Chess

The chess season starts today as Uni hosts Regionals. Regionals is part of the "regular" season where Uni takes part in a round-robin with 5 other schools in the area (Bismarck Henning, Georgetown Ridge Farm, Notre Dame de la Salette, and Urbana). Today we were supposed to play Georgetown, however they couldn't make it so we will have to play another time...

My Chess Career
I started playing chess when I was 5 years old. I would just bring my queen out, and try to checkmate as fast as possible. When I joined a chess club in first grade at Robeson, I would soon realize that bring the queen out early is a bad idea, since it can be chased away while your opponents develop their pieces at the same time. Despite this early setback in my playstyle, I would soon become one of the best player at the school. One day, we played a match against Dr. Howard, and I played Blair Hu. He completely destroyed me, and Dr. Howard 10-0 us. I was applying to the gifted program, and I remembered wanting to go to Dr. Howard over Garden Hills, Stratton, and Booker T. Washington because of their dominating chess team. At Dr. Howard (in 2nd grade), I was number 4 behind Blair, Johnathan Wang (Uni alumni), and Alice Hu (Uni alumni). Meanwhile, I was in a chess club that meets every Saturday called the Champaign-Urbana Kids Chess Club. Blair, Johnathan, and Alice also attended, but the middle school kids dominated the club. They were people who would later make Uni's chess team one of the best in the state. People like Anshul Adve, Max Sigalov, George Ruan, Shawn Lu, Nathan Beauchamp, Justin Wang, and Kathy Qiu were my idols at the time. I also benefited with a chess coach that was better than all of them who could help me improve my game.

By the time I was in 4th grade, and the CUKCC was disbanded, my coach, Serge Minin thought it was time to enter some of the top players in our school to play in State. Dr. Howard had been dominating ChessFest (the very casual chess tournament in Champaign-Urbana). A team that included me, Blair, Robert Chen, and Will Peacock won Team State along with a team of 2nd and 3rd graders. In 5th grade "Mr. Serge" decided that we can go to Nationals. We practiced for one extra hour every week, and after winning State, a team that included me, Robert, Jacob Minin, and my brother Tue got 17th at Nationals.

Although I have stopped going to tournaments since elementary school, I have being playing irregularly online on chess.com. When I transferred to Uni I forgot that they had a chess team, and I recently started going to tournaments again. Last year, we won the 1A State division (although Anshul carried the team). This year, without Anshul, it will be hard to win 1A again, however I think we can do it if everyone improves.

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