Chess Players Graduate - Class of '13

Andrew and Benjamin

Kevin

Over the years, I have been blessed by the opportunity to coach some of the brightest kids in Northern California.  Simply spoken, smart children play chess, and chess offers a competitive arena to exercise their cerebral talents.  I always knew my students had the brains to excel.  Every June, it seems that the graduates move on to some of the best colleges in America.  Well done mates!

Many hearty congratulations to the High School Class of 2013!  Former chess students will matriculate all around the country in the Fall: Stanford (Kevin), UC Berkeley (Andrew and Ted), MIT (Jonathan), Yale (Benjamin) and NYU (Embert) in the Fall.  These young stars not only achieved state and national recognition in chess, but also in math and science.  Here is a special shout-out to Kevin and Andrew for being recognized as finalist and semifinalist (respectively) in the Intel Science Talent Search!


The nine main members of the 6-time CalChess K-12 Champion team at Saratoga High School have all moved on, with four choosing Stanford and four attending UC Berkeley (plus one guy at Duke).  David and Jeff have graduated from Berkeley while Marvin and Aaron earned their diplomas from Stanford.  Aaron will continue at MIT for graduate studies.  Congratulations guys! 

The following list shows the number of former chess students who enrolled at prestigious universities (including new freshmen).  Unfortunately, I lost track of a few students.

• 11 = UC Berkeley
• 6 = Stanford 
• 3 = MIT
• 2 = UCLA and UC San Diego 
• 1 = Yale, Northwestern, Duke, NYU, Rutgers
• 1 = Pomona, UC Santa Barbara and UC Santa Cruz
  

This is what happens when you don't resign

Andrew Chen had a wee bit too much fun trying to checkmate his opponent with four knights and a bishop. Another student of mine promoted to two bishops of the same color. Of course, in both cases, the opponent could have avoided the ignominy by resigning.

Boys Will Be Boys

The troublemakers above are: Isaac Zhang (left), Ted Xiao (top) and Sam Bekker (right); the "victim" is Andrew Chen (middle). All four kids finished in the top six of the Junior High section, with Isaac earning a share of 1st place.

Episode 5 of Chess Diva TV Show

Believe it or not, the San Francisco Bay Area has a TV chess show! Thanks to the effort of amateur producers Lauren and Barbara Goodkind, the Community Access channel of Palo Alto has a show called Chess Diva. Lauren and Barbara are twin sisters who both have ratings around 1800, which places them in the Top 100 of the country for women. The 30 minute long TV show offers instructional content for novice and intermediate players as well as interviews with local players. The hosts hope to encourage more girls and women to push wood on the chess board.



The fifth episode of Chess Diva TV Show is now available on Google Video! The program starts out with an example of a king and pawn endgame, then continues with the post-mortem analysis of a tournament game between Lauren and my student Andrew Chen and ends with images from the People's Replacement tournament in Santa Clara, including IM Ricardo DeGuzman and me. Check it out! By the way, Andrew really looks cool in front of the camera!