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
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