City ace keeps fine streak alive

(Page 38, Times Colonist newspaper, Sunday, Jan 4, 1981.)
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chess
City ace keeps fine streak alive
By Ray Kerr

One of the more interesting Island tournaments was the Victoria Fall Open, which featured some interesting innovations.

The most interesting was that the players were divided into groups of six - except for one group at the end - and then held a six-player, five round round-robin tournament in each group.

It made for quite a tournament in the top group, where Victoria ace Jeff Reeve had to contend with Danny Scoones, another Victoria master, former B.C. champion Gordon Taylor of Vancouver as well as three Lower Mainland experts, Ross Cameron, Art Milne and Ian Skulsky.

But there was no stopping Reeve on this occasion.

The highest rated chessmaster on Vancouver Island allowed only a draw against Scoones and polished off the rest to finish first with 4 1/2-1/2.

This performance has lifted his rating past the 2300 mark, putting him in strong master class on the Canadian chess ladder.

Scoones also did well by not only drawing against Reeve but also defeating Taylor.

However, he also lost to Skulsky and had to be content with finishing alone in second place with his 3 1/2-1 1/2 score.

Taylor has one of his poorer weekends, losing to both Reeve and Scoones while knocking off the three lower-rated experts from the mainland.

All in all quite a showing by the two Victoria players, which must have pleased Lynn Stringer, who organized and directed the event.

The next group was also a strong one as it did not have a player rated under 1800 - in other words they were all Class A entrants.

Harry Moore of Victoria put on another excellent showing and won with a 4 1/2-1/2 score to likely boost his rating about the 2100 mark - a strong expert.

Al Holzknecht of Victoria was second with 3-2 while Darrel Hunt and Ed Seedhouse, both Victorians, finished next with 2 1/2-2 1/2.

In any event, it was certainly an interesting tournament and now we have to wait and see what Santa has lined up for us on the chess tournament front during the coming years.

Unfortunately, the reappearance of the talented chess star resulted in a sparkling victory for his opponent Boston senior master Jack Bono, who should be proud of this win achieved in a Boston-Seattle match during the U.S. Telephone League championship last year.

Suttles' team from Seattle, which also has several other players, did not make the playoffs, and Washington eventually took it all.