A ChessKid's Report: Mission San Jose Sweeps States

[Kevin Pan (1920) is a four-time California grade level champion and recently became the 2016 CA Superstate K-5 Champion. He participated in the 2015 ChessKid.com Online National Invitational Championship and tied for second in the under-8 section. Here he shares the story of his recent big success.]

Over the weekend of March 19 and 20, the 2016 Northern California Scholastic Chess Championship was held at Santa Clara Convention Center, across the street from Levi’s Stadium where the 50th Super Bowl took place. Almost 1,000 students and more than 100 school teams competed in 16 sections.

Levi's Stadium.

I came into the tournament very nervous being one of the top seeds in K-5 championship section. Sometimes being the highest rated gives a lot of pressure, which was exactly how I felt. The K-5 competition was going to be hard due to the vast amount of players.

I really didn’t want to lose because I was going to lose rating and not earn the title. I also knew I had to get this out of my mind, otherwise I wouldn’t do well. I had many challengers that wanted to prevail, such as Oliver Wu (1856) and Andrew Peng (1927), two nationally-ranked fifth-graders.

Luckily (for me) one of them I didn’t have to face and one of them I faced a half-point ahead at the last round. Oliver lost in the second round to Ahyan Zaman (1207) surprisingly. Stephen He (one of my teammates rated 1463) drew Andrew in the fourth round.

Here is the great game Stephen played:

Speaking of the fouth round, Jacob Han (1603) gave me quite some trouble. My team after round three was tied with the cross-town rival Weibel team. As the captain I had to win the fourth round to break the tie!  

I was lucky to make it out alive. Here is my game against Jacob Han:

When I faced Andrew in the last round, I was very confident and determined to win. In the game I was up two pawns when he offered the draw. I only needed a draw to win the title, but I also wanted to win to get rating. During the game I had to make a big decision, but I finally decided to draw giving me the title with 5.5 points out of 6.

I was really happy about it and didn’t regret my decision. Here is my game against Andrew:

Here are the final standings for my section:

When I came back to the team room, I was thrilled to find out my school, Mission San Jose Elementary School from Fremont, California, had achieved something no other school in the 41 years history of Northern California Scholastic Chess Superstate Championship has ever achieved: we had a clean sweep of all individual and team titles in all championship/varsity sections!

Our head coach, Joe Lonsdale, created our school’s chess program 30 years ago when his kids were in our school. His program has produced generations of state and national champions year after year. He picked me and my brother up when I was in kindergarten, and my brother was in fifth grade, and knew nothing about chess!

Now my brother is an expert, and I have been on Coach Joe’s national and international champion team!

Here are the proud winners from my school:

(Left to right) Coach Joe with K-6 champion Jaisuraj Kaleeswaran; K-3 champion Aghila Nachiappan; K-5 champion Kevin Pan; K champion Jason Liu.

The K-6 champion team.

The K-5 champion team.

The K-3 championship team.

The kindergarten championship team.