In the Ohio High School Championship,  CCL players Vikram Srivastava and Maggie Feng tied for 1st place with 5-1 scores and are co-champions.  Vikram won their individual game, gaining 1st place on tiebreaks, and plans on representing Ohio at the National Denker tournament.  Interestingly, Vikram won this event as a 9th grader, didn’t compete as a 10th grader and has now won it as an 11th grader.  I guess that many of you are hoping that he does not return next year.

In the Middle School Championship, CCLian Chris Shen came in clear 1st place with a 5.5 – .5 score, only yielding a very hard fought draw to Vincent Baker in the last round. Chris plans on attending the Barber tournament.  There was a 3-way tie for 2nd place with 5-1 scores amongst CCLians: Vincent Baker, Justin Storn, and Dae San Kim.

With Victoria Baker’s win at the Ohio All-Girls, CCL will represent Ohio at all of the key National Scholastic tournaments held during the beginning of the US Open.

There was a 3-way tie for 1st place at the 2017 All-Girls Championship.  1st and 3rd place on tiebreaks went to CCLians Victoria Baker and Adeti Mohanselvan.  Emma Cheng finished a 1/2 point behind in 4th place.  Due to Victoria’s 1st place finish, she has won an invitation to play in the National All-Girls Invitational, along with the top girl players from the other 49 states.  Right now, Victoria does not plan on attending so the invitation will drop down.

On the right is Victoria Baker and on the left are the top boards going into round 3.  As you see, it was a pure CCL shootout at that time with Emma Cheng vs Sneha Prabu on board 1 while Adeti Mohanselvan was battling with Victoria Baker on board 2.

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