Delaware Chess Weblog

Today’s review is of a local chess club website found at http://bear.delawarechess.org/ As the name suggests, this site belongs to Delaware’s very own Bear Scholastic Club. The Bear club is run by our frequent Delaware Chess Forum posters Richard Martin and Bob Wilder. As you can see on the site these guys do a great job at promoting chess amongst Delaware’s youth and have a very busy and active club. The site itself shows information about the club, although you might have to dig around a little as some information is hiding in some non-intuitive places. Be sure to find the pages on current/past champions and improving club members - they are really nice additions to the site and I look forward to tracking the progress of the younger players on that list. Girls should also take note of the upcoming girls state championship and everyone should checkout the information regarding Jennifer Shahade’s upcoming visit to give a lecture and simultaneous exhibition. The Bear club deserves congratulations for their promotion of the sport and for their up and coming website. Keep up the great work guys!

Until next time….

Tom Fleetwood

The Chess for Charity tournament held by Andrew Shermeyer to benefit St. Jude Children’s Hospital was an unqualified success. Congratulations to the winners of each bracket and kudos to the Shermeyer family for organizing this event. Everyone had a good time playing and winning some wonderful raffle prizes! The Shermeyers would like to say…

Thank you to all who participated in making this event so successful:
Newark Charter School for donation of the space and custodial support,
The Learning Station, BEST BUY and Days of Knights for their gracious
donation of raffle prizes and Rick Martin and the Bear Library Chess
Club for allowing the use of their chess sets. Another thank you goes
to Dr. Tom Fleetwood and Bob Wilder for their support, guidance and
invaluable expertise in officiating the tournament. Finally, thank you
to Andrew Shermeyer who came up with the idea and worked very hard to
organize the event.

An exciting and surprising part of the tournament was that for quite a
few players, it was their very first experience in a chess tournament.
This type of tournament was perfect for them because the competitiveness
was very low key. Hopefully a positive experience at Chess for Charity
will encourage those players to explore more opportunities for
tournament play.

You can find the full results and some tournament pictures by clicking on over to http://www.delawarechess.org/tournaments/chesscharity.htm

On Wednesday, March 16th, four members of the Salesianum chess club went to Charter to play against their top four players. It was a heated battle with both sides going back and forth during the games. The matchups were (Charter players listed first):

Chase Butler vs. Bill Frame
Ben Riblett vs. Matt Fendt
Matt Borowski vs. Ray Zeller
Chris Beattie vs. Shawn Savage

In the end all players had a great time and enjoyed the competition. To relieve the stress of the ’serious’ games the day finished off with bughouse craziness.

The Sallies team captain and club organizer Bill Frame summarized it best by saying, “I felt the match between Salesianum and Charter was a very important one not only for the players but for scholastic chess in Delaware. If we are lucky, it will open the door to similar matches, ingraining the love of chess into highschoolers throughout the state.”

Well said Bill and we hope other schools join in on the fun!

A couple pictures of the day….

Ahh, so many things happening in the world of chess. Today you get two links to keep you busy for awhile.

The first site is a NPR interview with Garry Kasparov where he talks briefly about his retirement and about Russian politics. It is certainly no secret he wants to be the next president of Russia - it will be interesting to see how it all turns out. The interview can be found here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4541865.

The second site is the official page of the Amber Blindfold and Rapid Chess Tournament. This tournament has many of the world’s best playing each other in two games - one blindfold and one rapid. The blindfold time controls are G/25 with a 20 second increment added before each move. The rapid time control is similar but only 10 seconds are added before each move. This tournament does not affect the players elo points so be on the lookout for some interesting and aggressive chess. You can view results and watch the games live at the site and, of course, on the various chess servers. Have fun!

Until next time…..

Tom Fleetwood

Inspired by a puzzle posted in our Delaware Chess Forum by Jonathan Martin, I thought I’d direct you to two nifty chess puzzle sites. Sure, there are lots of puzzle sites out there, no doubt, but here are two more to add to your list.

The first site is http://www.mazeworks.com/chessprb/index.htm This site offers an excellent java-based mating puzzle each day. The great thing about these puzzles is that you can actually move the pieces around and try your solutions. This is especially good for those who need practice visualizing where the pieces will be after a couple of moves. The only thing I wish you could do is turn off the fact that it tells you how many moves the mate should occur in. It would be much better practice if you didn’t know it was “mate in 3″ since that information in itself steers you away from certain lines. But all in all this site offers great puzzles of various difficulty.

The second site is http://www.logicalchess.com/hcc/puzzles/puzzles.html. What is nice about this site is three-fold. First, the problems aren’t all “mate” problems - there are problems where you must find the best move, which is typically more helpful in an actual game. Second, there are three levels of each problem set, easy/moderate/difficult, which makes it nice for various player levels. Third, there are positions from actual games rather than all fabricated board setups.

So hop on over to those sites and exercise your brain - but be warned, you may be there for a while.

Until next time….

Tom Fleetwood

On Friday, March 11, 2005 the Charter School of Wilmington’s chess club visited St. John the Beloved (SJB) to play against their students. St. John put forth 17 of their 33 club members. These 17 range from 2nd grade through 8th grade and make up their “tournament team.” The names and grade of each tournament team member are listed below with an * denoting a peer elected team captain. Charter brought 4 club members to the competition - Chase Butler, Ben Riblett, Chris Beattie and Steve Cinderella - and each charter student played a ‘mini-simul’ against 3 SJB members. After a SJB player would finish a new one would take his/her spot as players rotated around the room to play different Charter players. In the end there were a ton of games played and the Charter students really enjoyed the challenge of playing several games at once. St. John members Robert Zappaterini, Ann Marie Fitch, and Philip Keup each won one game during the meet - special congratulations to them!

St. John the Beloved has a very active chess club with wonderful parental support. They have had as many as 75 students signup for their club and this year they have become a USCF affiliate. Regarding the meet, their coach, Josephine Fish stated, “I am very proud of how each and every player participated and played their very best during our meeting. It was the first time we had a visiting Chess Club meet with our team after school. We have been fortunate to have visiting Chess Masters come and instruct our students. George Chressanthis taught last year and recently we had Vitali Marchenko from the Ukraine.”

Keep up the great work Josephine! And the rest of you schools with chess clubs need to get out and play other schools - it is great fun and a great way to get your club better.

The Charter School coach, Tom Fleetwood, and team wish to thank St. John the Beloved for their hospitality and time in getting ready for this event and we hope to get together again in the future.

————————————————————————————–

St. John the Beloved Players

Name/Grade/USCF Member
Fish, Alex* 2 (USCF)
Hughes, Johnny 2 (USCF)
Purzycki, Michael 2

Clark, Michael* 3
Papa, Brandon 3
Papa, Nick 3
Schmelz, Zachary 3
Walls, Tyler 3

Jones, Andrew 4

Fish, Francis* 5 (USCF)
Witkowski, Nathan 5 (USCF)
Zappaterini, Robert 5

Clark, Shannon 6 (USCF)
Nicastro, Vincent 6 (USCF)

Fitch, Ann Marie - Pres. 8
Keup, Philip - VP 8
Walls, Jimmy 8

Wow, Garry Kasparov has had one heck of a day. He lost a drawn game to Topalov, won the overall Linares championship via tiebreaks against the man who had just beaten him and then retired from professional chess. Kasparov did play an outstanding overall tournament and it is a sad day for chess if he truly isn’t playing anymore. On the other hand, it may open the door for efforts to have a single world chess champion. Only time will tell….

Hop on over to our Chess Forums and tell us what you think this will mean to the chess world.

4th Saturday of the Month Quads. #RR, 40/75, SD30.

Reg. 9-9:30

1st round is 9:45
2nd round is 1:15
3rd round is 5:00

EF: $20. $40 to top finisher in each quad. Adv. Ent: Richard Martin, 61 N. Jacqueline Ct. Bear, DE 19701, (302) 832-2952, pilgrim19701@yahoo.com.

Howard Johnson Hotel
1119 S. College Ave.
Newark, DE.19713

We will be meeting in the “Iron Hill Room.” The Howard Johnson hotel is next to the Friendly’s Restraunt on 896 just off of the I-95 Newark exit.

A new month so it must be about time to throw in a plug for our very own site! Through the help of Bob Wilder we now keep a list of the top 35 players in Delaware. So if you ever wondered who the best players around the Diamond State are, or exactly how good that guy is who beat you down at the last tournament, you can check out the list at

http://www.delawarechess.org/deuscfratinglist.htm

Take note of the ratings for the players because you may be just shy of making the list. So get out there and play some USCF tournaments and get yourself bumped up to our top 35!

We would also like to create a list of the top student players in the state but the USCF does not release age related data. So if you are a student with a USCF rating and would like to be on our ‘top Delaware students list’ please email me with your name, age and current USCF rating.

Until next time….

Tom Fleetwood

Come join in on the Chess for Charity scholastic tournament being held on March 20th. This is a non-uscf event helping raise money for St. Jude’s Hospital for Children. More information can be found by going to http://www.delawarechess.org/tournaments/chessforcharity.htm

The Spring Scholastic Shoot Out Tournament

When? March 5th, 2005

Where? At the Bear Public Library in community rooms 1 & 2

What? A 4 round Swiss tournament with a time control of Game 30.

How much? $15.00 if your entry fee is received by 3/1/05. $25.00 at the site.

Registration is 10:00-10:30am with the rds being 10:45, 12:00, 1:45, and 3:00pm.

Sections: K-4, 5-8, 9-12. Trophies being given to the top three finishers of each section.

Note: Players must be USCF members (players can join at the site) and legible notation will be required unless waived by the tournament director. Players must supply their own boards and clocks.

Questions? Richard Martin (302)832-2952 or pilgrim19701@yahoo.com

Mail advance entries to: Bear Scholastic Chess Club
61 North Jacqueline Ct.
Bear, DE. 19701