Meet my friend Eric Hoffner 12684082. In my first two quad tournaments I played we met twice. I drew an inferior position in our first meet, then I slaughtered him in our second encounter. He was about a 1650ish.
Nicest guy you’ve ever met.
At the Thanksgiving open I played this weekend, He went through Class A players like they weren’t even there. Like a hot knife through butter. He had the greatest tournament of his life.
He won the Open with 6 straight wins. No losses or draws. His performance rating was probably around 2100.
Just a cotton-pickin’ minute. There can be only one “nicest guy you’ll ever meet.” Therefore, your 1650ish friend must be Yasser Seirawan. No wonder he beat all those A players so easily.
I didn’t know Yasser Seirawan was rated 1650, though.
I remember about 40 years ago my buddy Duane Polich (1792) played in an open in Oregon. After the obligatory first round crush, he defeated experts in the next two rounds. His round four opponent was Arthur Dake (can’t recall if he was ever awarded the GM title, but at least an IM). Dake, while not playing at his former strength was still formidable enough. Somehow Duane eked out a win in that game too. He was finally stopped in the last round, but that was a pretty remarkable run nevertheless.
At the start of the 2001 Illinois Open, Kim Pindak was rated around 1750. Despite being eligible for the Reserve section, he entered the Open. By tournament’s end, he had scored 5-1, a half point behind co-winners Dmitry Gurevich and Alexander Goldin. IIRC, Mr. Pindak was never paired with anyone under 2000, and had to play three masters. (Unfortunately, MSA records only go back to about December 2001, maybe three months after this tournament.)
IIRC, Mr. Dake was made a GM in 1986, so he would not have officially held the title when Mr. Polich beat him. The title was honorary, in recognition of his play during the 1930s. However, I don’t believe FIDE makes that practical distinction; I’ve always seen honorary GMs just referred to as “GM”.
(I only recall this because it happened the year I started playing rated events, so I was reading every bit of news that I could.)
Of course, MSA goes back to 1991, not 2001. facepalm Thanks for finding the crosstable.
It is true that Mr. Pindak did play one A-player in round 2. (Mr. Quan’s FIDE rating was already over 2200 in this tournament, and he made IM about 5-6 years after this.) Other than that, though, my memory is not bad. And he was never paired with anyone within 140 points.
Attempting to compare the two events by respective rating change runs into a false equivalency. The rating system (particularly the bonus mechanism) was different in 2001. My napkin math says Mr. Pindak would have gained about 190-200 points if his five rated games were rated today. He did win one game by forfeit against a master (who was a no-show after losing R4), but IMO, Mr. Pindak played a much stiffer field (including beating a former US Championship participant in R6) than Mr. Hoffner.
I’m not denigrating Mr. Hoffner’s excellent performance in the slightest. I wish I could claim even an approximately equal performance at any point in my history (it’s extremely hard for a non-scholastic player to gain that many rating points in one event). Mr. Pindak’s performance, however, certainly holds its own in this discussion.
Mr. Hoffner had a nice run. Good for him! However, he did not win the “Open” section of the event, as noted by the OP. He won the second section which was U2000. He seems to have had a good two years after a 5 year hiatus from regularly rated tournaments. Likely he was due a rating bump after his recent performances. Whether this was the “greatest performance ever by a Class B” player is debatable. Surely there are recent winners of U2000 and U1800 sections at major open tournaments who could lay claim to that. A few sandbaggers could probably make that claim as well. There have been many 200+ rating point games by players in “under” sections. Still it was a good tournament and time for him to step up and play in real “open” sections.
Oops, my mistake. Under 2000. Over 200 rating points is still amazing. I know he wasn’t sandbagging since I’ve played him twice. There was also a luck factor. We analyzed his best win and his opponent didn’t play that well.
Anyway, 6 wins in a row is awesome! What’s even better is the $1,000 check he got.
i still think the most incredible performance was alan troffler(?) rated 1911 or something like that tying for first in the world open back in the late 70’s. maybe '79? i don’t know why i remember some minutiae like this but can’t remember how to mate with bishop and knight against king.
Alan Trefler (IIRC, wallchart rating of 2070) scored 8-1 in the 1975 World Open, tying for first with GM Pal Benko. Trefler lost his first game, and then got medieval. He emerged with a rating just north of 2300. Since then, he started Pegasystems (they make good CRM software), and made boatloads of money.
Probably the closest thing to Trefler’s run that I’ve heard of was Hugh Tobin (also an expert) at the 1977 US Open. Tobin lost a last-round game to IM Timothy Taylor, but went on a spree against a bunch of titled players before that. Had Tobin beaten Taylor, he’d have tied for first with GM Leonid Shamkovich and GM Andrew Soltis. (Perhaps Mr. Soltis, who does post in the Forums occasionally, can correct me if my memory is wrong.)
I did not reference these performances earlier, since the title of the thread concerned the “greatest performance ever by a class B (player)”.
Your mention of this tournament got me looking at some of the participants. I noticed Hugh Myers played. He was one of my English teachers in HS. We played many games, most of which he won. He was probably 2200 back then.
I remember this event because Mr. Pindak was a source of admiration/jealousy for a number of the Reserve section players (myself included). I would’ve traded tournaments with him in a second.
I can’t believe I mis-remembered the co-winners. I guess I just automatically associated Goldin with Gurevich in the early '00s, as they tended to travel together.
(Interesting story from that tournament: in Open R5, the two GMs were paired as the only 4-0 scores. I looked at the pairing sheet maybe 5 minutes before the round was scheduled to start. There was a draw marked on board 1. My guess was that they played a blitz match the night before, where the loser had to wake up to mark the draw.)
I don’t have any first-hand memory of either Trefler’s or Tobin’s performances. I first heard about both years ago, while having a discussion with the late Jerry Hanken. I got curious, and did some digging to find out more details. Eventually, I had enough bits of information from what I considered reliable sources to piece together the stories.
The performance rating formula doesn’t really mean anything when you have a perfect score (you’ll notice that the USCF calculator will always just give you a performance rating of the best player you beat + 400). It’s also hard to say that someone is playing like a 2200+ when they haven’t played anyone over 2000. Nevertheless that is very impressive. Even changing one win to a draw so that the performance rating formula actually has something to work with results in a performance rating of 2270. Judging from his results since 2014 his rating had a lot of catching up to do and maybe now it is close to “correct”.
