Recapping the 16th annual California Open
A year ago, we made history at the California Open by welcoming a record-setting field of 33 Collins players to downtown San Francisco for the 15th annual CO. It was a pretty earth-shattering number at the time - a testament to how much CSW enthusiasm has grown in recent years, not just in the Bay Area but across North America. We were thrilled. It was one of the CoCo highlights for the calendar year 2024.
So naturally, for an encore, we aimed to go even bigger for the 2025 event.
This weekend, we were pleased to see a new record of 36 CSW players join us for the 16th annual California Open. They included world and national champions, other experts, intermediates, and novices. They were San Francisco locals as well as travelers flying in from Texas, Missouri, Maryland, Australia, Uganda, and more. This group was big, diverse, congenial, and competitive as all get out. Everyone played 20 games, and the result was an exhilarating race (almost) all the way to the finish.
I say "almost" because (let's not bury the lede any deeper here) this tournament was Ben Schoenbrun's pretty much from wire to wire, culminating in his Gibsonization after round 19. Ben got off to an insanely hot start and didn't let up from there - when the dust finally settled, he'd finished 16-4, +1157, two games up on the rest of the field. Ben is now immortalized as the eighth unique champion in the eight-year history of California Open CSW.
While Ben was dominant throughout the weekend, his victory was far from a foregone conclusion, as we had a veritable horde of expert players chasing him in the standings the whole way.
Ben started 7-1 on Friday, but the one loss was to Rasheed Balogun, who was 7-1 himself; a whole bunch of us were close behind at 6-2. The leaderboard was as crowded as could be.
On Saturday, Ben kept winning, but the rest of the field kept chasing. Ben finished the second day at 12-4; meanwhile Wellington Jighere surged to 11-5 with a huge spread, putting him just barely off the pace. Four others were also at 11-5, including a pair of lower seeds who ran off streaks of upset wins - #17 Bharath Balakrishnan found his way to third place, and #24 Zachary Dang was in sixth.
In the end, Ben couldn't be caught on Sunday. I myself ended up being the last man standing with a chance to take him down, but it wasn't meant to be. After starting the tournament 6-6, I went on a hot streak to get to 12-6 and second place, which put me in a head-to-head showdown with Ben on the stream table in round 19. We had a tight, back-and-forth game that culminated in a tense pre-endgame; I ended up making a couple of questionable moves late under time pressure, and Ben was able to find just enough points at the end to secure the victory, 453-439. It was his tournament.
Wellington bested me in the second-place game that followed, finishing 14-6; Uganda's Edgar Odongkara capped off a strong tournament with wins in his last three games to finish third at 13-7. Enoch Nwali and Zach rounded out the top five moneywinners.
This was an absolutely thrilling tournament from a competition standpoint, featuring countless great games from countless great players. Congratulations to Ben and everyone else who put forth strong performances - and thank you to everyone who helped the event run smoothly, especially our director extraordinaire Ed De Guzman.
Scrabble is a zero-sum game, and every time someone notches a win, someone else has to take an L. But at a tournament as awesome as the California Open, it almost doesn't even feel that way. As Ed so eloquently put it in his post-tournament remarks, we were all winners this weekend because we got to spend this time together playing Scrabble. I couldn't possibly say it better myself.
This event featured wins all around, from the top tables on down. The 16th annual California Open was the best one yet. We already can't wait for the 17th.