Grade Nationals Report

Richie scored 6.0/7.0 in the 2010 Grade Nationals which put him in a tie for 2nd (4th on tie-breaks). He was pleased with his result since 4th was just high enough to get a four-poster (a trophy with four posts on the bottom). As expected, the deep field made for a very interesting tournament with many upsets wins and drama, but at the end of the day the event favorite, Joaquin Perkins, emerged as repeat champion. Congratulations Joaquin!

I've become a pretty decent judge of chess strength at the grade-school level, so I was not surprised at all that Richie's friend Corwin placed 2nd and came within a move of winning outright. I had been quite impressed with a couple of games I saw him play when he was just starting and even more impressed after watching him review a few games this tournament with his coaches--considering how long he has been playing, he has a very mature understanding of chess from what I can tell.

Although Richie's final placing was pretty much in-line with his pre-tournament seeding, I actually feel that he's made real strides in his play in the last few months. Perhaps I am succumbing to parental pride, but I really feel his play is more sophisticated than his rating suggests and expect that with a little more maturity he will soon pose a real challenge for players rated under 1500. Whereas many of the games at his level appear to be won by "tactical bullying," I found his wins from this tournament to be due mainly to excellent logic which ultimately is what is needed as he progresses to tougher and more careful opposition. Richie will still need to improve his defensive skills a little in order to more comfortably dispatch the sort of naive "aim everything at the King" desperado attacks that are commonplace at the scholastic level. He'll also need to tighten up his endgame and endgame transitions to convert more "won games" than he is currently, but overall I think the near-term future is bright for his progress.

Wins
+ Four-poster for the win.
+ Friends in the tournament make it more fun.
+ Mastered the art of lowering our expectations at Disney: the food ... didn't make us sick, the coffee was ... hot, the buses were ... free, and the lines ... ok, there's nothing good to say about lines.

Draws
+/- Supposedly this is the last year at the Coronado Springs. Hopefully the next place will be an uptick.
+/- Based on consumption patterns at Disneyworld, the New Normal is the same thing as the Old Normal.

Losses
- 40 degrees in Florida? So much for swimming...
- Sketchy Orlando cab driver purposely driving us to the wrong branch of a nearby restaurant to run up a tab.
- Sketchy Orlando cab driver driving our friends in circles to run up a tab.
- Why is every meal at Disney $20 a person for food court fare?
- Endgame blunders that turn losses to wins to draws to wins to losses...

How Do You Prepare Your Kids For Big Events?

I often find myself wondering what (if anything) other parents of children in these large national chess do before the large national events.

Before one of his first major events, I had Richie focus on tactics. This was the advice I had seen and heard over and over, and for good reason. Mostly I had Richie work through problem sets with specific tactical motifs. I found that he was very good when he knew what to look for, but in real-life game situations he could still miss simple tactics. The result: he did well, but got fancy in some games and sacrificed unsoundly...

As his tactical strength improved I shifted focus a bit and would (before major tournaments) attempt to prepare for him for the most common openings. Part of the reason I did this was that I ultimately wanted him to study middle game concepts and positional thinking but I needed him to get into similar positions as often as possible so that we could talk about common plans. I just wasn't strong enough to have these discussions if he played a wide variety of openings where I couldn't study beforehand the common ideas. The result: he did well, got some decent advantages out of the opening but then missed some tactical wins. On the other hand, he began playing very quickly in the opening as they became rote and didn't seem to realize he was out of his "book." Relying on "feel" to choose the right moves and coming to expect appropriate moves to jump out at him made him liable to play superficially at the early stages of a game.

Over the last summer, we worked a lot on positional chess. I tried reviewing grandmaster games with him that systematically touched on certain positional themes. The result: he'd win a pawn or get an outpost and then relax assuming his opponent would fold. Unfortunately his opponents somehow managed to comeback from positional bankruptcy with surprising regularity.

Then I thought, endgames. That's the ticket. I'll admit I don't like studying endgames. I find so much of it to being akin to learning how to spell esoteric words that you'll never use in everyday writing. So we studied some endgames. The result: I have no idea. Richie's only ever reached a handful of endgames that resembles something we studied.

Sometimes it makes me wonder if doing nothing is best.

But then I quickly come to my senses.

So for this year's Nationals I had him go through a carefully refined study program of endgame, tactics, strategy, and openings! Seriously, though, my goal has been consistency of practice rather than quantity. We decided to skip some of the local events. And to get acclimated to a slower pace of play, for the two weeks prior to the Nationals we avoided having Richie play anything faster than G/45.

This year we opted to fly out on the morning of the event so he will have a pretty rough first day. Usually parents are advised to fly out the night before to get a good night's sleep. One time we tried that, though and the wait from the time he woke up at 7am to the first game at 1:30 pm felt truly endless.

So we're trying something different this time around. We have a very early flight out (hopefully we don't miss it!), and I'm hoping that he sleeps on the plane and catches up on his rest then. Even if that backfires and he's too wired to sleep perhaps he'll have an afternoon siesta, which otherwise would be unusual for him.

His section has turned out so far to be very competitive with at least a dozen players at the 1100+ level with good chances to win it all. I think in 1st grade last year there were a couple of standout players at the 1500+ level, but only 5 over 1100. The depth of strength should make for an exciting tournament.

2010 Grade National Chess Tournament, Orlando FL

The 2010 Grade Nationals will be held in Orlando, Florida this year. For those who don't know, there are two major Nationals each year, one held in the Winter and one held in the Spring. The Winter tournament has each grade competing in a separate sections, while the Spring nationals have certain grades combined (e.g. K-1).

The table below is mainly for my own convenience to make it easier to look up the top contenders in each section and how they have performed leading into the event (since there is a six week gap between cut-off of the December rating supplement and the actual tournament), but last year, the table got a couple thousand views so I guess I wasn't the only one using it.

This year Richie will be playing in the 1st grade section. Even accounting for late registrants, I think he should be comfortably in the top 10 rated players going into the event, but there are at least a couple higher rated players in his cohort that either haven't registered yet or aren't planning to participate.

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Nationals Round-Up (Continued)

Richie finished the event strongly, picking up wins in all his remaining games to end up with 6.0/7.0 points and a tie for 3rd place (10th on tie-breaks). Overall his play was not bad but I think that if he had to face the top players (a fate he avoided by having the early loss) he may have struggled to win. Even as it was, his final round against none other than Alexander Medina (the kindergartener from the Grade Nationals who played a 2-hour final with Joaquin Perkins), was only won through a terrible oversight by his opponent in a won position. At every Nationals I hear so many stories of games that were given away in won positions that I wonder if parents realize that in virtually every game, each player gives up "wins" multiple times, and it's really just the player who makes the penultimate egregious error that emerges victorious. This is especially true at the lower scholastic levels which can to have more in common with roulette than grandmaster chess. In Richie's case this event was similar to the prior nationals: he was swindled in round 2, and he swindled in round 7 so I guess it balanced out. Even more interesting, from the standpoint of karmic neutrality at least, was that his 7th round swindle was almost the exact same situation with roles reversed--his opponent was up material but with queens on the board still and he maneuvered his queen to a position that seemed to offer a trade of queens or a mating attack, but in fact, simply forced Richie to execute his own mating attack first. Had his opponent thought for a just a few seconds about where Richie was going to move his queen if he didn't want to lose the game on the next move, he would have seen that his own King was perilously close to being mated and he could have avoided the upset easily.

At any rate, Alexander's play until that point was commendable. He played an uncommon opening which Richie handled poorly and built up a sizeable advantage. I can see why he's had good results at these large events and is certainly capable of being a dangerous opponent.

I witnessed another fascinating quick skittles game between Max Roberts and Richie. It's a joy to watch them play because their play always seems to create devilish complications with unexpected and creative solutions being found at nearly every turn.

Kindergartener Praveer Sharan from Oregon emerged victorious with the only perfect score for the event. This was all the more impressive when you consider that the field had at least 20 higher rated and older players include a handful with current ratings over 1200 and he defeated at least three experienced 1000+ players on route to victory. So congratulations to Praveer! Update: It turns out that Praveer's pre-event rating may have been as high as 1300 in the Northwest Scholastic system which put him in among the top seeds but of course doesn't diminish his accomplishment at all. I expect we'll see more of Praveer in upcoming events.


Wins
+ Atlanta venue was great. Even though we stayed in the overflow hotel (Marriott
Marquis) it was connected by covered walkways through the Peachtree Centermall.
+ Kudos to the organizers and volunteers. Job well done!
+ Comeback kid.
+ iPad. Perfect place for an iPad for many, many reasons.
+ Mary Mac's Tea Room.
+ My that's a really big aquarium.

Losses
- Swindle and re-Swindle? I hope he outgrows that soon.
- Lazy until it's too late. Richie didn't want to warm-up with tactics or review until after his first loss.
- Alyssa didn't do 2/3rds of her homework because she didn't have a ruler(??). C'mon...

Draws
=/= Hibaaaachiiii. We went to Benihana the first night and it was great. The kids loved the fried rice, so we were back again for an after-event celebration with our friends. But the 2nd chef overcooked my steak which lessened my enthusiasm for the place.
=/= Paying for the first bag on the airplane. But I guess that's just part of the new world order.

2010 Burt Lerner National Elementary K-6 Chess Championship Player List with Most Recent USCF Ratings

We finally got off the fence on the K-6 Nationals and (surprise, surprise) we decided to attend! That gave me the motivation I needed to make the small modifications necessary to be able to publish the current ratings data on Socrata.

The Grade Nationals were just 5 months ago (Why are there two nationals each year anyway? Is Don King involved in anyway with the USCF?) but in that time span many scholastic players will have improved significantly thanks to in-school programs, plenty of weekend chess tournaments and other practice. In the winter I thought that Richie was playing a little better than his published rating for the event. This time around it may be a bit of the opposite.

More recently his "form" has been a little off as other activities have attracted him (primarily video games and play-dates). So it seems we'll be "going fishing" for the month before Nationals. (10 Extra Chess Nerd Points if you know what the quote alludes to).

I was a little surprised to see when I registered him that he's seeded in 5th in K-1. I expect before the tournament starts that we'll see a handful of higher rated players register, but nevertheless it makes for a more interesting event if he's a dark horse contender.

We're looking forward to seeing some of our friends. Just in K-1 I see many of the strong local players we know (Hudson, Ethan, Manaav, Jonathan) as well as a couple familiar names from the grade nationals (Max, Diego, Daniel). And of course many others. Good luck to all!

2010 Burt Lerner National Elementary (K-6) Chess Championship

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Recent Chess Events

Auntie Kumi has pointed out that I have not been keeping the blog up-to-date so I thought I'd do a quick recap of recent events:

Recently Richie played in the NY City Championships which is held at the New Yorker Hotel annually. He placed 3rd overall in the K-1 section with 4.5/5.0 points and got a nice plaque for being top Kindergartener. There isn't too much to say about the event itself or the result which was about in-line with ratings based expectations.

He also placed well in the NY State Championships, scoring 4.0/5.0. His third round loss was to a player rated a few hundred points below him but after looking at the game score I would say that his opponent is likely on the way up so I don't think the game result was as much of an upset really. The event winner, Hudson Beaudoin, has been a frequent co-participant in recent major events we've attended and I was not surprised at all to see him come out on top.

For a change of pace, we took Richie to the Eastern Class Championships in Sturbridge, MA. This was a two or optionally three day event with very long time controls (90 minutes for 30 moves + 30 minutes after the time control, I think). Richie was very excited for the opportunity to play for a substantial cash prize (his section winner received around $900). He participated in the Class E section (under 1200), and most players were adults which was a bit of a challenge for him. In fact, his one win came against another scholastic player while most of the adults played carefully against him and capitalized on his lack of experience at long time controls. Having said that, he actually put up quite a strong resistance in several games, including one in which he probably missed a win in a difficult game where his opponent had 4 pawns vs. his bishop + 1 pawn. It was actually a fun mini-trip for the family though, so I think these adult class tournaments will become a more frequent part of our chess calendar. It's nice to be able to combine a chess trip with a visit to the the Old Sturbridge historical village, among other things.

The other notable event he played recently was the CT State Scholastic Championships. After last year's experience, we had almost decided not to attend this year's event but we had a change of heart since a few of his CT chess friends were going so we decided to go at the last minute.

Richie didn't have a great tournament, scoring 2.0/4.0 in the K-3 Open section where he was actually seeded #2. I may be partially to blame for the result, however, as I committed the cardinal sin of chess parent/coaching and didn't give Richie the chance for a good night's sleep. We had dinner at a friend's the night before and were goofing around on the computer until nearly midnight after we got home. A review of his games for the tournament adds confirmation to my completely unscientific estimate that getting fewer than 8 hours of sleep for a 6 year old is the equivalent of handicapping him/her by 100-200 ratings points.

On the bright side, we did run across the Suryawanshi brothers who have also been to some of the NY tournaments we've been playing in. Rohan, the younger brother, is another promising kindergartener from Connecticut. He played a scrappy game in round 1 and was able to overcome a 3 pawn deficit by capitalizing on a piece blunder by Richie and efficiently guiding the game to a winning endgame. It seems that there are now a handful of very promising K-1 players in the Fairfield county area. Of particular note from this tournament: From the K-3 Reserve section, event winner and 1st grader Tyrell Staples breezed over Richie in a skittles game afterwards--from what I can tell he already has the foundation for great chess results. Cogan Lawler, Sadie Edelman, and Terry McGrath are a few more young players from the area to highlight. If there was a K-1 regional team event, I think CT could be right up there with NY, TX and CA in this age group.

Game from Nationals

Originally this post was meant to be in the grand tradition in chess of cherry-picking the best games for annotation. But it's been so long since the tournament, that I feel obliged to combine it with the equally grand blogging tradition of apologizing for my lack of recent posting activity.

But without further ado, I give you Richie's penultimate game from the nationals. This particular game is an interesting example because I think it very much highlights how his chess has developed in the last six months or so.

The first aspect I would point out was that until move 6 both players were playing along what is widely considered to be the critical main line for the two knights defense.

The main move of interest in the game was 8...Bxf2! This was part of a basic combination that nets a pawn and prevents the opponent from castling but from a chess development standpoint it is interesting because it shows a reading depth of around five or six plies (half-moves) even in the early opening and it appears to have been part of a plan to simplify into a probably winning endgame which is something he would have been reluctant to do half a year ago.

In general I would say his moves are beginning to involve more positional considerations than before (although this game was ultimately decided by a simple fork tactic).

Nationals Round-up

Richie ended up scoring 6.0/7.0 which put him in 2nd Place in the Kindergarten section. After a bit of a rough start, he worked very hard in his remaining games and made a nice comeback. He had some very nice games during the tournament. He also had a few games that were...ehh. He was certainly quite lucky to escape with a win in his final round against a very impressive David Zhurbinsky. In fact, what impressed me the most about the tournament was the strength of some of the play that I saw from the other Kindergarteners. (This was the first time in awhile I've actually seen other Kindergarteners playing).

His first round opponent, Diego Costas, showed great maturity in converting his win over Richie. He re-routed pieces well during the game and very effectively denied Richie counter-play by declining easy material that Richie offered as bait.

The aforementioned David Zhurbinsky had built an absolutely crushing advantage over Richie in the final game but fell victim to a back-row checkmate. Judging from the quality of his play to that point though, I'd say he seemed to be comparable in strength to Richie.

Max Roberts played a couple of quick games with Richie after the tournament since they weren't able to play during the official matches. They both seem to be attracted to highly tactical, double-edged positions and played a couple of amazingly complicated middle game positions where both sides needed to be mindful of continuous tactical threats and held the balance much longer than I could have. I think Max's game shows a lot of promise.

Richie made fast friends with and played a few games in the airport with Daniel Levkov on the way home. Daniel won a nice game over Richie, coming back from a piece deficit even, and also showed well developed endgame skill. It won't surprise me at all if he's soon rated much higher.

And of course, the event winner, Joaquin Perkins, deserves special mention for his perfect 7.0 performance. (Joaquin and his opponent, Alexander Medina, played a 2 hour game in the final match. I wonder if that's a record for Kindergarten). Sadly, Richie never had an opportunity to play with Joaquin but clearly he played at an exceptionally high level to run the field.

I wish all of these bright young players continued success and hope to meet them and their parents again in the future.

Good:
Hilton Anatole -- rooms exceeded expectations.
USCF -- tournament well organized, playing venue excellent.
American Airlines -- no major delays.
Breakfast buffet.
Kumi & Dan for driving out to visit with us.
Meeting Sarah -- what a cutey.
Meeting some very nice kids and parents.
Julian & Zachary & other familiar faces from the NY Tournaments.
Big Trophy

Bad:
$20 for the *first* checked bag on AA??
Wide awake at 5:30 am on the first day.
No Italian restaurant or pasta at the hotel??
Apparently the muffins that K&D&S ate before the drive up from Austin.
Only 7 rounds. More games at shorter time controls would be nice.

Ugly:
Losing the first round.
Winning a game when down 2 pieces...

The Setback

Richie lost his first round in the Nationals. While always mindful that in chess anything can happen in any given game, I must admit that I had some expectation that he would be in the hunt for top honors longer than the first game!

My initial reaction when Richie emerged from the playing room looking less than thrilled was of course to be disappointed. I had mentally prepared myself for this moment but I wasn't expecting it to come so soon. I knew that we had built up in his mind the importance of the Nationals. The whole point of even going is to give him something to strive for, to learn to set goals and push himself, etc. But the consequence of the build up is that if you stumble along the way, the let down is greater.

I have to confess that I more or less assumed that Richie blundered his queen or blitzed out his moves without thinking. But after reviewing the game with him, I realized that his loss was directly related to some of the combination exercises he had worked on recently--unfortunately, combinations (where you initially sacrifice material, but regain it through a tactical follow-up) introduce an element of risk into the game because they require accurate calculation a couple of moves ahead at least and if they fail you're usually left worse off. In this case, the combination was actually quite deep (in its intended form) but he didn't recognize that one of his opponent's replies created an immediate forcing response that saved the position. Still, the fact that he was even looking for this type of combination is something that was a direct result of his recent training exercises so I can hardly find fault with him for trying. My next thought was that he failed to put up resistance after he was down material and just gave up without fighting. In reality, he posed his opponent multiple tactical threats over the course of the game and even baited some clever traps, any one of which could have swung the balance, but to his credit, his opponent dodged them all and even found some very strong responses and eventually finished the game off solidly.

Richie generally handles losses with relative equanimity. This one was a little different. I asked how he felt and he defiantly replied, "fine," but I could tell he was upset because he knew that his chances for first place were probably over already.

Well, I suppose that situations like this are where the real life lessons are learned and I was actually looking forward to sharing the whole "a man's character is measured by how he reacts to adversity" thing, but before that, step one was just to cheer him up.

I had told him a few days ago about some of the world champions and what I thought made each of them so great. I told him that Paul Morphy was like a force of nature -- he was a great attacker and defeated his opponents right out of the opening. I told him that Capablanca played beautiful simple looking moves that created tiny advantages and was the best in the world at converting his advantage in the endgame. And I told him that Bobby Fischer was one of the most consistent players ever -- move after move, he just didn't make mistakes.

I raised his right hand and I said, "You had Paul Morphy, right here in this hand, look at the way you charged out in the opening and planned that combination," and I raised his left hand and said, "and Capablanca was right here waiting patiently to finish the game off in style," and then I searched in his left pocket and I searched in his right pocket and I said, "but you forgot to bring Bobby Fischer with you!" "Richie, Richie don't forget about me! You didn't here him calling for you?" He laughed. We hugged. We watched a Pokemon movie together.

In a calmer moment, we had the talk about setbacks and adversity and character.

While Richie was playing the next round, Julian stopped by to wish him well. I think he had heard about his first round loss and wanted to cheer him up but he had to leave for his own game before Richie could see him. I delivered the message.

"Richie, you just missed Julian. He came by to cheer you up and give you encouragement. Wasn't that a nice thing for him to do for you?"

"Yes. Well. That's O.K. Tell him 'Thanks, I'm already cheered up.'"

Never underestimate a kid's resilience.

[On a technical sidenote: it is possible to win a 50 player tournament even after losing the first round, but it's unlikely unless you came into the event seeded #1 or #2 especially in a field where the strengths span a wide range (Richie was seeded #5). The reason is that even if you win the rest of your games, in order to be picked to play against the tournament leader you need to be in clear 2nd place or have the highest rating among players tied for 2nd going into the last round (that haven't already played the leader. A series of upsets in this particular tournament is fairly unlikely due to the wide ratings span.]

2009 National K-12 Chess Championship

The 2009 National K-12 Chess Championships will be held in Dallas, Texas this year from December 11-13th. Richie will be participating in the Kindergarten section. It took in a couple of months to regain his form from last year, but I think it's safe to say that he's playing quite a bit more strongly now than he was at the time of the Supernationals last Spring and is as well prepared as he could be for the nationals.

The two areas that I think he's definitely progressed in recently are his depth of tactical reading and his comfort with and use of slower time controls. Of course he has lapses all the time, but overall, I would say that his gross blunder rate is much lower than last year and that has resulted in more wins against higher rated opposition.

A word about ratings: In a previous post I had stated that ratings are an unbiased, and highly accurate indicator of practical chess strength. There is, however, a caveat. Ratings tend to better *relative* indicators within an active player pool than they are *absolute* indicators between players from different pools. Of course there is always a gradual adjustment of any misaligned ratings as players cross over from one pool to another but it is still quite easy to have a couple hundred ratings point difference between equivalent players playing in separate pools. I think our own experience has been that in CT, ratings can easily be inflated by 200 points over NYC ratings at the lower levels. In NY, the large player base and tendency for tournaments to have players from many different schools present leads to very consistent and accurate ratings for pretty much the whole city. In CT, it is possible at the lower levels to still be playing virtually entire fields of unrated or novice players even in 2nd and 3rd grade. An experienced player would have no trouble beating such a field, and could quickly achieve ratings of 1000+ but they might still struggle against a 600 rated NY player that has been competing regularly against other 600 rated players with some experience and coaching. Even within NYC there are overlapping, but on the other hand, graduated competition levels based on age group: many tournaments offer K-1, Primary (K-3), and Reserve (K+) sections which all might feature fields with top ratings close to 900, but the older, more experienced sections are without a doubt tougher at the same rating level.

In our case, Richie's peak nominal rating of almost 900 was achieved over a year ago after winning some local CT tournaments, but immediately dropped 250 to 300 points when he started playing tournaments in NYC against more experienced and deeper fields. He's since re-established that level but essentially he's "improved" from a CT 900 to a NY K-1 900 to a NY Primary 900 to a NY Reserve 900, while showing little peak rating change.

It will be interesting to see how things shake out at the Nationals which offers one of the few opportunities for direct comparison between regions (albeit on a small sample set). My suspicion, though, is that New York is one of the more underrated regions *on average.* Having said that, obviously ratings don't win tournaments, otherwise, players wouldn't need to bother showing up at all...

2009 Grade National Chess Championship Player List

Last year when we went to the SuperNationals I had a spreadsheet where I recorded the players in the K-1 section. I used it to keep track of the top handful of players names and most recent ratings on the USCF website. Due to the lag between the most recently used USCF supplement and the actual tournament date, current ratings will often be a better indicator of playing strength than the listed rating from the official tournament publications.

I have a small story which probably says too much about chess parents in general and me in particular. Before the first round I was chatting with another parent as our kids played some practice games. The subject of ratings came up and we talked a little about how impressive some of the top players were. Then he reached into his bag and surreptitiously handed me a piece of paper. Imagine my surprise as he said, "I've recorded all of the most recent ratings from the USCF website. You can use this to see how strong your kids opponents really are." As I imagined the two of us (and who knows how many others) clicking through the torturous USCF website and scribbling down the latest ratings in the wee hours of the night, I got to thinking that there was probably a better way to do this.

This year, to spare myself the trouble, I wrote a small program to do the work for me. Once I had the data and a way to refresh it easily, I needed a nice way to put it on the blog. I found this is a neat applet to publish data on the internet from Socrata.

And voila! I will be keeping this as up-to-date as possible until the tournament start.

2009 Grade National Chess Tournament, Dallas TX

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Heat map of number of entries by state.


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Chess In The Schools

A couple of weeks ago, Richie and Alyssa played in their first Chess-In-The-Schools Tournament. For those who don't know, CIS hold free tournaments throughout the academic year at public schools in the NY City school districts. Amazingly, CIS is one of two separate free chess programs in NYC (along with The Right Move) which co-exist alongside several well-organized and popular paid alternatives (NYChessKids, National Scholastic Chess Foundation, Continental Chess Association and several private schools that hold their own regular tournaments. There's even the Marshall Chess Club for higher rated players).

If you are at all a follower of scholastic chess you'll be familiar with the exceptional performance of certain NY public school chess teams at national scholastic tournaments. Many of these schools serve lower-income and minority residential areas which demonstrates quite convincingly that chess is an equal opportunity mind sport. After visiting the infamous IS318 (home of chess instructor extraordinaire, Elizabeth Vicary), it's really quite obvious to me why these schools are able to consistently turn out nationally competitive teams. (Observant readers will be able to make Elizabeth out in the photo).

If ever a picture was worth a thousand words, the few I post here certainly would make a short novel. When the top chess players in the school are prominently lauded on a chess hall of fame, and the hallways are decked with championship banners and newspaper clippings of past conquests and students have access top enthusiastic and top flight chess coaching, it's no mystery at all why IS318 is a perennial top-runner in team competitions.

Heading to Supernationals IV

Richie and I are off to the Supernationals IV tomorrow. It's actually a bit of an accident that we're even going at all. I had made reservations for the Opryland hotel just in case we decided to go but I was 90% sure we wouldn't. The main reason I wasn't interested in going this year was that Richie is still in Kindergarten. (Actually he I should probably refer to him as Pre-K since he will be entering Kindergarten next year) but they only have a K-1 section. He has pretty much no shot at winning and only a small chance of getting the all important trophy so I was inclined to pass and just wait for next year. But, and let this be a lesson to myself for the future, I naively listened to the booking agent who originally told me I could cancel with 48 hours notice. That's apparently true for normal hotel reservations but not for conventions like the Supernationals. So I was basically stuck with the reservation and had to scramble to make other arrangements so it didn't go to waste.

It's nice though to go to the tournament just for the experience (at 5000 players it's the biggest chess tournament in history). I won't be so concerned about preparation because the results are not as meaningful this time and I can focus on making sure Richie is getting an enjoyable and edifying chess experience. It's actually awful that I care so much about the results at tournaments to begin with but to be perfectly honest with myself, they always matter to some degree. Having said that, the most uplifting chess parent moment I've had recently was when I showed Alyssa a grandmaster game that involved opposite side castling and a spectacular double edged race to land the first blow. At the end of it she said, "that game was so cool, I like that one a lot." She's always been more of an artistically minded person, so I had hoped that the creative side of chess would appeal to her, and it seems like the seeds of chess appreciation are taking root.

CT State K-1 Open Champion

Richie recently competed in the Connecticut State Scholastic Chess Championships and was fortunate enough to take the K-1 title. He scored 3.5/4.0 in the preliminaries and 3.0/4.0 in the finals. Due to the limited number of participants, however, he was playing in a combined K-3 group and ended up finishing with the highest score for Kindergarten or 1st graders. He won on a sort of technicality, however, because the actual highest 1st grade finisher (Julian Wang), was awarded the K-3 Open title which left Richie as the next highest finisher.

After it was all over, I guess it was worthwhile but I have to admit I had my doubts after the preliminary round. Unlike last year, which attracted probably over 200 players and was held at Yale University in a single day, this year's event was curiously split into two rounds. Only the top five resident finishers (and players rated higher than a pre-determined rating cutoff) were eligible for the finals. Also the finals were held in Storrs, CT which was quite a long way from home. I'm not sure if it was the tournament structure, or the effect of the recession, or what, but sadly the state championship only had about 60 players in all age groups. It was actually smaller than an ordinary weekend tournament in NY. The kindergarten and 1st grade sections had only six players (!) in the preliminaries which almost assured Richie of making the finals. Thankfully in the finals they combined his age group with older kids so at least he got to play a couple of rounds with opponents rated near his level.

He did have an enjoyable time, in part because a few of the players from his chess club (Alex Zarikos, Julian Wang) also did well.

As for his playing, I would have to say that it was a mixed result. He still appears to be unable to compete with 1000+ rated players. I'm curious to see what changes will occur in the next few months that will make him stronger than 1000 in practice. I already believe firmly that he is playing at a level at least on par with some of those kids but he doesn't seem to put it together during a tournament for some reason. His playing style is becoming more of an attacking, slash and burn style which is good against unrated opponents who offer little resistance, but some the soundness of his attacks is often more strictly tested by the slightly more seasoned 1000+ players.

In a warm up tournament in NYC, Richie had his first perfect score in a Reserve section tournament (for players rated over 800). In his play, I saw some more confident attacking skills coming into play like purposeful exchange sacrifices and creation of open lines with pawn moves. I would definitely characterize him right now as dangerous. Certain types of positions he can probably play like a 1200 player but clearly other types of games expose big holes in his knowledge base.

It will be interesting to see how he fares at the upcoming Supernationals.

NY City and State Championships

We recently attended both the NYC and NY State Championships. The NYC championship was held at the New Yorker hotel in midtown Manhattan. The venue was quite nice since the playing area was in a ballroom with high ceilings. It was a step up from the normal playing experience. Unfortunately it was also extremely crowded and there was limited seating area for parents. Richie did well and finished as the highest Kindergartener with a score of 4.0/5.0. That was good enough for 10th place. His one loss came against an unrated opponent who turned out to be pretty strong and played patiently and methodically. I thought it was interesting that afterwards Richie wanted play that boy in some skittles games and at a faster pace had little difficulty winning. I mentioned to him that the reason he lost in the tournament was most likely that he was moving too fast. I'm not sure if the message sank in though because he is still a quick player and doesn't have the patience still for extended thought on important moves. I guess the maximum he's spending is 10 or 15 seconds on a move and the longer games he plays are probably a result of his opponent taking longer for their moves.

At the NY States, Richie didn't have as much success, finishing with a score of 2.0/5.0 against a pool of Kindergarten and 1st graders. He came into the event rated in the top 10, so I thought he had a chance of getting a trophy (top 20 got trophies), but a few critical errors against lower-rated opponents ended his chances. Generally speaking, Richie is unsuccessful against higher-rated opponents and rate of upset is relatively low. I would have actually thought that he'd have more mixed results against higher rated opponents and random results against lower rated opponents because I think his peak playing level is pretty high (maybe 1100) but he's inconsistent especially if he's tired. But the results speak otherwise. Richie may have gotten a little over-confident and wasn't interested in playing games or doing tactics before his matches (and hadn't really played in the preceding days). Even though we told him he didn't win enough games for a trophy he wanted to attend the award ceremony just in case. He was visibly disappointed when they finished calling out the winners. We felt badly for him but the upside is that he showed much more interest in playing again.

Interestingly, Alyssa managed to win a game against a 1000 rated opponent. She was thrilled with the result even though she was 2.0/6.0 I think her confidence was pretty high afterwards. I really admire Alyssa's fighting spirit. She has kind of come around to the game and seems to be enjoying the challenge more. She played one game that lasted over an hour and though she lost you could tell that she put all her effort into winning it. I couldn't be happier. I hope she her effort starts paying off with some more wins and higher finishes. Someone mentioned to me that his daughter really had a good time at an all-girl's event. I don't know if we can find one in the area but that would probably be a good experience for her.

I tried to inject some excitement into the game by teaching them a new opening. I called it the "secret opening" and its... a secret! Alyssa really liked the idea of springing a surprise on her opponents. Unfortunately her opponents went out of her "book" by the third move. Still she got good opening positions and really lost her games in the middle and endgame, so I guess the secret opening is sort of a success.

83rd ACTA Scholastic Chess Tournament

The kids recently played in another ACTA tournament. This one was unrated and was unique in that all 65 or so kids won trophies (winners choose first)! It was very successful in terms of entertainment value. Richie, who played up in the Primary section, ended up being undefeated which would have been a performance rating of around 1050, I guess, had it been rated. Alyssa played a great tournament and won 3.0/4.0. She was very proud to have earned to right to choose one of the larger trophies. Richie reached another milestone as he recorded his first tournament game by hand. Surprisingly the game score was completely accurate. When Alyssa started she made several errors, skipping moves or making other mistakes.

In other news, I noticed that our friend Julian Wang has made it onto the Top 100 list for age 7 and under! I'm not surprised at all, but it's still a cool thing to have achieved.

2008 National K-12 Championship

We just finished the K-12 Nationals in Orlando Florida. Richie scored 5.0/7.0, tying for 2nd place on points and receiving 6th place on tie breaks (there was a cluster at 6.0 and a cluster at 5.0). Since the top 10 finishers received (very large) trophies, this was a very nice result. I have been emphasizing the importance of work so I was hoping that some concrete gains would reinforce this concept with the kids. Richie was so happy with his trophy. He was "a little" nervous going into the final day since he knew he needed to win both games after a slight upset loss on the 2nd day. He managed to pull it off, though. Congratulations, Richie!

Alyssa scored 2.5/7.0. The competitive bar is much higher for 2nd grade, so I was actually glad that she wasn't completely swept. Actually she managed a first round win versus a much higher rated opponent which really boosted her confidence. I think she has been improving by leaps and bounds recently and is now on par with Richie. Considering the gap between their play as recently as a few months ago this is pretty impressive. I guess there was just a small aspect of her play that changed which made a big impact.

Heading into the event, I had found that there were at least two 1000+ rated players in the Kindergarten section. There turned out to be one more that I missed because he was 6 yrs old already. All three of these strong players, Arun Khemani, Awonder Liang, and Zane Ice, finished tied for 1st place. Congratulations to them! We met Arun's father (Arun finshed 1st on tie breaks) in the skittles room. He recognized the kids from our blog and we had a nice chat. I expect we will see more from these young talents in the future.

We decided that it was too much distraction for Richie to keep game scores. I didn't see many Kindergarten players writing moves so this wasn't unusual. Unfortunately this means it's hard to really analyze what has been going on in his games. Alyssa kept all her scores and that will certainly lead to further insights into playing strengths and weaknesses.

Ready for Nationals

We have started on an online program of instruction with NY Chess Kids. So far I have been pleased with the way the online lessons have turned out. I have written in the past about some of the advantages. The technical execution of the lessons is very smooth. It's virtually the same thing as having a live lesson but more efficient. It helps that the instructor has a prepared lesson plan each time and all game scores and tactics pre-loaded into a database from which he teaches (and gives us afterwards). We have one recorded lesson which is a good example.


Alyssa seems to have benefited the most. She has gotten much more focused recently and I think she realizes that there's a direct correspondence between her win ratio and the effort she puts into following the lessons. In a recent tournament game she got to apply one of the first lessons which was drawing with a K vs. K + Pawn. She probably wouldn't have been able to do that a few weeks ago. Alyssa's rating has shot up a few hundred in recent tournaments and the quality of her games has improved noticeably.

We have been stepping up the number of tournaments and lessons they have been getting ahead of the National K-12 Scholastic Championship in Orlando, Florida on Dec 12th-14th. This will obviously be our first national event so everyone is looking forward to it (and to Disneyworld afterwards). I looked a few past events and current top player lists and my best guess is that Richie will be somewhere around 5th-15th highest in rating for the kindergarten section but there's a lot of variance. There's definitely at least two much higher rated 5 year olds. Alyssa, of course, will have an uphill battle but with her recent strides I'm hopeful she can enjoy the tournament. She recently toppled an 800 rated player who probably got frustrated with the resistance she put up while a piece down and eventually blundered away the lead. If she plays with that kind of fighting spirit, I'm pretty confident she won't get zero points at least.

New Jersey State Grade Championship for 2008

Richie had a very nice result at the New Jersey State Grade Championships. He scored a perfect 5.0/5.0 in the Kindergarten section to take 1st place ahead of a small field (13 players, I think). Richie seems to be "in between" levels right now. He had an easy time with unrated or inexperienced players, but has quite a bit of difficulty against 1st-3rd graders rated over 500. We made the trip out to NJ, hoping to give him a chance to play stronger competition in his age group, but from that perspective this tournament turned out to be no different than local tournaments. There were only two rated players and the rest were early beginners so the experiential value was a little less than I had hoped. Alyssa scored 2.0/5.0 in the 2nd grade section. There were quite a few players that are objectively stronger than her and her results pretty much followed expectations based on ratings.

Inline with my recent realization that Alyssa and on occasion Richie are still making simple sight errors (not having anything to do with strategy, but simply overlooking a chance to win a free piece easily, or moving her pieces in a way that they can be captured immediately), I asked both of them to try their best to avoid these two types of errors on every single move. That's quite a bit of concentrating to do over a whole day, so I'm proud of them for their efforts. I believe that until this much can be mastered, working on other skill development may be premature.

Most of the time these errors are the side-effect of a good thing: trying to plan ahead. Usually at some time during their previous turn they plan something, often something that follows some generally recommended action (castle, or develop a piece, for instance), but they execute the move without pausing to consider the opponent's most recent move and how that move changes the dynamic of the position.

I am going to experiment with speed chess as a practice routine. The goal of the exercise is not to win the game (they are hardly dexterous enough to win a close game at 5-minutes), but to focus on a short set of thoughts that should be made every single move. For example, play through a 5-minute game making an effort on every move to check a. if the piece they just moved is free, and b. if it attacks something that should be moved. If a. or b. they should respond appropriately with a capture or an evasion, otherwise they should make the first safe move piece move they can think of (or pawn move if no piece move seems obvious).

[Edit: I had previously called Richie the 2008 Kindergarten Champion, which technically incorrect. That title is reserved for NJ state residents. The NJ State Kindergarten Champion is Jai Narayanan. Congratulations to him and congratulations to Richie for taking first place.

81st ACTA Scholastic Chess Tournament

On November 1st, the kids participated in the 81st ACTA Tournament. Richie ran away 4.0/4.0 to take first place for the Kindergarten section. In general it seems the competition in CT in the Kindergarten age group is not really much challenge currently. I'm very proud to report that Alyssa scored 3.0/4.0 to take 2nd place in the Primary Novice section. More importantly, she was very proud of herself and even started to say that she "kinda likes chess now." I had told her many times in the past that it was just a matter of time before she started winning more. We've recently worked a little bit on tactics (or "tictacs" as she calls them) which has helped her quite a bit. She is still strangely reluctant to use her queen. She fears losing her major pieces and therefore plays passively, but she is a little more careful nowadays. In her final game, for instance, she lead by a queen and a minor piece at one point, but never moved her queen off of d1 and eventually lost it for free on that square to bishop!

The more I watch them kids play the more I realize that the following skills are most important (in descending order):

1. moving pieces when directly threatened if that piece can be taken for free
2. capturing an opponents piece that has just moved if it is now free
3. not falling for simple counting errors (3 attackers to 2 defenders)
4. not trading pieces for pawns

Surprisingly, Richie, for example, who is sometimes quite strong at tactics and can spot mate in two with a clearance sacrifice, for instance, still sometimes overlooks a chance to win a the most recently moved piece with a pawn.

Someone should make a drill for K-1 age players which repeatedly makes threats and the only task is to save the threatened piece (by capturing the attacker if it's free, or by moving to a safe square if it's not). This is so basic that it's not even covered in tactics books or software, but it really requires practice.

It's pretty hard to make kids play slow enough too. I still struggle with finding away to remove these types of hasty errors from their play.