chess lessons and more, for players of all strengths and ages

In the Ohio All-Girls Championship, 4 CCL girls (Stella, Emma, Victoria, Sneha) where on the top 2 boards going into the last round.  When the dust settled Stella and Emma finished on top as co-champions with 4-1 scores, while Victoria finished in a tie for 3^rd place with Abby (Abhirami).  Abby was our big point gainer at +57.  Tie-breaks, along with the 1^st place trophy, $100 scholarship, and invitation to the National Girls Championship went to Stella.  I am pretty certain that Emma is the youngest All-Girls champion in the history of Ohio.  Don’t let the young age of these girls fool you, this is a K-12 event.  The CCL girls have now fully arrived as the dominate force in girls chess in Ohio.

Maggie and Lainie tried their luck at the Cincinnati Open and the National All Girls (Chicago) respectively, being held the same weekend.  Maggie performed well in the Open section of the Cincinnati Open while Lainie came in 8^th place in the U-10 division at the National All-Girls.

 

• 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
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  • • 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
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  • • 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
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  • 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

 

For the 2^nd year in a row, CCL wins the Midwest Open Team Chess Festival.  This year’s team (CCL has Alekhine’s gun!) was composed of:

Board 1 – Maggie Feng – 7^th grade

Board 2 – Luke Xie – 6^th grade

Board 3 – Noah Keating Adams – the old man, a college freshman

Board 4 – Chris Shen – 4^th grade

An incredible group of very young strong chess players.  Maggie and Luke were also members of last year’s MOTCF winning CCL team. This tournament brings out the strongest adult chess teams throughout Ohio.   In the last round, they demolished the top seeded team in the tournament 3.5 – 0.5.   To see our young CCL players win this event as they have done at most of the major adult tournaments (ie. last 3 State of Ohio championships, Cardinal Open, FIDE Invitationals, etc.) it is clear that a changing of the guards has taken place.  I have been playing chess in Ohio for the past 45 years, and there would only be the isolated scholastic player who would sometimes compete with the top adults of our state.  Never has there been this type of dominance by such incredibly young chess players, over the seasoned adult masters of Ohio.  I keep thinking that each occurrence is an isolated phenomena but the long trail of successes has shown that this is a real transformation of the base of chess power in Ohio.  It is amazing to be part of this piece of magic.

CCL proudly sent 7 teams to MOTCF.  This is a very strong tournament but many of you were up for the challenge, including my team that had 2^nd graders on boards 2, 3, and 4.

Our money winners were:

Team prizes:
Open Section – The team of “CCL Has Alekhine’s Gun” (Maggie, Luke, Noah and Chris)  got 4.5 points to won clear first.
U1600 – Two CCL teams (CCL4 – Sujan, Cody, Joe and Kunal and CCL6 – Anagh, Arvind, Dakshin, Justin and Aditya) got 2.0 points to be part of a 4-way tie for top U-1600 team

Board prizes:
Board 1 – Coach Alan – clear first at 4.5 points.
Board 2 – Luke and Blake were part of a three way tie at 4.5
Board 3 – Leo Zamansky got 4.0 points for a 1^st place finish. He was from Coach Hans’ team – Mulligan Chess Club – Cincinnati
Board 4 – Chris got a perfect 5.0 score and clear first.

I am very proud of all of you but especially proud of Joe Kleban.   Joe was playing Abhi in the last round.  It was a very tough battle but at the end of the game, Abhi had an easily won position and lost on time.  However, it was Joe’s clock and he forgot to set the 5 second delay.  Abhi just noticed this as he ran out of time.  If the 5-second delay was on, Abhi would have easily won the game.  The TD made the decision that since Abhi make his claim about there being no delay after his time had expired that Joe is granted the win.  Although this is the correct legal decision, it is probably not the correct ethical decision.  This is what Joe felt, even though the TD had awarded the win to Joe.  Joe then offered Abhi a draw, feeling that it was the ethically correct thing to do.  When something like this happens, I cannot but beam with respect for our young players.  By far, the most amazing move played by anyone at the 2014 MOTCF.

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ChessPiano, like ChessMath, is CCL’s attempt to provide free prodigious development activities to our students, other than chess.  CCL believes in putting the kids first and this is another attempt to help develop the more complete person.

This session was run by CCL member Harvey Friedman.  Harvey is not only one of the top scholars of our time but he is also very talented at the piano.  His piano skills are largely self-taught.  In this session, the interested CCL students played a slow piece to the group and then Harvey worked with them on ways to improve the creative and dynamic nature of the piece. Here are Harvey’s notes on his piano background.

I took piano lessons from age 7 till just before 16, when I went to MIT – where I got my math Ph.D. just before 19. I worked little on the piano before college, and much less after college, until about age 30 when I acquired my present piano. I made slow moderate progress nearly entirely on my own for about 30 years until age 60. Around that age, I got much more serious, as I found it remarkably easy to readily improve in many aspects of performance. This has continued through this day, at age 65.

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The Ohio Scholastic Invitational invited the top 25 rated K-12 players to compete in a 5 round FIDE rated tournament.  The average rating for this tournament was over 1900 and there were 3 beautiful trophies for the top 3 finishers.  CCL players took home all of the hardware.  Rahul Ramaswamy and Luke Xie tied for 1^st place with 4-1 scores, Rahul taking home the 1^st place trophy on tie breaks.  Finishing in clear 3^rd with 3.5 points was Maggie Feng.  Complete results for this tournament can be seen at https://cclchess.com/ohioscholasticinvitational/ .

The CCL IM Norm Tournament had many of the top rated players from the Midwest, where for the first time in 30 years international norms could be earned in Ohio!  The average rating for this 10 man round robin was over 2400!  Finishing in the top 2 places where CCL coaches IM Goran Vojinovic and IM Atanas Kizov.  CCL student/coach Walker Griggs came in clear 4^th place and CCL student/coach John Hughes came in clear 6^th place.  The results can be seen at https://cclchess.com/imnorm/ and all of the games can be seen at https://cclchess.com/games-from-the-ccl-im-norm-tournament/ .

These were two great events for Ohio and two great showings for CCL.  A huuuuge thanks goes out to the Hughes family for organizing these two events.  Both event seemed to go flawlessly.  It is wonderful to see families giving back to chess in Ohio.

Below are pictures from the event.

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