News

The ninety-eighth edition of the B.C. Championship was held on the Thanksgiving long weekend at the Vancouver Chess School (Arbutus Shopping Centre) – many thanks to Maxim Doroshenko for providing the site. As in the last two years, there were three new faces in this year’s Closed, all juniors: Jason Cao (12), Jack Cheng (18), and Ryan Lo (16), coincidentally the three winners of last year’s Vancouver Open held alongside the 2012 Championship. With the addition of Tanraj Sohal this meant that half the field were juniors, setting up a potential battle between youth and experience.
Six of the eight spots in the Closed are filled from qualifying events, and this year only one of those qualifiers declined their invitation (Leon Piasetski from the Langley Open, who chose to play in Holland instead). Those who accepted were Butch Villavieja (defending champion), Jack Cheng (junior champion), Tanraj Sohal (BC Open), Jack Yoos (Grand Pacific Open), and Ryan Lo (Keres Memorial). The remaining spots were filled from the ratings list; as we didn’t have to go far down the list the ratings were correspondingly high, resulting in the highest average rating (2272.5) for the championship since the year 2000. Five-time champion Jack Yoos was top-ranked and remained the favourite but his last two Closed appearances had been subpar – would he put it all together and win the title for the sixth time?

Jack Yoos won all his games with white and drew with black to amass 5.5 points, which normally would be sufficient to win the championship (the last time it wasn’t was back in 2004). Unfortunately for him, Tanraj Sohal kept pace throughout and won his last-round game to secure the title by a half point. After three rounds Yoos and Sohal were tied with 2.5 points, closely followed by Villavieja and Pechisker. On the Sunday Yoos beat Villavieja and Villavieja beat Pechisker; Yoos and Sohal agreed to a short draw which left them tied for first after five rounds, now a full point ahead of the field. On the last day Sohal had to face the trailing players, Villavieja and Pechisker, whereas Yoos had already beaten both. Villavieja obtained a promising position on the white side of an Advanced French but Sohal turned it around, leaving Sohal and Yoos tied with 5.0 points going into the last round. Sohal ground down Pechisker’s Benko Gambit (a slightly strange choice, given that Pechisker had done the same thing to Howard Wu on the white side of a Benko in a previous round) while Yoos was unable to generate enough winning chances on the black side of a Nimzo-Indian against Ryan Lo.
Thus at age sixteen Tanraj Sohal becomes, by this writer’s reckoning, the youngest B.C. champion in the ninety-eight year history of the competition. Using today’s definition of a junior as being under twenty, other junior winners would include Maurice Pratt (1951), Duncan Suttles (1963), Peter Biyiasas (1968), Bruce Harper (1973), and Loren Laceste (2011). Jack Yoos placed second by the smallest of margins, while everyone else (with the exception of Howard Wu who had a rough event) tied for third place on minus one. This time round experience largely came out ahead of youth. Despite being a junior Sohal was in sense on the side of experience; this was his fourth Closed and he has gradually improved his final standing in each of them, while this year’s debutantes (Cao, Cheng, and Lo) took some time to adjust to the competition.

Stephen Wright, BCCF Bulletin 271.