16 May 2008 - Megafinals 2008
Our players had great success at the recent UK Chess Challenge Megafinals. Visit the Gallery for photos of our stars in action: http://www.chesslinksproject.btik.com/gallery/home.ikml
Yorkshire
We had qualifiers from Yarm School and Whale Hill Primary at the Yorkshire Megafinal (5/52008)
Being up against the best players from all over North Yorkshire made for a tough tournament
but our young stars did us all proud and returned with a big collection of prizes.
Aditya Chaudhury was playing in his first Megafinal and he did extremely well to win the
Under-7 section. He won a big trophy and a place in the next section (the Manchester Gigafinal). Ethan Jones scored heavily too, with 4.5/6.
Arjun Tapasvi and Katie Anderson were on terrific form in the Under-8 section and they
won the Boys and Girls titles respectively. This was Katie's third consecutive Megafinal success - a remarkable achievement.
Charles Guthrie powered his way to five wins and the Under-10 title. This was his greatest tournament success to date.
Daniel and Ryan Todd both qualified for the Gigafinal with excellent scores of 4/6 in the Under-9 section and the winner of the section - with a magnificent 6/6 - was fellow Whale-Hiller Nathan Spenceley.
Dhruv Tapasvi won all six of his games (a score achieved by very few players at any Megafinal) and naturally took the Under-11 title. Ben Williams scored 4/6 to qualify for the Gigafinal too.
In addition to the six impressive trophies, our players brought home numerous rosettes and lots of them have qualified for the Gigafinal.
It will be interesting to see how well our champions do against Megafinal winners from other parts of the country. We will find out in July!
Northumbria
A number of players from Teesside High and Preston Primary made the journey to the Northumbria Megafinal in Sunderland on Bank Holiday Monday (10/5/2008). They had all qualified via the Chess Links Project UK Chess Challenge and were now hoping to score at least 4/6 to qualify for the national ‘Gigafinal’.
The standard was very high but all of our players really got stuck into the action in all of the sections from Under-7 to Under-11.
Only a couple of our stars had played in a ‘Megafinal’ before yet they all emerged with very creditable scores.
Niall (under-10) kept up his excellent form with 4/6, thus qualifying for the next stage.
Full scores of our players:
Under-11
3.5/6: Ben Amos
3/6: Tom Batchelor
Under-10
4/6: Niall Garner
3/6: Becky Donaldson
2/6: Katie Wake
Under-9
3/6: Josh White
2.5/6: Adya Trivedi
2/6: Abigail Glancey
1.5/6: Zaahra Maiter
Under-8
3/6: Joe Oliver
2/6: Ben Portas
Under-7
1.5/6: Becky Portas
All of our players will still be able to qualify for Megafinals for many years to come (Becky inparticular -she is still Under-6!) and I’m sure that the experience gained this time will stand them in very good stead in future events.