2018 Aurora Fall Open Tournament Report

The 6th Aurora Fall Open tournament attracted a full roaster of players i.e. 96.  There were only 2 no shows due to air travel delay and sickness.

Registration was not as smooth as we would like.  As usual many players waited until the last week before the registration deadline only to end up on the waiting list.  As late as 2 weeks before the tournament date we had barely 70 players signed up but many of them didn’t confirm their attendance by paying.  If it weren’t for the team of 14 players from Illinois State University in Normal, IL we would be in deep trouble.  Thank you ISU team for attending and thank you Mohammed Zaman for organizing this trip for your team.

Several players were removed from tournament before the deadline because they didn’t pay for registration.  They were replaced by players from the waiting list who wanted to play and could pay right away.  5 players dropped out of tournament after they paid, some of them after registration deadline, 2 of them on Friday before the tournament.  In the end over 40 players tried to register for tournament and came away either empty handed or on the waiting list.  Please, please don’t wait till last minute to register for our tournaments.

Sponsors

This was the first tournament with fully barriered courts using exclusively Newgy barriers.  I took us 6 years to collect all these barriers, but we finally did it.  It looked very neat and I hope players liked it too.  Thank you Newgy  for donating the 10 barriers and supporting us for all these years.

The new JOOLA balls also fared quite well.  We did have less than a dozen of broken balls.  Thank you JOOLA for sponsoring this tournament.

The LED lights provided great illumination so conditions were as good as they get in a small venue like this.  See for yourself below.

Setup

Setup was accomplished under tight deadline since we didn’t get the north side of the gym until 9:30 pm and the south side had our regular open gym table tennis until 9:30 as well.  Luckily this was a slow night in open gym, so we could setup some courts before 9:30.  We also prepositioned tables and prepared barriers before 9:30 so after the gym became available we could quickly move in and setup up all remaining courts.

The volunteers who helped with all setup tasks including washing the tables were: Justin Wu, Wesley Wu, Adam Koziel and of course our dedicated tournament organization team consisting of Michael Curry, Jim Brandt, John Brandt and Swavek Lorenc.

Tournament Operations

Hardly any tournament goes off without a problem and this one was not an exception.  Due to all these roster changes the order of matches on score sheets printed from OmniPong was for some reason not corresponding to the order on the data entry screen.  Some matches had reversed players and we had to watch very carefully when entering match scores and this slowed us down considerably.  Thanks to Justin and Wesley Wu and Andrew Moy (our umpire) data entry was done in a timely manner and error free.

Then a fire alarm went off at about 10:15 a.m., which delayed the morning event 20 – 25 minutes as we all had to evacuate the gym.  It turned out that the alarm was pulled by some kid. Thankfully it was nice outside to wait it out and it didn’t really seem to set us back much at all. 2 pm matches started on time.

Given our somewhat routine organization of tournaments after 6 years of running them and larger organization team, I felt brave enough to experiment with live streaming of some matches.  Many thanks go to David Del Vecchio for lending me the high resolution camera and video signal encoder and guiding me through configuration of this setup.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time to try it out in the venue before the tournament and consequently I had to satisfy myself with recording matches to SD card.  It turned out that the encoder needed a firmware upgrade to connect to the WiFi network in the venue and the HDMI cable broke and needed to be replaced.  The good news is that the WiFi upload speeds at the venue are 16 Mbps which should allow us to stream at 1080 resolution perhaps at the next tournament.

Take Down

Take down was started early by John and Jim Brandt, Wesley and Justin Wu.  The last matches ended at 7:50 and we were done with take down at 8:30.

Results

Results were published to OmniPong on Sunday so that everyone could review them and and to allow for corrections.  They were sent to USATT for ratings update along with tournament report on Monday.  However, due to my mistake on the report – I chose payment by check instead of my usual choice by credit card – USATT was waiting for a week for my check.  Once Ethan Figge from USATT made me aware of this mistake I asked to charge my credit card but a week was wasted unnecessarily.  Sorry.

Event – Click for full results	First Place	Second Place	Third Place	Fourth Place
Group 1	Wojciech Wolski	Viktor Bedriichuk	Gediminas Mickus	Kian Beyranvand
Group 2	Igor Falchuk	Patryk Zyworonek	Jiawen (john) Bian	Narasimhan (tig Ramakrishnan
Group 3	Keigo Yamagami	Tadao (tom) Inui	Ha Bui	Mark Neal
Group 4	Kanglun Zhou	Justin Wu	Aniruddh Shahal	Matt Stockham
Group 5	Andzej Paluch	Daniel Biodrowicz	Tadeusz Alberski	Jagadeesh Yedetore
Group 6	Levi Litwiller	Jim Biggs	David Soltwisch	Richard Murphy
Group 7	Veera Chandrika	Rishabh Mohta	Michael Hu	Eric To
Group 8	Joon Lee	Tom Dorman	Mohammed S. Zaman	Goran Vukadin
Group 9	Hanchen Jiang	Arun Govindhan	Kraig Anderson	Brent Lacheta
Group 10	Woosuk (Evan) Choi	Senthil Kumar Ranganathan	Justin To	Wesley Wu
Group 11	Naureen Sajwani	Darya Tenenbaum	William Michels	Anand Sankara
Group 12	Efrain Aguirre	Miguel Yu	Adit Raha	Susanna Eschbach

Pictures

And here are the happy winners on the podium.

 

Final Thoughts

The organizing team would like to thank everyone who signed up for the tournament and participated.  Your support and kind words feed our desire to organize more high quality events.

Jim Brandt

John Brandt (Tournament Director)

Michael Curry

Swavek Lorenc (Tournament Referee)