The Game Of Kings In Queensland

 

Who needs surfing? Scholastic chess is big in Australia!

Gardiner Chess is based in the Gold Coast and Brisbane in Queensland, Australia. We also run the Official Queensland Inter-School Chess Championships on behalf of the Chess Association of Queensland all the way along the coast, from Gold Coast through to Cairns in the North (approximately 2000km!). Additionally, we run the New South Wales Northern Rivers region on behalf of the NSW Junior Chess League.

Regional tournaments are held in: Gold Coast, Brisbane, Sunshine Coast, Maryborough, Bundaberg, Gladstone, Rockhampton, Emerald, Mackay, Townsville and Cairns. Some schools travel up to 3 ½ hours to get to the regional events!

In Australian chess, the action gets so hot you need the ceiling fans to be the size of half a room!

We currently coach in 80 schools in SouthEast Queensland, which encompasses more than 2000 students a week in coaching. Currently we have 55 chess coaches working for us!

We believe in providing a positive impact on society and using chess as a vehicle to do this. Gardiner Chess actively strives to strengthen a child’s mental clarity, fortitude, and stability through high quality chess coaching. We strongly believe chess can be used as a metaphor for life -- You have to be responsible for your actions, make a move and plan ahead. We hope that students learn a love for the game, whilst gaining the many educational and social benefits that are available from chess. Of course chess should be FUN, and we hope students continually improve their chess and can go on to represent their school and themselves in the future!

Is this company owner Andrew FitzPatrick, or Alekhine Fitzgerald? It sure looks like a position that ChessKid also uses to show the "Alekhine's Gun" battery in King Level 38!

Now that we have partnered with ChessKid, we have become unique by providing a full Gold Membership for ChessKid as part of each student enrollment.

ChessKid is being used in two ways:

For schools where parents pay directly to Gardiner Chess, coaches teach a weekly lesson, and then send a message to their group with a link to a video to reinforce that lesson.
Schools from around the state have signed students up to the program. This allows students in far-flung places we can’t access with coaching to get access to coaching through ChessKid and improve their chess. We offer full support behind the scenes, from setting up the programs, to helping keep schools on track with any questions they might have.

We can already see the benefits of using ChessKid. On the recent Queensland Junior Rating list (which has more than 3000 names on it!), the top improver jumped 133 points in two months, after hammering the lessons, puzzles and games. At the Australian Juniors held in Brisbane in January, 2017, the students that helped trial ChessKid all were noticeably stronger at tactics than they had been.

Now that's more like it. Getting a tan while playing outdoor chess at the Gardiner Chess booth.

Gardiner Chess has seen much success. Somerset College, one of our biggest clients, qualified three teams to the National Schools Championships in December, and all teams placed on the podium, including winning the Primary Open Division (2nd Primary Girls and 3rd Secondary Girls). Somerset College and Gardiner Chess have had a very long and successful relationship, with Somerset College boasting the most success of any single school in Australian Schools Chess.

Students that win/place at the age state titles each year have almost always come through a Gardiner Chess program and I believe that in the next few years we’ll be able to challenge the Southern states more at Nationals.

We have also had some limited success at this stage in getting chess into the school curriculum, which is obviously an extremely busy place. Some schools have taken on our Chess and Maths program, which is designed to teach chess to students and involve maths concepts wherever possible in order to keep progressing both chess and maths. Other schools prefer to keep a pure chess element to classes but as we all know this helps general learning anyway!