On the eve of our first club championship, I would like to share some thoughts on the relaunch so far:

• Attendance jumped 35% during our Poughkeepsie Fall Open compared to the Turning Leaves from years past with several first time players showing up.  However, we did not draw any current masters with our free promotion (only future ones).
• The club championship starting Monday will be our first attempt at finding a clear club champion.  In years past, whoever won the Dutchess County Championship – even on tiebreaks – was the defacto club champion.  Hopefully, attendance will be on par or exceed that of the DCC of recent years’ past.
• Going to one-week events between Thanksgiving and President’s Day was purely for safety’s sake after an ice storm during a multiweek event last January imperiled our players.  The round should have never been played but there was no dedicated system in place to address borderline bad weather (a historic blizzard is obvious).  The TD drives less than 10 mins to direct, its not the same thing as someone coming from 30+ minutes away in that type of storm.  Cancellations will occur via website, Facebook and Twitter from about 24 hours before the event starts.
• Whoever plays in the Amateur Team East in 2018 under the club’s name will have their entry fee for the tournament paid for by the club.  In a pipe dream, we would like to have a junior team (all under 18), a senior team (all over 50) and a regular team all participating.  It might happen…
• Whoever plays in our Columbus Day blitz, Thanksgiving blitz (or club championship playoff) and President’s Day blitz (or the Amateur Team East under the club name) will have free entry to the Hudson Valley Blitz championship next Spring.  For all blitz tournaments, we also went to 3 2 (delay or increment) to align with FIDE and minimizing playing purely to flag the opponent (even though that’s still possible).