HEAR YE! HEAR YE! WEIBEL GIRLS SHINE AGAIN – WEIBEL BOYS DO OK

HEAR YE! HEAR YE!  WEIBEL GIRLS SHINE AGAIN – WEIBEL BOYS DO OK

This weekend Grand Master Susan Polgar held her second competition for Boys and Girls in San Mateo.  The numbers dropped a bit from last year for this Nationwide competition—but very little.  The first year here, 2015, the event drew 380 players.  This year 359 players attended.  What I like most about this event is that top players attended from all over the country.  Other tournaments that have been held in this area claim to be nationwide and hardly draw players from Southern California.  

I did not require our teams to attend The Polgar Nationwide Open for Girls and Boys, but I did strongly endorse the event. Chris Torres, does a great job in organizing the event.  Of course, he was trained through the CalNorth Youth Chess Tournaments programs. :-) This tournament is also the last big event before the CalChess State Scholastics (March 19-20, Santa Clara) and the All-Girls Chess Nationals (April 22-24, Chicago) and the Elementary School Chess Nationals (May 6-8, Nashville). 

Despite my encouragement many of our top players selected not to attended due to the long two day weekend and the short time controls of game in one hour.  We had only one player in the Under 8 Section for Boys and two in the Under 8 Division for Girls. A full team is four players with two minimum.  So we had no team in the Under 8, but only Nikko Le.  Nikko had the distinction of doing better then any of our other individual players.  He played for the Championship in the last round, but lost. This second grade student is now rated 1367. The Weibel Under 8 Girls Team became Co-Champions with Mission San Jose Elementary School. 

We continued to win the girls with strong teams in the Under 10, Under 12 and Under 14 (Horner Jr. H.S.) categories.  As I noted, our boys did only OK lacking full teams in the Under 8 and Under 10 categories.  We place second to Mission San Jose in the Under 12 section and won the Under 14 section.  We had a number of our sixth grade students, who turned 12 right before the January 1, 2016 cut-off, that could not compete with their sixth grade teammates in the Under 12 section.

Our players and parents were exhausted after spending two days at the San Mateo Event Center.  They begged me to skip the awards ceremony so they could relax and their kids could get their homework done.  They feared another three hour affair similar to the one they struggle through at last year’s States.   I gave in.  This will explain why I do not have team awards photos—few players attended.  I simply collected a large box full of trophies and luckily convinced a couple of Dads to carry them out to my car. 

I should mention one very beautiful moment for me listening to a mother trying to convince her daughter to stay for the awards.  The daughter kept saying something like, “I can’t Mom, I have to much homework.” Weibel has Tiger Kids, not Tiger Mom’s.

  
Full tournament results can be found at: http://www.spfno.com/results/

USCF ratings are at: http://www.uschess.org/msa/XtblMain.php?201503016772

I WILL POST ALL MY PHOTOS SOON AT: http://www.CalNorthYouthChess.org/photographs.html