Well, sort of. He stayed at the Sheraton on Friday night and had breakfast there Saturday morning. I never saw him but the lobby was full of police and all the surrounding streets were blocked off. There were about 20 police motorcycles parked out front and they all took off with a roar at about 9:45 AM when the motorcade left for the train station.
The tournament got squeezed into some smaller rooms because of some Obama event at the hotel on Friday night. The TDs were grumbling that they had been told in effect, “Contract, what contract?” I guess when someone with big clout and unlimited funds walks in the door, all bets are off as far as the hotel is concerned.
The hotel informed me in November that they had accidentally double booked both the chess tournament and another event. This caused a problem mainly for Monday, Martin Luther King Day when space will be tight. I doubt that this event had anything to do with Obama, though I did hear that we lost a little space we expected to use when he was there because it was needed by the Secret Service.
Hotels make this mistake now and then; we had a worse problem at the 2006 Chicago Open when Memorial Day was contracted to us and also rented to another group. We had already run several ads in Chess Life when we learned about this, and then eliminated the Monday holiday from our schedule and changed the 7 round event to a 6 rounder. These changes cost the tournament about 200 entries, and after considerable argument we were compensated by the hotel.
We didn’t arrive until Saturday morning, unfortunately too late to see Obama or his secret service entourage, so I don’t know how much the overcrowding had to do with Obama but rather with some pharmacological type conference that appeared to be taking place in the same space as the tournament. It meant that tournament rooms were constantly being shifted around and the skittles area was smaller. It was mostly a problem on Monday when there is also an annual MLK day luncheon in the hotel and things were really overcrowded. There were also issues with overheating and running out of water in the tournament rooms but in terms of the actual running of the tournament – pairings going up on time, etc. – things ran very smoothly from this chess parent’s perspective so hopefully Steve Immit and all of his able assistant TDs will not abandon us for California next MLK weekend.
It was nice to see the attendance was up again this year. My only complaint was the brutal heat in the playing room during round 5. Though part way through the round the A/C came on. I actually didn’t miss being in the other part of that ball room space where last year I kept hearing all the noise from the lobby bar during the football game. Though I guess since the Eagles choked on their lead, that was the reason it was so quiet.
