Last Saturday 17 and Sunday 18 December marked the 66th time that the Open Langedijker Championships (also known as the OLK) were organised.
The juniors played on Saturday. Due to the unfortunately low number of entries (about 40) these were held at TTV Spirit. Amstelveen was represented with four participants.
In group 2, Taha Mansri and Vrishty and Amrit Kumar competed. Brother and sister were also in the same pool and this historic ‘battle of the Kumars’ -under the expert guidance of referee Harish- was eventually won by Vrishty in 5 games after considerable emotion. Vrishty came 3rd and Amrit 5th in the pool of 6 participants and unfortunately did not advance to the quarter-finals.
Taha, on the other hand, finished first in the group with only one loss and even made it to the finals, where unfortunately a Tempo Team player was just too strong. But a great 2nd place!
Jeffrey was in group 1, due to a misunderstanding he was slightly late which made some opponents already hoping he would not show up. Unfortunately for Jeffrey, the opponents were clearly not so strong and he managed to secure 1st place quite easily.
Hopefully more youth members will participate next year because playing a tournament is just so much fun!
The seniors followed on Sunday. Amstelveen had as many as 10 members delegated (out of a total of 110 participants).
In group 1, Arjan Verburg, Brian Bakker and Brian van den Heuvel competed. As there were also a number of first division players in both groups, our players were unfortunately unable to pull off a surprise, although Arjan even had match points against one of them.
In group 2, Harish Kumar made it to the quarter-finals and was 8-4 and 2-1 ahead in games, so very near the semi-finals (“with one leg and a half”). Unfortunately, Brian Carnas of the Victors just managed to win the match in five games and even managed to win the final in the end.
In group 3, TTVA was represented by Jeffrey van den Heuvel and Gijs Hasselman . Gijs managed to win one match but that was not enough to advance to the next round. Jeffrey lost only 1 game and went through 1st in the group and with a bye and a walkover he was immediately in the semi-finals. Despite a few tight games Jeffrey managed to win the semi-final against Marco van der Wal of VDO quite convincingly, but at 20.45 (!) after an exciting and good match, he had to let go the first prize to Youri Rasch of DOV with the smallest difference in the 5th game.
Viktor Bocz, Andrei Borisochkin and Raymond Tessensohn competed in group 4. Raymond was closest to the next round with third place in the pool, Andrei and Viktor both managed to win 1 game.
Waldo auf der Springe was our representative in group 5 and managed to qualify first for the semi-finals in the pool of 7 participants with one loss. Waldo had clearly brought his nerves of steel with him on this day, because he managed to win both the semi-finals from Mark Schilder of Victory ’55 and the final from Stijn Ruiter of TSTZ Haarlem with 11-9 in the 5th game and thus clinched the 1st place!
As always, a super fun tournament and everyone drove home cautiously due to the sleet that night.
Who knows, maybe next year we will have such a great turnout of TTV Amstelveen members again!
