Middle School and Chess

Since making the transition from elementary school to middle school, I have been a lot busier with school work. One of my discoveries in sixth grade is that the teachers like to assign long projects in all subjects which I believe are very beneficial to my education. I am also beginning to learn violin, as part of my school’s excellent music education. After a few months’ practice, I can stand listening to myself playing with only occasional screeching sounds.

A side-effect of these is that now I have had a lot less time for chess study, let alone chess blogging. No more weekday evening chess games in the club. No more state scholastic championships or scholastic nationals. I switched to play a few club-level tournaments on the weekends when I managed to push my school projects to other days. Eventually I became used to the middle school “madness” and actually managed to squeeze in a couple “big*” tournaments since last month.

My Definition of a Big tournament:

1. A tournament that is extremely crowded when trying to look at the pairings on the wall. If you would like to see your pairings before others, you can either wait at the pairing sheet location 30 minutes earlier, or you can practice squeezing between people while shouting “Excuse me! Coming through!” - not something a gentle lady is accustomed to.

2. A tournament usually held in a hotel. Warning to scholastic players: Do not try to play hide and seek or play tag in the lobby between rounds. The hotel staff may yell at you. Also, you might knock over a luggage cart or a vacationing family member.

3. A tournament in which some players sandbag or cheat with Pocket Fritz or some other ways in order to get some prize money after they pay expensive entrance fees.

It has become harder to play at higher levels and understand positional play. For chess playing kids this is even more difficulty when we try to do well in both school and chess because of the time and energy demanded from us. I start to understand why there are so many kids especially girls quit chess when they get into middle school or older. During this time, I received encouragement from chess players, chess masters and chess parents. Thank you Mr. Cashman, the Ong family, Master Mick, Master Smith, Mr. McKey, Sansei Akagi, GM Khachiyan and many other nice people who want to see me stay in chess.