Congratulations to our latest and 14th CCL graduate, Jason Wang.

• Jason earned his CCL graduation at the National Elementary School Championship, in Nashville, Tenn.
• He became the youngest CCL graduate, earning the honor while still in third grade, surpassing Chris Shen’s mark of the beginning of 4th grade.
• This Who’s Who chess list has been growing with great talent which is clearly characterized by a high value on perseverance and hard work.
• What is a CCL graduate?  It is an honorary degree that we give to any CCL player who has worked their way through the ranks while in CCL and has made a USCF experts rating (>= 2000).   This group is becoming a who’s who of the top young talent around.  It entitles them to lifetime membership in CCL, based on good behavior, without the requirement of taking lessons (although most still do).  They are allowed to receive email spam from me for the rest of their lives!!
• Who will be next?
• CCL graduates are (in order of obtainment):
• • John Hughes
  • Walker Griggs
  • Maggie Feng
  • Rahul Ramaswamy
  • Annorjan Naguleswaran
  • Luke Xie
  • Chris Shen
  • Noah Keating-Adams
  • Sam Massick
  • Anagh Kulkarni
  • Vikram Srivastava
  • Aristo Liu
  • Abhi Ramaswamy
  • Jason Wang

This year CCL had 6 players officially qualify for the 2015 World Youth Championship, although they are opening the tournament up to everyone who wants to participate.  The tournament will be in Greece, this fall.

Our official girl qualifiers are:

U-10
Emma Cheng

U-14
Meghana Bhanuprasad

U-16
Maggie Feng

Our official boy qualifiers are:

U-10
Jason Wang

U-12
Aristo Liu
Chris Shen

 

The top CCL finishers in the National HS tournament were Maggie Feng, Chris Shen, and Vikram Srivastava who each scored 5.5/7, finishing in a tie for 10^th place.  Based on tiebreaks, they finished in 24^th, 26^th, and 27^th places respectively.   I am hopeful for a CCL National HS champion in the future as these 3 players are in 8^th, 5^th, and 9^th grades.

We had a very fine finish by 3^rd grader Emma Cheng in the U-1600 section who tied for 2^nd place with 5 wins, 1 draw, and 1 bye.  Also of note was a nice tournament by Mark Carroll who gained 157 rating points and Dominic Mayhew who gained 113 rating points.

The complete cross-tables for this tournament can be found at:

http://www.uschess.org/tournaments/2015/hs/?page=RESULTS

As was expected, there is no program that can compete with CCL. Although most of the top players in CCL stayed away from the fast time control, enough attended to secure CCL most of the tournament’s top awards.  The top CCL awards in the Open sections were:

K-12 individual – 1st place individual – Luke Xie

K-12 team – 1st place by winning 6 of the top 8 individual spots

7-9 individual – 2nd place – Victor Lim

7-9 team – 2nd place

4-6 individual – tie for 1st (Justin Wu, Dakshin Pisini, Aditya Jambhale, Ethan Ferkins, Karthik Kallam, Dominic Mayhew)

4-6 team – 1st place by winning 6 of the top 7 spots.

K-3 individual – 1st place – Ethan Fang

K-3 team – 1st place – top 3 individual finishers

 

 

Congratulations to 7th grader Luke Xie 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.