Tournaments held at the Santa Monica City College have been a fixture in the Southern California table tennis scene.  I remember going to these tournaments in the mid 90's.  I recall watching several promising young players like Edward Chang and MinHee Hwang, Shelley and Stacey Lee.  I dont think these few I mentioned are active in table tennis, though I've heard several occassions MinHee took up golfing.  Stacey is a famous model up in the Bay Area.

Back to the Great Western Open.  This tournament is always met with a lot of excitement.  It is the first two day tournament of the year in Southern California.  In some years, entries have been huge, 250 plus.  There are so many good things about the Santa Monica tournaments:  large gym, large courts, wooden floor, bleachers, good lighting, good parking, availability of food. drinks and snacks.  One bad aspect for the tournament held in late June and August, the gym can get quite warm and humid.  However, the biggest gripes by players over the years had been poor time and table management.  One solution to this problem is to pattern the events similar to NATT where each day is a mixture of low and high rating events.  The current format has U1800 and lower on saturday and U1900 and higher including the Open on sunday.

Here is a case in point.  Teddy Tran and I entered the U3600 doubles event that commenced at 8:30 saturday morning.  If I recall, there were 16 -18 teams.  We finished playing the quarterfinals by 9:30 advancing to the semifinals. The other quarterfinals in our bracket was not played until 12:15.  We had to forfeit out SF match since Teddy had a piano test at 2:30.  The U1500 event had been listed to start at 9:30, I believe some RR groups started after 12:00 noon.

For those interested in taking photographs, this playing hall is a great place to shoot. In fact, there were quite a few photo-graphers present. The gym has great even lighting and lots of room to roam around.  New to the tournament were a group of talented youngsters from Guadalajara, Mexico.  Unaware of the USATT rating system, their coach had entered them in events way below their level of play.  The kid from this group, Salvador Uribe, was given an initial rating of 2357.

The interesting match for sunday was the U2300 round of 8's with Brana Vlasic of San Diego vs former Kazakhstan national player Elie Zainabudinova.  Brana lost the first two games, then comes back to win the next two games at 1 and 7.  The 5th game was a nail bitter.  It went to deuce with Brana pulling out a 17-15 win.  Brana continued her good play in the next round beating 2258 rated Fred Li 3-0 to advance to the quarterfinals.  The other match that had a lot of people watching was in the U2300 RR that pitted upcoming junior 13 year old 2167 rated Anand Engineer vs Adam Bobrom, a TT player aka a comedy performer in the local comedy clubs.  Anyone who knows Adam, he loves to lob and is quite good at it.  He has very good touch and is quite athletic to boot.  The match was tied at 2-2.  Anand is tired.  The highlight of this match occurs in the 5th game prior to the side change.   Anand serves and before long Adam starts to lob.  Anand hits three shots in a row to Adams BH, Adams returns the last one towards the middle.  Anand loop kills two shots wide to the FH and Adam manages to return them.  Then Anand pounds another one much wider to the FH and Adam lunges towards the ball and in the process losses his blade.  Anand seeing Adam is down on the floor decides to do a drop shot, not realizing Adam had imparted some backspin on the ball.  Anand tries his drop shot and the ball hits the net.  Point to Adam.  The crowd goes wild.  Adam goes on to win the 5th at 6.  Another match of note was the U2300 SF between Diane Chen vs Earl Alto.  Diane Chen has reverted back to playing PH with short pips.  She won 3-1 with controlled placement of her blocks to neutralize the constant attacks of Earl, who has been rated as high as 2391.

In the Open event, there were no upsets.  Jim Du took care of Jones Baldonado 4-0.  Jones who had caused quite a stir taking first place in the U2300 and O40 at the Berkeley Western Open.  He also had crushed Ariel Hsing 4-0 in the Open RR.  Jim did not have any difficulty playing against Jones' style of defending.  Both Thilina Piyadasa and Ben Johnson took care of their QF opponents Diane Chen and Salvador Uribe respectively 4-0 and 4-0.  The QF match between Dr. Le and Jessie Mai was quite interesting.  Jessie is a left handed shakehand player originally from the city of Wuhan, Hubei province, China.  Jessie had beaten Ben Johnson in the Open final several months back in a nonsanctioned tournament.  After that she had lost to John Thach Tran in the QF at a Power Pong tournament earlier.  This time she face Dr. Le, himself a giant killer.  A year ago at this same tournament, Dr. Le won a close one 18-16 in the 7th over Jim Du, then rated 2625.  This time around Jessie was leading 3-1, then proceeds to lose the next 3 games with identical scores of 11-9, 11-9 & 11-9!  It was clear Jessie had some difficulty in dealing with slower and more spinnier shots.

Jim Du dispatched Dr. Le in the SF 4-0.  There was not going to be a repeat of a year ago.  The match between good friends Thilina and Ben went the distance with Thilina taking the match with a 14-12 win in the 7th.  The final between Jim and Thilina was not as close as the scores.  Jim was rusty very tentative with his shots.  As usual, Thilina covered the table mostly with his FH and using his backhand to strategically place his blocks.  Match to Thilinia 4-2.