rating of 1506P coming into the tournament, performed at 1944 level and collected 190 rating points.
• The ages of participants spanned 75 years.
• We had players from Texas, Utah, Wyoming and Washington.
• The highest rated player in the tournament was Gregg Stanely from San Antonio, Texas at 2158. Several unrated players made the ratings spread 2158.
• There were no girl or women players this year.
Many thanks to Dan Mattson and Eric Walthal, who came by the scoring table often enough to answer questions concerning running the SwissSys tournament software. Gary Solomon helped organize the tables in a sensible arrangement.
Our flyer for the event was posted in two places in the Butte-Silver Bow Library, thanks to Ed McGlaughlin and the library staff, but unfortunately nobody from Butte played.
Others may have helped in ways I didn’t notice and thanks to you if you were one of them.
The real hero of the tournament was Dan McCourt who went above and beyond. First, he loaned out his printer when the one I brought failed to work on the Finlen wifi.
Then Dan also helped when he agreed to play a mid-1st round game/30 against Gregg, the Texas player, who was late due to getting lost and so had not paid. Since the flyer stated you have to pay to play, Gregg was not paired in the first round. Had Gregg arrived on time to pay, his first round opponent would have been Dan. Dan’s first round game had already ended. The stipulation was that Gregg would carry the result of this side game into the tournament.