Central Texas Chess club
Coach James will be reviewing the Scholar’s Mate with the Pawn group by showing the following video:
Coach Chris will be reviewing one of the most common opening traps called the Fork trick with the Knights group.
The Rooks and Kings groups will complete the last round of their club tournament and then start a lesson from our new Westwood student volunteers.
Coach James will be reviewing the battering ram tactic to the pawns at this week’s club meeting.
Our judges have voted and the winning design goes to 5th grader Leonardo Fernandez. His design has two cats or panthers playing Chess at a table with one standing up. Around it, text says “The Best Never Rest”
Congratulations to Leonardo who wins a $5 chess buck. And thank you to all the students who entered the contest this year. The design will be sent to our tshirt printing company for their graphic artist to clean up. We hope to have tshirts in November for everyone to wear and enjoy.
We received nine entries to our t-shirt design contest last Friday. Our parent judges are currently reviewing them all and we plan to choose a winner at this Friday’s club meeting. As soon as we have a winner, we will begin working with our shirt vendor to get the design touched up and finalize the shirt order. We hope to have the shirts finished and passed out by November.
The Spicewood Elementary Chess Club is having a party at the Spicewood Elementary school on Saturday November 2nd from 10:00 to 2:00pm. The event is for 4 hours with pizza arriving around noon. We know Saturday’s are a busy day with lots of sports and other activities, so this event is designed for you to come and go as you please. Swing by for only 30 minutes or stay the whole time.
We will be playing Chess and having fun with our friends. We will have coaches available to work with the students. This is the week before the Casis Elementary Scholastic Chess tournament, so we will be helping the kids prepare for the tournament as well as have fun with our special chess sets including our light up chess boards, our 4 player chess sets, our Musketeer variant chess pieces (elephant, unicorn, dragon, leopard, etc)
We have also invited some of our friends from other local elementary Chess clubs as well as local chess teachers and experts.
The club will be providing Pizza and we ask parents to signup to bring other items needed for the party such as drinks, plates, utensils, etc. This is also a potluck, so we encourage parents to bring cookies, snacks, etc. There is a signup sheet for Parents to RSVP and let us know what item/items you can volunteer to bring. Please remember no food containing nuts!
Registration closed on September 27th for Chess club. We will re-open registration for two weeks starting in January 6th for any additional students who want to join.
We have 109 students in our club this year. Half of those students are in Kindergarten or 1st grade, so we have many beginners this year.
Here is a nice animated video that talks about the origins and history of Chess. We recommend all students watch this and it is only five minutes long.
We had 14 students from Spicewood Elementary participate in the Meridian Scholastic Chess tournament on September 14th, 2019. The tournament consisted of 5 rounds of games each worth 1 point. In total, our kids scored a total of 35 out of a possible 70 points. (50%)
This tournament kind of snuck up on us as we did not do a great job of promoting it in the weeks leading up to it. We will do a better job for the next tournament at Casis Elementary.
We got FIRST place in the K-1 under 400 section with 2 students getting a total score of 8 points!. Congratulations to Yashas Veerapaneni for winning all 5 of his games and getting 1st place in the section (Trophy). Benjamin Yu came in 6th with 3 wins (Medal). This two person team received the 1st place trophy at the awards ceremony and you can see it at our next club meeting.
We got FOURTH place in the K-3 under 700 section with 3 students gaining a total score of 5 points. (Devin Liu, Julian Joseph and Tiffany Teoh)
We got THIRD place in the K-5 under 1000 section with 2 students gaining a total score of 8 points. Joyce Song came in 3rd place with 4 wins and Gavin Wang came in 5th place with 4 wins each getting a trophy!
For the individual awards:
We had three students receive trophies for 4 or more points in their sections: Yashas Veerapaneni, Joyce Song and Gavin Wang.
We had 1 student receive a medal for scoring between 3.0 and 3.5 points in their sections: Benjamin Yu.
Congratulations to all of our students who competed at this year’s Meridian chess tournament. Each student will get $5 chess bucks for their participation.
We also note that Canyon Vista Middle school got first place in the K-12 Any rating section. We were happy to see many Spicewood Elementary chess club alumni in the group that won!
At today’s club meeting, coach Chris announced a design contest for the students to come up with this year’s t-shirt design. We wanted to pass out a flyer that outlined this contest, but in the hectic ending of our meeting, we forgot to hand it out. No worries though as we can post it right here for you to read.
We have a two week hiatus while the Book fair goes on in the library and when we return on October 4th, all t-shirt designs are due. From all of the submissions, the coaches will pick a winner. That winner will not only get $5 Chess bucks, but will also have their name printed next to their design on every shirt!
We have some rules to follow, so please read through them on the contest rules page.
Here are some images of the past 10 years of T-shirt designs to use as inspiration.
Coach James will be showing the following video at this week’s club meeting. It reviews what “check” means, how to check your opponent and how to get your King out of check. If you have time before the meeting, he asks that all Pawns watch this video to be well prepared for Friday.
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