THOUGHTS OF A CHESS ADDICT

Tan Zhong Kai, a 13 year old student from Victoria School has won the Challengers Section of the Whampoa Open Rapid Chess Tournament held over the weekend with 6/7 pts, finishing ahead of several seasoned and higher rated competitors. My congratulations go to him as he has put in diligent work towards his game. Well done!

The July ratings reflect some healthy increases in ratings for the ones who have worked at their game, Royce Tan once again gained 127 pts from his last rating to increase 150 since his January rating. Hui Ling was taking part in more competitions this year and has done well in the last 2 tournaments to gain a hefty 89 pts from April to total 122 pts gained since January. It was a slide for last quarter's top performer I Shiuan, whose performance in the Serangoon and Teck Ghee tournaments caused him to lose pts mainly due to unfamiliar opening play from his opponents. Hopefully we've patched that and the decline should cease. Malcolm and Bryan made modest gains, but with correct thought processes shaped during our sessions they should make bigger process. A few have dropped out of the list owing to O Levels and PSLE which made them inactive. Finally Tricia Koh joins the list after a long wait of 2 years! Hopefully she would find more time to play and improve her rating.

This year's National Inter-Schools is slated to begin 31 August - 1 September. As usual, going by statistics over the last 3 years: BOYS U14      TEAMS SCHOOLS     PLAYERS 2010 18 15 90 2011 13 10 65 2012 12 9 54 SEC OPEN 2010 31 25 149 2011 29 18 136 2012 30 24 146 OPEN 2010 16 10 73 2011 10 8 48 2012 12 8 55 Note that the Secondary Open section is combined with the Girls U16 category, otherwise the numbers will drop if we are to measure only boy's participation. I am sure the number of ladies playing in secondary school has dropped but will need to work out the statistics at another post. The trend that fewer schoolchildren engage in chess for school competition after they turn 16 years of age shows a gradual erosion of interest (seen from the number of players still playing in the Open). This could also be due to the fact t