Check, mate: Chess league championship tests students’ skills
Dennis J. Carroll For The New Mexican
Posted: Monday, January 17, 2011
Kian Morgan, 7, of Taos sat on the bleachers next to his mom Monday licking his wounds and the icing on a consolation chocolate cupcake after being quickly dispatched to the sidelines in his second chess match of the day.
“I knew about that kind of checkmate,” the boy said, “but I didn’t see it coming this time.”
Kian, whose king bit the dust after only four moves, was one of about 120 students, including his twin brother Nitise, participating in the Northern Schools Chess League championship matches at St. Michael’s High School.
The kids, the great majority boys, from elementary, middle and high schools around Northern New Mexico sat facing each other over chessboards set up on tables in the gym for the first of their three games.
The youngsters, some of whom had come from as far away as Hatch, 250 miles to the south, were competing for a variety of individual and team trophies and medals.
After league director Andy Nowak announced that “if it gets noisy in here, tell me and I will try to quiet things down,” the games were afoot.
There wasn’t a lot of anything that could be called noise coming from the tables, but as the matches heated up, there was plenty of pencil gnawing, lip twitching, throat clearing, finger tapping, leg swaying and face-contorting grimacing.
The games were timed, each player having a total of 45 minutes (plus 5 seconds between moves) to launch attacks or mount defenses. After each move, the players hit timers, setting the other player’s clock running.
“It’s about time management,” said Bruce Nelson, a volunteer chess coach at Española’s McCurdy Elementary School. If a player uses all his time at the beginning of the match, the last few minutes can get pretty frenetic, Nelson said. “The time scrambling makes it very exciting. You have to allocate your time.”
If your clock hits zero before a checkmate or a draw, it’s the showers (or the cupcake table) for you.
Henry Poston, 9, of Española Elementary School, moved quickly, but he seemed to realize the end was near. In a back-and-forth battle for the crucial middle of the board, Elizabeth Wasilewska, 17, of Los Alamos High School, had just forked Poston’s king and a rook with her knight, dooming the rook.
Two moves later, Poston surrendered, tipping over his king, and the two politely shook hands. “I just got lucky,” Wasilewska said.
Full article here.
This is great stuff for kids.