FunMasterMike In Australia!
A famous song once asked, "Do you come from the land down under?" Well, for FunMasterMike, the answer is "no" but for one glorious week I pretended! I even ate Vegemite and went surfing just to try to fit in
In late January I was lucky enough to be the invited guest at the 2020 Australian Junior Chess Championships, which featured more than 300 of the country's most talented ChessKids. Thanks to the super hosting by the Chess Association of Queensland and Gardiner Chess, I felt right at home in the Gold Coast of Queensland, Australia.
Maybe you're thinking you've heard of Gardiner Chess before? That's because they run the biggest and best chess events in Queensland!
How cool that even young kids got to play on electronic boards that broadcasted their moves on big screens and online!
In addition to hosting a ChessKid booth, FunMasterMike was also asked to give a simultaneous exhibition and give two lectures. Overall, I won 20 games and lost one, but the "simul" took longer than planned because the Aussie kids played me so tough!
Some video of my lectures will be offered later on our social media channels, but here's what our booth looked like!
See if you can spy FunMasterMike's sidekick, the Ticher!
Some kids returned again and again to try to win all the prizes I had to offer: wristbands, stickers, and tattoos!
These ChessKids practically lived at the ChessKid booth for a few days!
One of the other highlights of my time there was introducing a first-ever idea: a national puzzles championship using the features of ChessKid! Want to try it yourself? Here's how it worked:
- One hour before the start of one of the morning rounds, kids arrived early with the ChessKid app downloaded to a phone or tablet (a few kids played on the web version, which was fine)
- Kids logged out of their normal account and were given a one-time use account so that all kids started at the same level of puzzle difficulty
- The "print login cards" feature allowed us to give kids a slip of paper with their competition account. They signed in and waited.
- When I said "Go!" they all began solving as fast and as accurately as they could, with the winner being the ChessKid with the highest rating after 10 minutes.
- Tracking winners was easy since I had placed them all in the same club, and the leaderboard showed me all the stats I needed.
Are you curious what it looks like to have 52 young kids using iPads but completely silent for 10 minutes? I'm guessing that might be a world record!
Another pro-tip for this kind of competition: Make sure you have good Wifi for everyone to use (we did!).
Take a look at the outstanding performances of the top 10 finishers:
And we had our winners for the first-ever Australia ChessKid Puzzle Championship! Amazingly a few kids were able to get their rating over 2000 in only 10 minutes time.
Here's all 52 kids holding up their ChessKid devices.
Maybe FunMasterMike's favorite picture of any ChessKid event!
The top three finishers got limited-edition ChessKid scorebooks. And a pic with me (but it was my honor to be seen with these future masters)!
Third place!
Second place!
First place!
If you ever want to run a puzzle competition like this one and need one-time use accounts, please email [email protected] a few days before your event and our friendly staff can help out!
FunMasterMike loved the warmth of the weather and the warmth of the Aussie ChessKids and parents. I hope to be able to return to Australia one day!
**Many of you may have also heard about the devastating forest fires currently happening all over Australia. ChessKid will be hosting a live episode of "Beat FunMasterMike" soon as a charity event, with all of proceeds going to help save koalas and their habitat. To stay informed about when that will be, make sure to follow ChessKid on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter or on the Official ChessKid Club on Chess.com.
A koala in a wildlife refuge that FunMasterMike visited.