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Coach Joe’s Report on the 2019 Calchess Spring States

The 2019 Northern California Scholastic Chess Championships were held the weekend of March 9th & 10th at the Santa Clara convention center.  Over 1200 students and more the 50 schools competed in these championships.  Mission San Jose Elementary school (MSJE) of Fremont was the big winner in the Elementary School Division.  The MSJE team won two major elementary school sections (K-3 & K-6) and Allyson Wong won the overall individual elementary school championship.

The 2019 Calchess Elementary Chess Champions from MSJE

The top elementary school section at these championships is the K-6 Championship Division.  Allyson scored five wins in six rounds and took the first-place trophy.  Other members of the MSJE team were Lucas Jiang (4.5/6)  (Lucas and Aditya Arutla (3.5/6) are second graders that “played up” in K-6 to help the K-6 team as we correctly felt we could win K-3 without him)   Aghilan Nachiappan  (4/6), Jolene Liu (3.5/6) Aditya Sujay.  This was the ninth straight year that MSJE has taken home the first place trophy in K-6.

K-3 Calchess Championship Chess Team from MSJE

The K-3 Championship section is often called the primary school championship.  MSJE finished in first place in this section every year since 2008.  In 2019 MSJE once again finished in first place in K-3 Championship.  Our K-3 team was led by Jason Liu and Swagatha Selvan, who each scored 4.5/6.  Artham Pawar (3.5/6) and Allen Yang (2.5/6) were also top 4 scorers. Arnam Pawar, Thomas Zhang, and Dev Bhatt also competed for our K-3 championship team.

MSJE also did very well in the other sections. Ashwin Jegan, Chet Jayakrishnan, Zahaan Kassamali, Isha Vanungare, Sarvesh Maniv, and Helen Hong competed in K-3 Junior varsity (under 800 rating) and took home the first place team trophy.  Prisha Agarwal, Shreeya Hule, Jai Panicker, Ranga Ramanujam, Pranav Rajit, Atharv Jha, Shashwa Manjunath, Edward Zeng, Aashi Gupta, Keerthana Gudi, Shriya Thirumalai, Sunay Rao, Aditya Vanungare, Samuel Montesinos, Nathan Jacob, and Cedric Liu competed for MSJE in the K-3 beginner (under 500 rating) section and took home the first place trophy.

Pranavi Pramod, Saambhavi Karthik, and Nick Jiang competed for MSJE in the kindergarten section. Sanskriti Pandey, Edmund Saroufim, and Kevin Pham competed for MSJE in the K-6 rookie section.  Adarsh Swamy, Ashwin Marimuthu, Pratyush Hule, Arnav Gupta, and Dhritee Desai, competed in the K-6 Junior varsity section.

Congratulations to the Chess team for a great showing at the State championships.

MSJE Chess Coaches: Joe Lonsdale, Terry & Cathy Liu, Nachi Aghilan, Chris Torres

Published by chessmusings

Chris Torres is a nationally renowned scholastic chess coach working in the San Francisco Bay Area. His classes have attracted players of strengths ranging from rank beginners to world champions. A chess professional since 1998, Chris is widely recognized as one of the main driving forces behind the explosion in popularity and sudden rise in quality of scholastic chess in California. Chris Torres served as the President of the Torres Chess and Music Academy from 2005-2020 and currently is recognized as a correspondence chess master with the United States Chess Federation. Since 1998 Chris Torres has taught 6 individual national champions as well as led multiple school teams to win national championship titles. In addition, Chris Torres has directed and taught at 10 different schools which have been California State Champions at chess. In 2011 and 2012, several former and current students of Chris Torres have been selected to represent the United States at the World Youth Chess Championships. Mr. Torres’ hobbies include playing classical guitar and getting his students to appear on the national top 100 chess rating lists.

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