October 22nd, 2023 Livingston Scholastic Report

It's fall again and that means it's time for another Livingston Scholastic chess tournament. (To be fair, is it ever time not to hold a chess tournament? They're great additions to any but the busiest of weekends.)

Our scholastic tournaments in Livingston consist of four sections:

Beginner / Grades K-2 (unrated)

Beginner / Grades K-4 (unrated)

Under 800 (rated)

Under 1200 (rated)

... of which today we had a highly unusual situation - not enough people in the K-4 group to make the section work. To offer everyone three games, we need a minimum of four players per section. Even though the event had 32 kids, they weren't evenly distributed. Oh well, this sort of thing does happen on rare occasions.

Fortunately there's an obvious solution. We merged the K-2 and K-4 groups. They're quite close in skill anyway. To compensate for the three slightly stronger kids, we made sure three additional awards were added to the K-2 section. The combined K-2/K-4 section would have six awards instead of the usual three. Plus we had a handful of participation medals to offer the four kids who did not win a trophy. All would remain good in the world, and everyone would (hopefully) leave happy.

This fits right in with my philosophy of beginner and intermediate chess tournaments: Players should be better off for having participated in the tournament.

What does this mean? As I see it...

• Players should have the opportunity for personal growth. This includes accepting loss gracefully, managing stress and anxiety, developing social skills including sportsmanship, focusing one's thoughts, and more.
• Players should have every opportunity to leave happy from the event. Losing games can be stressful for some children, so they should leave at least a little wiser for the experience.
• If the above can be achieved, players should refine their chess skills and deepen their appreciation for the sport.

Some people find it funny that I consider "get better at chess" to be the least important, but in my mind this is rightfully so. What good does it do a child to become a great chess player if they fail to transition into a well-adjusted adult in the process? We've all met the occasional adult who goes ballistic when life doesn't go their way. No one wants their child to be one of those people.

Today's tournament went very much in this spirit, so I was pleased with how everything turned out. There were the usual issues -- someone who failed to show up, opponents disagreeing on whether a piece was touched, players talking too much and needing to be redirected, or an unhappy player after losing a game. Such things are common to chess, are easily addressed, and happen on occasion in most events.

Far outshining these were the good (or at least amusing) things that happened. Young Raghav Sambasivan beamed with happiness after he won a game. Arhaan Rao, beaming with even more pride after he went 3-0 in the Under 800 section. Teddy Hirsch, who came back from a touch-move ruling that didn't go his way, only to take the opposing king after skewering his queen. Arjun Korada, who managed to checkmate his opponent 15 moves after missing checkmate in two.

In the end, our trophy winners were...

K-2/K-4

1st - Vihaan Agarwal

2nd - Yuvaan Nai

3rd - Anaya Goel

4th - Ariyan Kaushik

5th - Ryan Ying

6th - Raghav Sambasivan

Under 600

1st - Arhaan Rao

2nd - Teddy Hirsch

3rd - Liam Fan

Under 1200

1st - Hayden Chiang

2nd - Patrick Coughlin

3rd - Joshua Ganger

Thanks to everyone for coming out to play. Our next tournament will be a quad-format event on November 12, and a Scholastic event again on December 3. We hope to see you there.