2019 Aurora Summer Open was held on a hot Saturday of July 6, 2019.  Tournament organizers feared that US Nationals which were held the week of July 4th in Las Vegas would decrease attendance but were proved wrong when the tournament filled up completely 3 weeks before the registration deadline.  Over 140 players expressed interest in our tournament but only 96 successfully registered for one or more events.  Many of those who decided to register late ended up on the waiting list and some of them were able to play when others withdrew.

Of the 96 players who registered successfully only 3 didn’t show up.  Majority of players came from IL and WI (9), but we also had players from IA (2), KY (2), CA (2), MO (1), MN (1) and even as far as New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Ontario Canada.  Despite good venue conditions several players went home early due to fatigue or other commitments when the playoff rounds stretched for too long or were not aware that we play matches for 3rd and 4th place.

Many players who entered into more than one event ran into scheduling conflicts and ended up waiting longer for their playoff matches when they had to divide time between round robin and playoff rounds of two different events.  We apologize for these delays but they are almost impossible to avoid given relatively little table time and players desire to play as many events as possible.  We made an effort to keep the play progressing by scheduling playoff round matches during round robin phase and I think that made a difference in slightly shorter wait times for some players.

Despite these delays most of the events started on time.  The last matches in U700 event ended about 9:15 pm.

The young players who train hard, keep improving and beating more experienced players who have less and less time to practice.  One such player who showed a lot of improvement was 11 years old Zayd Syed (1794) who beat several higher rated players.  Zayd is coached by Brian Bae who runs a successful table tennis training program in Prospect Heights.  The other highly effective local training program is the Experior Club Junior Program which grew such young stars as Sid and Nandan Naresh, Patryk Zyworonek and Justin Wu.

Sponsors

We would like to thank JOOLA for sponsoring this tournament and Englelber Solis for setting up a booth selling JOOLA merchandise.  JOOLA has been a gracious supporter of our tournaments small and big (Aurora Cup) and we thank them for this support throughout the years.


JOOLA07_blue400x157

We used JOOLA Prime balls and only 3 or 4 of them broke which is significant improvement over previous version of JOOLA plastic ball.


JOOLAPrimeBall

Results

The tournament offered 11 events and here are the results from all of them.  They were published on OmniPong on Saturday and sent for processing to USATT on Monday.

Event First Place Second Place Third Place Fourth Place
Open Singles RR Felipe Morita Oliver Gartner John McDermott Danny Williams
Under 2400 RR Felipe Morita Zedric Sta Catalina John McDermott Dong Liu
Under 2200 RR John McDermott Dong Liu Justin Wu Zayd Syed
Under 2000 RR Jerry Lou Zayd Syed Danny Williams Aliraza Ashiqali
Under 1900 RR Yanko Stoykov Sasha Veljkovic Faizaan Shaikh Aliraza Ashiqali
Under 1800 RR Vadim Korneev Faizaan Shaikh Van Johnson Anujay Gupta
Under 1700 RR Freddie (zheyua Fan Mark J. Hoffman Jim Gableman Paul Krynski
Under 1600 RR Eric To Lefan Zhang Xinchen Pan Frank Kang
Under 1400 RR Veera Chandrika Wesley Wu Hanchen Jiang Ron Stevens
Under 1200 RR Ethan Talreja Tsetsen Batkhuyag Arun Govindhan Sathiyaraj Jagadesh
Under 1000 RR Anthony Ty Scott Finley Nathan To Nathanael Stevenson
Under 700 RR Michael Curry Jeevith Veera Karthikeyan Krishan Sophie Sharoen

Photos

I took some photos of players and created a small album on Google here.  If you were on the podium you can find your picture there.

We would like to thank all who participated in the tournament.  If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends to join one of our next tournaments.  The next one will be 2019 Aurora Fall Open on September 28, 2019.