Pacific Coast Open 2012

17th Pacific Coast Open
July 19-22, 2012

The 17th Annual Pacific Coast Open was held from July 19-22, 2012, at the Sheraton Agoura Hills Hotel, 30100 Agoura Road, Agoura Hills, California.

To the dozen or so players in the Pacific Coast Open from the Peoples’ Republic of China, and on behalf of Continental Chess and the U.S. Chess Federation, I want to thank each of you for making this trip so far away from your familiar home towns all the way to the United States, and for choosing to include our chess tournament among all your activities.

Your Chinese ratings appeared to be similar to the USCF ratings, but the difficulties posed by the seemingly infinite number of possibilities presented by different players who have the same exact name in English, different ratings for the same player, and different ratings for players in different regions, all proved to be too much for me to comprehend in the short weekend. I apologize if my lack of understanding led to inconsistencies in applications or unwarranted surprises in your pairings.

To Yangboya Liu and Yidong Chen, I personally wish to thank you both for donating over $900 of your prizes to the other prize winners in the Under 1900 Section, resulting in them each receiving nearly $230 more than they otherwise would have received had you not done this. I hope everyone who reads this understands the magnanimity of this offer which you have made to help promote friendship and goodwill between our two peoples.

To the young chaperone of this great group of serious chess enthusiasts, thank you for all your hard work in organizing this trip of a dozen players even younger than you to visit our country for the first time – I hope you also had a chance to visit Disneyland and have some fun! And I look forward very much to seeing you all in our future tournaments!

To all the players in the Pacific Coast Open, I offer my apologies as well for the delays and inconsistencies and confusion wrought by my own lack of a complete understanding of the nature of these foreign ratings. I think I have a little better idea now of these things should work in the future.

And to everyone who reads this, I want you all to know how hard Quan Long, who volunteered his time for this entire weekend, worked to make sure that he did his best to keep everything running as smoothly as possible, under the circumstances. His devotion to your concerns presages a bright future for him, in whatever endeavor he chooses.

Thank you very much everyone, for playing in our tournament.

Respectfully,

Steve Immitt,
Chief Tournament Director, Pacific Coast Open

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