The 2010 Western Open is being held at the Cal gym in Berkeley this weekend and today (2/20) I played in four events: U1100, U1250, U1400, and U1550.  I didn't advance out of any of the RRs but nevertheless had a good day, going 6-5 and stunningly winning 2/3 in the U1550.  Not bad considering I've played maybe 7-8 times in the past seven weeks and am in the throes of a major EJ period, not having played with the same setup more than twice in a row since early January.

Today I was faced with the choice of either using the magellan, which is nice and slow and is the setup I've used the past two sessions, or the stradivarius which I put two sheets of vega on to see what that rubber would be like on a carbon blade.  Common sense clearly favored the magellan but the EJ in me was dying to try out the strad/vega combo so that's what I did.  After using all-wood blades for the past seven weeks the strad felt like a piece of frozen titanium.  Sub nanosecond dwell time.  We had a lot of good times together but I think the strad is officially retired.  I'm going all-wood 5-ply from now on (and if you believe that...).

The tournament seemed to be run better than previous Western/Berkeley opens where I seem to remember there being a lot of problems with events running late.  Today everything went off on time, even the last event at 6pm.  They also seem to have improved the lighting in the gym which again I remember being dimmer several years ago (and it wasn't just me, several players I talked to afterward complained about the poor lighting back then).  Today it was nice and bright.

I had the pleasure of playing against one of the rarest creatures in the TT kingdom today: the japanese penholder with lps on the fh and inverted on the bh.  Unfortunately the only lps player I faced today, all other 10 opponents being regular penholders or inverted shakehanders.  I got by him 3-1 but it was touch and go all the way.

The rest of the matches were unremarkable.  I struggled with the strad all day, especially returning serve where the combo was just too fast and high strung for me to do anything but push long.  I missed a lot of fh loops out of sheer unfamiliarity with the setup.  Well that and the fact that my fh is  a total mess these days!  Backhand was only marginally more reliable.  Overall I have to be happy.  I've been blanked at tournaments before (I remember one particularly sad 0-8 day in the same gym several years ago) and I was a little afraid today was going to be another one.  Perhaps I just got lucky with the draws or maybe all the fitness work of the past 1 1/2 years is paying off.  Or it might just have been all that ping pong training I've been doing.  Either way, I feel good to have come out ahead today.