Thursday, May 15

Advance Entries for CalChess Scholastics (May 17-18)

1038 players!
(final count as of midnight on May 14)
Check the advance entries on the official website.

Join us this weekend at the biggest rated chess tournament west of the Continental Divide!

Top players: High School --- Junior High --- Elementary --- Primary

2 comments:

Carl Moy said...

The K-3 Primary Varsity section is uber-competitive this year. 22 players over 1000, 37 players over 900, 23 players who currently on one of the Top 100 lists. Compare this with last year, where there were 13 players over 1000, 19 players over 900.

The median rating going into the tournament last year was 868 and the mean 893. For this year, the median going into this year is 967 and the mean is a whopping 1003. It's easy to see why some kids chose to seek shelter in other sections.

I dare say this has to easily be the toughest non-national K-3 ever.

Michael Aigner said...

Certainly the K-3 section represents the future of California scholastic chess and maybe even the entire nation.

What Carl mentioned carries over a trend that we have seen in the K-12 over the past three years. In many ways, the intense competition at the CalChess Scholastics rivals that of Nationals. Perhaps the 2006 K-12 was the strongest ever, with masters Matthew Ho, Nicolas Yap, Drake Wang and Daniel Schwarz plus strong experts Sam Shankland, David Chock and Daniel Naroditsky all playing (Schwarz won a playoff for first place against Wang). The 2008 K-12 will have only one master, but seven experts should offer some sort of competition.