Sacramento Winter Open
Sacramento 
February 11, 2006

In the general interest category, the Open singles champion was Freddie Gabriel who defeated Peter Zajac in the final. Freddie defeated Shashin Shodhan and Peter defeated Avishy Schmidt in the semi-finals.
 
On a personal note, I was very satisfied with my own results.  Two of my three losses were 11-9 in the fifth --- first to Terence Chan in the U1900 singles quarter-finals and then to Bo Ding in the U2050 singles. 
  
The loss to Terence was a bit painful since I had come from 2-0 down to lead in the fifth game only to lose the final point on a somewhat furious exchange in which I thought I had established some amount of control but was unable to return the final high return which floated deep into my backhand corner (ignore for the moment that the end of the point was also disrupted by a ball from the adjacent table and a player following it --- ah, but that is just my bitterness speaking).
  
I also lost to Scott Gordon 3-0 in the U2250 quarter-finals.  The 3-0 result was a bit disappointing since I had actually upset Scott the last time I played him. I should have at least taken a game from him.  But Scott was playing well since he went on to win the event by defeating Mert Caglar (USATT rating = 2100+) in the semi-finals and Renjie Liu in the finals.
   
Finally, I would like to congratulate Gary Barretto and David Hanson in their play in the U3400 doubles. Although they were only semi-finalists, they were clearly the second best (if not the best!) team there.  I should know since we played them in the semi-finals.  We quickly fell behind 2-0, before we were fortunate enough to win the final three games to reach the
finals. The final itself was anti-climactic since Victor and I took that in three straight games where only the first game was ever in question.  Oh ... and thanks to our fellow MSCTT members --- Bo Ding, Jerry Poon, Qingmin Liu, etc. --- who watched and cheered us on in the finals.  That made it a lot more fun.