The 2025 Taxing Quads are in the books, with upsets putting newer or infrequent players in the top half of the cross tables and toppling pre-event favorites.
Twenty-two players entered the 2025 edition of this ever-popular event, one of our three annual quad events (with the Ajeeb Quads coming in August, followed by the Turkey Quads in November). To accommodate this number indivisible by four, a 6-player mini-Swiss was added to the four top quads.
Quad A featured three Class A players and one high Class B player, John Frostad. Frostad managed a draw against Nikolay Bulakh and a win against Ben Patterson to secure third place and knock on the Class A door with a post-event rating of 1797. Bulakh scored an upset himself, beating Michael Cambareri in the final round to take the Quad in decisive fashion.
In Quad B, players separated by just 95 pre-event rating points sorted to opposite ends of the results bell curve, with the top two players, Walter van Heemstede Obelt and Joe Ong scoring 3 and 2 points respectively, with the bottom half of the quad splitting a point in the first round. As a result, Walter added a shocking 73 points to his post-event rating. His clean sweep was the best result of the Quad groups.
In Quad C, Khai Le notched an impressive tie for second place with Craig Moore. Khai entered the event a 150-point underdog against Moore, the top rated player in the group.
In Quad D, Omar Embaby had the best event performance behind Walter VHO. Avoiding losses and scoring 2.5 points gave him a post-event rating boost of 96 points (provisional). Michael Michalak scored a draw against Embaby, avoiding a loss in time pressure to take second place. His post-event rating of 1398 puts him just below Class C.
Karl Milton posted the third unblemished performance of the event, joining Walter VHO and Omar Embaby. His 3.0 took the mini-Swiss running away, taking him from second-highest rated pre-event to highest post-event. The pressure on higher ranked players to convert their advantages is intense, and Karl justified his ranking, beating Jim Burney, his rival for the top spot, in a head-to-head final round match-up.
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