CCL does well at the Queen City Classic — Welcome to the CCL Chess School!

CCL does well at Queen City Classic, winning the team championship in top section, where many of our students ‘played up’ into. We also won the team championship in 4-6 and took 2^nd place in both 7-9 and K-3.
The winner in the open section is a master from W.V. (Advait Patel) who is the same age as Luke and a friend of Luke. Both of them were the lone 4-0 scores going into the last round but Advait got the better of Luke and won the tournament. Both of the boys are planning to return next year to again fight for the championship. Actually Luke plans on playing in the Queen City Classic for until he graduates.
- As you all know by now, Luke is one of my heroes. While everyone else is worrying about their ratings, Luke plays in whatever tournament he wants to play in. Yes, he is concerned about his rating but he does not put that before the enjoyment and value of the experience that he will gain. As a benefit of this he keeps gaining more and more valuable experiences and in the long run he is becoming a stronger player which is reflected in his rating. He is not letting the short sightedness of ‘protecting his rating’ get in his way of enjoying his chess. And in the long run, he is coming out the winner.
Listed are the top 10 and 3.5 CCL finishers in each section.
- K-12 Open – 1^st place team
- - 2 Luke Xie
  - 3 Vikram Srivastava
  - 4 Vincent Baker
  - 5 Sujan Rachuri
  - 8 Arvind Sai Prasad
  - 9 Jason Wang
  - 10 Tim Goldenberg
  - 11 Divyesh Balamurali
- 7-9 Open – 2^nd place team
  - 4 Jacob Eismann
  - 6 Victor Lim
- 4-6 Open – 1^st place team
- - 2 Om Borkar
  - 3 Ethan Ferkins
  - 4 Justin Huang
  - 5 Soham Joshi
  - 7 Yutong (Elton) Cao
  - 9 Alvin Anand
- K-3 Open – 2^nd place team
  - 4 Kellan Ren
  - 9 Emma Cheng
- Blindfold Exhibition with Jason
- This is an interesting story. Usually on Friday night, one of their events would be Gregory Kaidanov and Irena Krush playing a blindfold game. This year they put a twist on the game with each blindfold player being paired up with a random 1600+ player. They played in a turn, like double-player in ping-pong (not tennis). Jason was picked up because of his 1600+ rating. GM Ashley was surprised about his rating/height and wanted the parents to verify. There is a video of this game at http://youtu.be/7xchVa2TH-w