2013 Tri-State Super-Juniors

10/12 – 10/13/13


The future stars of the chess world with round 1 underway.

Our annual Tri-State Super-Juniors once again drew an incredibly talented field of sixteen players.  The field featured many of the nation’s top scholastic players from the #1 ranked seven year old Maximillian Lu, to the winner of the 2013 Denker Tournament of High School Champions NM Kapil Chandran and New York high school champion NM Joshua Colas to name just a few.  Colas and Chandran entered the tournament as heavy favorites but quickly found themselves needing to win out when they both drew against lower rated opponents in round one. 

A unique feature of this tournament is a two hour lecture for the players. Last year's guest was Grandmaster Joel Benjamin. This year the guest of honor was US Champion and GM-Elect Irina Krush who gave the a fantastic lecture to the kids about the "Psychology of Piece Activity". Her inspiring words and examples clearly resonated with the kids. The following rounds were extremely dramatic.


GM-Elect Irina Krush's lecture

Colas and Chandran worked their way back through the field to finally face each other on board one in the final round, both with a 2.5/3 score.  Also with 2.5/3 was expert Jason Shi who faced fellow expert Michael Ainsworth on board two.  This meant that a draw would not be enough to guarantee victory.  After an extremely tense round with over 300 spectators observing the games online, both Chandran and Shi won their games, tying for first place and necessitating a blitz tiebreaker (NM Daniel Lowinger annotates Colas - Chandran here).

Jason Shi won the coin flip to decide colors of the single G/5 blitz game and bravely chose the black pieces!  Unfortunately for Jason the strategy did not pay off as Kapil handled the pressure with the calmness of an experienced veteran and swiftly outplayed Jason to take the title!  Second place went to Jason Shi.  Third place went to the incredibly talented Dennis Li who finished ahead of many of his higher rated peers and is now nearing expert! 


NM Kapil Chandran receiving his prize from CCFC Director Melvin Patrick!


L to R: Jason Shi, NM Kapil Chandran, Dennis Li

Click here for results and more pictures!