The past few months have been both busy and successful for the Chess Academy and for a good number of our members. Enrolments have increased to over 40 divided between the Ravenclaw and Gyffindor houses and there is no doubt that the standard of play has improved markedly.
The in-house Ravenclaw tournament was won by Guy Parsons with 7.5 points, closely followed by Antonio Di Fruscia, Thomas Sha and Jonathan Guo on 7 points. Jonathan won the Most Improved Player prize. The Gryffindor tournament was won by his brother, Matthew Guo on 12 points followed by Moer Sha (girls’ prize) on 11 points and improvers Tomas Drake, Ofri Pilowsky-Bankirer and Pratyush Reddy
on 9 points. Congratulations to all of them.
Away from the Academy the leading players have excelled. For me the following individual performances stood out. Kayal Vijay won the Girls’ Under 8 British Championship in the summer and was selected to represent England in the World Cadets championship in Kazakhstan in September, scoring a very creditable 5.5/11 over two weeks.
The Academy had a dozen entrants in the Delancey UK Schools Challenge, where competitors battle it out through county, regional and national stages as the numbers qualifying for the next stage are whittled down. This culminated in the Terafinal at Blenheim Palace in October, where Antonio Di Fruscia came third in the Under 10s and Minh Nguyen came second in the Under 8s.
Minh also bravely tested himself in the Cambridgeshire County Chess Championships in November against strong adult opposition and scored a remarkable 4/5, pushed into second place only on tie-break. A truly exceptional result.
Other players have also played in adult tournaments through the autumn. Leeladharahas Kanchi won the Under 1500 tournaments in both the Cambridge FIDE Congress and the Bury St Edmunds Congress, scoring 4.5/5, taking last round draws to win outright in best grandmaster style. Ivan Yu, Guy Parsons, Kayal Vijay, Neel Mishra, Jack Mao and Ming Nguyen also collected prizes at these and similar tournaments. And in the final tournament of the term newcomer Ishaan Sreenath won the Cambridge Rapidplay Under 1150 tournament outright. Apologies if I’ve missed anyone.
In team competitions ALCA provided the backbone of the Cambridgeshire Junior side (9 out of 20 boards) in comfortably winning the East Anglian Junior Counties Championship in October. The Chess Academy is also competing in the Cambridgeshire Schools League, and despite rule changes which have diminished our squad, are neck and neck with the Perse School halfway through the season.
All-in-all terrific performances all round.
PAUL KEMP
