The 2010 Team Elementary Chess Championship was held Saturday in Des Moines. Eighty players from across Iowa played 5 rounds, battling for individual and team trophies. In a stunning display of power and depth, Weber’s teams won both the K-6 and K-3 Championships. K-6 Team trophies went to Ziwen Zhou (finishing undefeated with 5-0), Ashwin Kalyanakumar, Arshaq Saleem, Soren Schmidt, and Stefan Schmidt (all finishing 4-1). Also winning 4 rounds were Chris Low and Seung-Ok Oh. The Team was so strong that, had our top 3 finishers not even played, our students would still have won the event. Several of our players won individual trophies, including Ziwen who snagged
1st place after playing consistently excellent chess all day.
There were also top trophies for players on Weber’s K-3 Team: Jason Lee (who, like those above, finished 4-1), Vladimir Tivansky, Pranav Krishnamurthy, and Nathan Huang. There’s a bright future for Weber’s teams since, of the 11 players who competed this year, only 2 will graduate from Weber after this school year.
Congrats to our Weber chess players!
