2024 SPOOKY FESTIVAL TOURNAMENT
Are we ready for some scary good chess?
Got those chessboards out and dust off costumes because the Spooky Festival Chess Tournament held on October 26, 2024 was creeping up fast! The Tournament Director, CM Alex A., made the pairings each round and Joan Sensei settled any type of dispute that arose during the game. Please give them a respect for the difficult job they do. Special thanks to Kairi & Kanata's mom & photographer, Hiroko A. for beautiful Halloween photos!
There were 20 brave souls, that came out during our Halloween Haunt from at least 10 schools. Halloween lends itself perfectly to the artistic elements of the game. Children played four rounds showing fine sportsmanship as well as fine ability.
The trophies and the Halloween Best Costume Award are presented at a ceremony.
When two or more players ended up with the same score, we will have a blitz chess play-off, in which champions play one game of five-minute chess to determine who wins which trophy. The tie-break has done for Class A. The winners were:
Class A: Kairi Akiyama with 4.0/5.0
Class A: Haruki Shimagaki with 4.0/5.0
Class A: Tristan Chih with 4.0/5.0
Class B: Jino Hernandez Zhou with 4.5/5.0
Class B: Eugene Yataha with 4.0/5.0
Class B: Yuta Yano with 3.5/5.0
Yuzuru Sugimoto dressed as a vampire won the best costume prize. There's no set in-stone way to be a vampire, especially with the evil one like hers!
Birthday celebration for CM Alex took place during the ceremony. Getting older is mandatory, but growing up is optional. Here’s to never fully embracing adulthood! Happy birthday, forever young friend, Alex!
Candies were handed out after the tournament. Congratulations to everyone who came out to participate and make for a great chess community event.
Stay tuned for the Christmas Tournament in December!
Sponsorship Wanted!
A BRAVE NEW WORLD! NEW OPPORUNITIES if you are interested in sponsoring global-minded young chess players! Build and grow your brand with Tokyo Bilingual Chess Club!
TBCC Sponsorship is open to individual, groups of supporters and large and small businesses, which allows you to obtain opportunities to reach a specific demographic, such as multinational corporations and communities inside and outside of this country. It increases visibility for the company and its brand through CSR activities.
TBCC is currently seeking sponsors for our tournaments, events, fixtures and materials during the forthcoming season as follows:
● Chess sets, chess clocks, uniforms, trophies and other fixtures
● Expenses for travel, accommodation, other fees of chess coach associated with TBCC players in various internal and overseas tournaments
● Expenses for travel, accommodation, other fees of chess master invited to TBCC events
Tokyo Bilingual Chess Club is looking for sponsors to replace chess sets and clocks. TBCC is currently using used chess sets and clocks donated by parents and a former Japan Chess Association. (Thanks always for your support!) These chess sets and clocks are damaged and broken recently and required to be replaced for internal tournaments. Especially, chess clocks are broken so easily with TBCC's little players who are so curious with chess clocks 😢
The fact of young players who are representing Japan in the various world championship by a selection from the National Chess Society of Japan is that expenses related to the championship is paid by each family of the player. Depending on a financial situation of the family, a talented and unbeaten young player sometime needs to give up enrolling the world championship which would result in his/her great experience and future challenges. Imagine being given such an international opportunity, the total costs would be X,000,000 yen for travel and accommodations for a young player plus Dad/Mom to visit the other end of the globe for two weeks💦
Additionally, pro-rata expenses for travel, accommodation, other fees for a wonderful GM chess coach, who comes all the way from Serbia and supports the Japan Team during the world Championship, is paid by each family of a player.
Your sponsorship will be recognized on the TBCC's various courses of benefit plans as follows:
WHY DO WE DO IT?
My son enjoyed his K-5 elementary school chess club in Tokyo. He was really looking forward to playing the chess club champions from the other international schools at the upper elementary chess club. Then, before the summer break, we learned the bad news. The majority of international schools had no chess club for elementary students in Tokyo to experience the benefit of chess. I started to speak with the school principal, teachers, students and parents.
Afterward I wondered, "could a parent with no expertise in chess start a chess tournament at an elementary school in Tokyo???" After all, I'm barely a good match for my 6 year old son! As it turns out, there were some helpful web sites indicating, this is indeed possible! But, how? A couple of the sites even provided general descriptions of the process of starting a scholastic chess tournament. However, none gave a good detailed blow-by-blow description of the process with actual requirements, all the necessary documents and materials to pull it off. I needed a scholastic chess tournament start-up do-it-yourself kit for dummies. But, none existed.
It was hard to put the idea of starting a chess tournament aside, in spite of my ignorance on the subject. My son and a lot of other kids in Tokyo Bilingual Chess Club stood to benefit a lot from the effort.
There will be still a lot of details to sort out and materials to prepare for our tournaments and events.
Let us try! And then try again! Hang in there!
SUMMER PROGRAM
FUN TOURNAMENTS
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