Chess

UK Chess Challenge Gigafinal

At the end of term I followed our largest contingent yet to the Gigafinals of the UK Chess Challenge which took place in Manchester. At this stage it is a private, individual competition but they did battle with all the best players from the North of England.  

Our stars were of course in the U9 section who had to compete not only with each other,but also the two top players at Nottingham High. Aloysius Lip finished 2nd with 5/6 and he will be joined in the Challengers section of the Terafinals by Matthew Fergusson who finished unbeaten on 4.5/6.  Vishal Aurora finished with 4/6 and he is to be congratulated on beating Ashwin Kalyana in the last round. Ashwin finished on 3.5/6, both boys narrowly missing a qualifying place in the Terafinals.

We had an incredibly large group in the U7s.These young players are very new to the game and although mistakes were made they all played well and will benefit from the experience.Congratulations to Andrew Fergusson who finished 5th on 4/6 followed by Chinmay Monga (3/6), Nikhil Gupta (2.5/6), Aroun Kalyana (2/6),Anshu Banerjee and Eashan Soma (both 1/6).

In the U8 section Tayo Fapohunda enjoyed his first taste of tough competition and fought hard to score 3/6. 

In the U10s Hari Nijjar scored 4/6, a score which probably belies his ability. 

In the U11s Rishi Sanger scored a solid 3/6. 

The new ECF grading list is out and our players feature well. All senior players have a grading, a number that represents their standard of play ( rather like a golf handicap) and serves as a reasonable indicator of the result of a game between graded players.   Loosely speaking, if player A is graded 40 points higher than player B he should win 4 games out of 5 if they were to play each other.  It is hard for junior players to receive gradings because few of the competitions they take part in count for grading purposes. However we are now very active and five of our last year’s teams now have gradings: 

102 – Ashwin Kalyana

99 – Aloysius Lip

86 – Hari Nijjar

60 – Sajan Sanghera

5 – Aroun Kalyana 

Ashwin is rated 22nd in the country and Aloysius 26th amongst U10s (though they were U9s last year!) 

To complicate matters still further, these are ‘rapidplay’ gradings because the games our pupils play are usually on fast time limits. Aloysius and Ashwin also have standard ratings (for slower – more adult time limits).Here Aloysius has a grade of 90 and Ashwin 78 – they are respectively rated 22nd and 26th amongst U10s. 

Malcolm Hunt