Basically, I threw myself off a couple of times in the flyers and reports for the Western. Once it was because I simply reused the flyer from the previous year and changed the relevant date information but forgot to change the ordinal number of the event, which threw me off. Eventually I spotted the mistake.

As far as I can determine, the 1957 event marked the first running of the New Western Open, and (unlike the North Central Open) it’s never missed a year since, so 2004 should have been the 48th, not the 47th.

At one point in time I was committed to preserving all the historic events of Wisconsin chess, such as the Elo Memorial and the NCO. A few years back I realized I was unable to do so alone, that I was barely able to keep the Western going and that I had neither the time, the energy, nor the money to preserve tournaments that other people controlled, so I’ve focused my time and energy on the Milwaukee Chess Foundation tournaments such as the Western.

Going to try an experiment, perhaps for the Levit this year: No class prizes, only trophies, but cash prizes going all the way down to 15th place or even farther, depending upon entries (looking at past crosstables, it seems that 15th place overall would still include most of the class prize winners from last year). I’m taking the idea from Golf tournaments; perhaps it’ll cut down on early withdrawals from events, and encourage more players to come. The basic result could be that anyone with a 50% score walks away with money. It’s how a lot of other tournaments work. (I’m basing it on a prize table from a PGA event, that gave prizes all the way down to 50th place. The Levit has never pulled that many players, but perhaps it could if the prizes extended down low enough; I’ll publish a guaranteed prize list for 15 places, but I’ve got a table that I can add prizes from if I get more than the usual 35 players for it, so that if 100 show up the prizes will possibly extend all the way down to 50th place. The table will start to break down over 125 or so players, but I’ll run out of space in the playing rooms long before that point is reached; I can only hope I’ll have to solve that problem next year.)

Updates while running the event are tricky, but fun. I’m going to try and do better in August when we run the Roman Levit.