Two important annual events recently took place in Washington (reported by WCF secretary Gary Dorfner):
The Washington State Blitz Championship was held at Cross Roads Mall in Bellevue on October 11, 2014. There were 32 players participating in this event. This year’s winner is Roland Feng with 11.5 points. 2nd and 3rd places were shared by Daniel He and Marcell Szabo with 10.5 points each. In the Scholastic Section Jakey Snyder was first with 13.0, with a tie for 2nd and 3rd between Christian Jordan and Vignesh Anand with 9.0 points each.
The Washington Challengers’ Cup was held at the Seattle Chess Club, October 25-26, 2014. There were 67 players in all, 32 in the Open and 35 in the Reserve. The winners were: 1st FM Curt Collyer with 4.0. He will be seeded into the 2015 state championship; 2nd Bryce Tiglon 3.5 (taking a second round bye and winning the rest of his games); U2100 David Rupel, Kyle Haining and Derek Zhang 3.0 each; U1900 Severo Caluza, Jason Yu and Trevor Jung 2.0 each. In the Reserve UW undergrad student Alan Tan was 1st with 4.5 (conceding his only draw to WCF tournament coordinator Dan Mathews); the 2nd/U1600/U1200-Unr. prizes were split among Catherine Smith, Addison Lee and Frank Hou with 4.0 each; while U1400 was a four-way tie among Oscar Petrov, Joshua Lewis, Jared Huang and Anshul Ahluwa with 3.5 each.
The Challengers’ Cup Scholastic was held at the St. Thomas More School on November 1, 2014. There were 70 students participating in all. In the K-1/U800 section Walter Barr was 1st with 5.0, Dhruv Ojha and Elizabeth Flynn shared 2nd with 3.0 each and David Wilson was 3rd. In the 2-3/U800 section, Arjun Handa was 1st with 4.5, and 2nd was shared by Pranav Venkatesh, Aaryan Dhingra and Krish Doshi with 4.0 each. In the K-3/Open section, 1st place went to Miles Kuipers, 2nd place went to Daniel Qian, and there was a 3-way tie for 3rd, with Andrew Nguyen, Anirudh Rajesh and Sophie Szeto finishing with 3.0 each. In the 4-6/U900 section, 1st went to Arvind Manivannan with a perfect score of 5.0, 2nd to Aditya Venkataraman with 4.0, 3rd to Harvey Yang with 3.5, while Terence Sinn, Elliott Riedy, Matt Flynn and Marcus Lam tied for 4th with 3.0 each. In the 4-6/Open section, Ishaan Puri and Ethan Kam finished 1st with 4.5 each, while 3rd place was taken by Revanth Pothukuchi with 4.0.