Sandy The Chess Guy wishes to announce that on Friday, March 24 at the St. Peter & Paul Parish Hall, the 7th Annual Holiday Family Chess Tournament was held.
37 players participated, many of which were students from classes that The Chess Guy (Sanford Staab)
teaches at schools like Peck Elementary School, St. Peter & Paul Elementary School, St. John Bosco Academy, and to many home schoolers, some of which are children of parents who were taught by The Chess Guy years ago.
The tournament was organized as a single open section but with sub-sections of Adult, Student and sections for 1-3, 4-6, 7-9 and 10-12th grade students.  This allowed all players to play each other while also allowing prizes to be awarded to the top (and bottom) players from each sub-section.
The Chess Guy had some very difficult problems with old software used to run the tournaments which delayed the start by 2 hours for data entry and fixing issues.
Thanks to the patient players who waited and waited for the first round.
The Chess Guy is working on writing new software for later tournaments that should fix the issues with the 30 year old commercial product.  Hopefully this solution will provide a much easier way to run live tournaments in the future.
Near the end of the tournament, the top players battled it out with a clock added to finish the rounds, leading to some very exciting chess with everyone watching excitedly for the winner to be revealed.
Though the Chess Guy was on crutches from a foot infection, all went smoothly with many parents expressing their pleasure with the event that highlighted the mental work-out that the game of Chess requires.
Lots of parents and players and especially my wife Kim, pitched in to help as the crippled Chess Guy manned the PC to generate pairings, print out player status and pairings sheets, and collect and enter game results.
The Chess Guy wishes to thank all the donors to our donation jars around the area and to those businesses that sponsored the tournament.
This was the first time the tournament was held in the spring as opposed to around Christmas for health reasons.  The Chess Guy is healing well from an infection and looks forward to more chess events in the future.
The Coffie Loft has a chess evening from 6-8pm every Thursday night.
Join The Chess Guy for ladder games and a cup of coffee!
Also The Chess Guy holds public Chess classes at the Kamiah Library every Thursday night from 4:30pm to 6pm. Starting April 7. It is hoped that these classes will expand to libraries around the clearwater valley area.
Tournament players will be rated by RatingsNW.com soon.
Following are the full list of winners:
Zachariah Heston, Adult, 1st place, $25
Alfred Allman, Adult, 2nd, Grab Bag
Jace Belisle, Grades 10-12, 1st, Gold Medal and overall student 1st place, $100 and Trophy.
Avery James, Grades 10-12, 2nd, Silver Medal and student overall 2nd, $50.
Lance Labrum, Grades 10-12, 3rd, Ribbon and student overall 3rd, $25.
Kayla Jessup, Grades 10-12 Sportsmanship, Grab Bag
Lincoln Pollack, Grade 1-3 1st, Gold Medal & Story Time Chess
Danny Bock, Grades 1-3, 2nd, Silver Medal and Grab Bag
Julianne Belisle, Grades 1-3, 3rd, Ribbon and Grab Bag
Buren Dieseldorff, Grades 1-3, Random winner, Story Time Chess
Grace Harris, Grades 1-3, Sportsmanship, Story Time Chess.
Wyatt Belisle, Grades 4-6, 1st, Gold Medal and Story Time Chess;
Chael Manley, Grades 4-6, 2nd, Silver Medal and Grab Bag
Conner Griffith, Grades 4-6, 3rd, Ribbon and Grab Bag
Cole Sonnen, Grades 4-6, Sportsmanship, Story Time Chess
Tanner Labrum, Grades 7-9, 1st, Gold Medal
Daniel Mason, Grades 7-9, 2nd, Silver Medal
Joe Jessup, Grades 7-9, 3rd, Ribbon
Sivar Galloway, Grades 7-9 Random winner, Grab Bag and Grades 7-9 Sportsmanship, Grab Gag.
David Whiteman, Overal Students Sportsmanship award, Grab Bag.
We gave away 26 official prizes and all participants received something. Thank you to Story Time Chess for their generous donation of prizes. All players said they had a wonderful time.