I am very happy to announce, that we finally found the type of GM coach that we have been looking for. Vlatko is a Grandmaster who is no longer very active in the chess circuit and is giving almost all of his energies to coaching and helping to develop the next generation of chess talent.  Atanas knows Vlatko personally and vouches for his work ethic and honesty. We have also broke off our relationship with Grandmasters Ivan and Milos.  Although they did an excellent job in their lessons, their availability and dependability proved to be too much of a problem.  We do not expect this to occur with with Vlatko.  To help promote Vlatko, we have lowered the price for our GM coaching.  As always, we strive for the best for The CCL Chess School. CLICK HERE for more information on Vlatko.

Vikram Srivastava and Justin Storn drew each other while winning against everyone else to share the title of Queen City Classic Champion. Vikram took home the 1st place trophy on tie-breaks. CCL was also the 1st place team in the Championship section.

I will list below all top 5 finishes by CCL players in the Open sections:

K-12 Open
1 – Vikram Srivastava
2 – Justin Storn
4 – Benjamin Yin
5 – Aryan Balyan

4-6 Open
3  – Rishik Lingam
5 – Varun Sathyajeeth

K-3 Open
2 – Edward Zha
5 – Arjun Krishna

Since we allow CCL players to play on other teams, it has the negative side effect of making both CCL individual and team results appear worse than they should.  I do plan on staying on the high road and keeping this policy going forward. However, I encourage every CCL player to enter this tournament on a CCL team.

Below are some pictures of the CCL teams that won a trophy.  Some players who were on the team left before the award ceremony and did not make it in the picture.  The team trophies were raffled off to the team members that were present at the time.

Congratulations to Rohan Padhye for winning the Ohio K-3 Championship with a perfect 5-0 score. Rohan has been on fire, also recently winning the U-1500 section of the Pittsburgh Open.

In the K-6 Championship, CCL did not win the championship but did finish 2nd – 5th place with all players scoring 4-1.  In order of tie-breaks, the finishing order was:

1. ——————
2. Adeti Mohanselvan
3. Dae San Kim
4. Benjamin Yin
5. Nicholas Wang

Six CCL teams participated in the Midwest Open Team Chess Festival.  The teams were CCL-G, CCL-O, CCL-R, CCL-O, CCL-N, and CCL-V.  The last letters being a tribute to GORAN Vojinovic, former head coach of The CCL Chess School. Our top finish was clear 2nd place by the 2nd CCL team, CCL-O,  In board order, the members of that team were Anagh Kulkarni, Justin Storn, Alan Casden, and Elton Cao.  Forest Chen, 3rd board from from out first team CCL-G. won the board prize for his strong performance.  It was very nice to have Forest come up from Tennessee and Arthur Xu from Illinois to join the teams.  Forest plans on joining us again at next year’s MOTCF.  I am so glad to meet CCL players from around the country and look forward to meeting many of you at the Super Nationals this May.  One thing that we did this time, which I hope that we can do next time, was to have an all female team.  Here is a picture of that team.

Maggtie Feng will soon play in the US Woman’s Championship.  She was on Good Day Columbus this morning due to this upcoming event.  Watch the video by clicking HERE.   CLICK HERE for details on the 2017 US Woman’s Championship which is being held from March 27th to April 10th.