The Dream Police

There has been a lot of activity in the chess world lately, with the MTel Masters tournament in Sofia, Bulgaria just wrapping up, the U.S. Championships in Tulsa are heading towards the final two rounds and locally, the 11th FIDE Invitational is at the midway point and taking place not 10 minutes from my house! I’ve been tracking each of these events online and even stopped by the FIDE Invitational to watch the action first hand. For myself, I’m getting ready to embark on my own tournament activity for the summer at this weekend’s Chicago Open in Wheeling. All of this great tournament bustle got me to thinking about what it would be like to play fulltime and travel around participating in tournament after tournament. Hey, a patzer can dream can't he? A schedule such as this would be entirely possible by simply overcoming a few, minor hurdles: taking a leave of absence from my job for 3 months and stumbling across a bag full of money. Adjacent to this would be that my wife (who would certainly be thrilled to join me in these travels!) would also need to get a stay of execution from her work as well. So, here is how it starts:

Play this weekend in the 17th Annual Chicago Open in Wheeling - ok, so no real travel involved since I’ll be driving to and from, but we want to start off slow!

I do need to participate in a work-related, nearly weeklong industry function here in Chicago from June 7th to 12th, otherwise I’d get fired. But if this was a true dream scenario, we’d fly out to Las Vegas and I’d play in the National Open from June 6-8. I played in this twice back in the 90’s and haven’t been back to Lost Wages since. Think it’s changed?

The following weekend we’d fly/drive to Ohio to visit with my family AND I’d step away from the barbecue to play in the Cleveland Open from June 13-15!

We’d take a weekend off after that and then I’d drive out to Skokie (ok, so not a LOT of jet-setting travels yet, but it gets better!) for the U.S. Game/30 and Game/60 Championships on June 28-29.

The following weekend is, of course, the 36th Annual World Open in Philadelphia. This poses several conflicts to the dream scenario: first, this is the weekend of my daughter’s birthday (the 4th) AND we already have plans for a family event in Wisconsin for this holiday weekend. However, the World Open offers so many different playing schedules, I’m confident we could do both! Since this IS a pipe dream plan I’ll go ahead and say we’d jet around and get both events in, otherwise I’m filling out divorce papers.

After this, there are enough summertime tourneys that the schedule could go in a few different directions. My preference would have us passing up either the U.S. Class Championships in Houston (July 18-20, Houston in July doesn’t sound pleasant) or the Pacific Coast Open in Malibu (same weekend, Malibu in July DOES sound good though!) and passing up the Chicago Class Championships July 25-27 (which I might actually play in) for this:

From Philly we’d travel on to Mt. Snow, Vermont for the Vermont Resort Open July 11-13 – I’ve never been to this part of the country and the “Resort” part would be enticing for Maureen.

From there we would cross the border and I’d play in the Canadian Open in Montreal from July 19-27. We HAVE been to Montreal before but it was in the icy cold of winter so this would be a great new experience.

After this northeast swing, we’d come back to the Midwest to wrap things up in Dallas for the 109th U.S. Open, August 2-10 – the granddaddy of them all!

The cherry-on-top finale after Dallas would be to cross over the big pond and fly to Barcelona, Spain and play in the Sants International Open, a hugely popular 10-round chess extravaganza from Aug 22-31. Two weeks in Spain after running around all summer? Don’t wake me! don’t wake me!