Welcome to the CCL Chess School!

chess lessons, for players of all strengths and ages

THE CCL CHESS SCHOOL
Private Chess Lessons … with group activities
… for students of all ages and strengths
Alan Casden – CEO – (614) 561-2718
Facebook = https://www.facebook.com/cclchess

Luke Xie becomes CCL’s 5th Master

Congratulations to 7th grader Luke XLuke at Queen Cityie for becoming the 5th CCL student to earn a national masters rating of over 2200.  Preceding Luke was John Hughes, Walker Griggs, Maggie Feng, and Chris Shen.  Luke earned his master’s rating by winning the Queen City Classic, sweeping the field 5-0.  Click here to see his last round win vs. fellow CCL student, Vikram Srivastava, when they were both 4-0 and competing for the title.

CCL comes up on top in Ohio HS and MS Championships

Vikram and Aristo

Our latest Ohio 2015 Champions:
High School – Vikram Srivastava
Middle School – Aristo Liu

Without a lost game among them, Vikram and Aristo represented CCL well at the state HS and MS championships.  Now Vikram has earned the right to represent Ohio at the National Denker tournament while Aristo has earned the right to represent Ohio at the National Barber tournament. Last year Vikram won the Middle School Championship and competed in the Barber tournament. Complete results are posted at http://www.ohioscholasticchess.org/2015hsmsresults.htm .

The Midwest Open Team Festival (MOTCF) was also held last weekend where CCL teams won Silver, Bronze, and U-1600.

 

Emma on The Good Morning Columbus Show

Emma Cheng, interviewed by NBC NEWS, regarding her upcoming bout with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

UPDATE

The Dispatch Gets it Right

My hats off to Lori Kurtzman from the Dispatch who got the story right, from beginning to end. Her insights, concern for accuracy, and ease to talk with, was a marvel to me.  Thank you so much for telling this story correctly. Here is her story:

Pre-fight - http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2015/03/06/arnold-chess.html

Post fight - http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2015/03/08/8-year-old-is-no-pawn.html

Both Ethan and Emma represented CCL very well, showing great composure dealing with all of the news media and cameras back stage. Since Emma was the initial, and the local player, much of the focus was on her.  However Ethan performed equally as well, both in his chess and in his behavior.  Thank you both, for confirming that CCL is a program with class.

This was not really a fair chess match as although Arnold may be a good chess player among his peers, he does not really compete with us.  Here are the first few moves of the game where Arnold, playing white against Emma, was down by a pawn and bishop after only 7 moves!

CCL Welcomes 2 New Coaches

With great pride we are welcoming two very accomplished chess coaches to the CCL family.  Not only do I think a great deal of them, Jelena things so much of Zoran that she married his twin brother IM Goran Arsovic.  People who know this author might think that this is one of those mean Balan jokes, but no this is for real!   Please welcome IM Zoran Arsovic and his sister-in-law WFM Jelena Arsovic to the CCL family.  What a thrill it is to have the two of them join our program.  Zoran has all 3 of his GM norms and just needs to raise his rating to get the title.  But much more important than that, he has extensive history of quality experience as a chess coach.  Jelena is going to be working in our Pre-CCL program.  Having a female coach in our Pre-CCL program should really help us to develop our girl’s program to even greater heights than we have taken it already.  And it is my understanding that these are two very honest individuals with a high degree of personal integrity.  Our search for additional coaches has taken awhile, as we needed to be absolutely sure that it will not lower the high bar that we have set for CCL.  More information on these new coaches in the CCL family can be see on the coaches page.