CCL cleans up at Queen City — The CCL Chess School

Queen City is the best scholastic tournament in the Midwest and was held on Saturday March 23rd. Due to a splitting of our forces that weekend, with us having two teams compete at MOTCF, CCL did not win either 1^st place individual or 1^st team in the Open section. Something that we have been very accustomed to doing. The team barely missed 1^st, finishing in 2^nd place to a Cleveland team with five 12^th graders on their team. Our top individual score was by Vikram, finishing 4-1 and coming in 3^rd place. Great courage was shown by Timothy, a new CCL 2^nd grader who fought amongst the tall trees in the K-12 section. His courageous efforts were rewarded by gaining 142 rating points. The winner of the tournament was Jonathan Clinton. CCL was matched up to him in rounds 2 (Alex, who probably lost to do a bad TD call), 3 (Tim), 4^th (Vikram). In all three of these games we were better with our opponent being in bad time pressure. However, we lost all of them. That is why during our O-1600 camp this May, we will be discussing and practicing how to avoid time pressure and how to take advantage or your opponent’s time pressure. This is a very important topic which has proven to be the Achilles heel of many of us.

In the other 3 open sections (K-3, 4-6, and 7-9) CCL was its typical dominate self, easily winning 1^st place team and 1^st place individual in each of these sections. Below are all of the individual trophy winners:

K-3

1^st Rusty 5 beating 1^st grader Emma in round 5 and regaining his swagger

3^rd Viktor 4 1^st grader

4^th Lainie 4

5^th Emma 4 1^st grader

6^th Elton 3.5 was not in CCL then but in CCL now

7^th Doc 3.5

10^th Gavin 3.5 1^st grader

4-6

1^st Sujan 5 riding a rocket ship to the top

2^nd ArvindSP 4.5

3^rd Sourjya 4.5