The Barry S. Spiegel Memorial Cup, the state’s scholastic singles championship, honors one of Worcester’s most hard-working chess volunteers, who died in 1992. This year the event in Marlboro produced multiple winners “from A to Z” in three of four age groups.
The open high school section produced the only clear winner, Mika Brattain of Lexington, 4-0. Brattain will also represent Massachusetts in the Denker tourney of state high school champions in late July in Florida. Siddharth Arun of Medfield was second in the strong 14-player event.
Danny Angermeier of Franklin will represent the state in the concurrent Barber middle school tourney of state champions by winning the age 14 and under section on playoff over Evan Meyer of Newton and Carissa Yip of Chelmsford (who played up one age section in the prelims), but all three share the state middle school title.
Brandon Wu and Michael Yu, both of Acton, and, Suraj Ramanathan of Canton shared the upper elementary title, but Wu took the top trophy on tiebreak. A similar tiebreak in the age 8 and younger (lower elementary) group gave Bernie Xu of Needham the first place cup over David Zhou of Lexington and Derek Zhao of Westford.
Quite a bit of clerical work for tournament director Bob Messenger, who wears out computer laptops keeping track of MACA’s membership and 20-plus state championship prelims and finals contests as well as the New England title events most every year. For this story and future scholastic events, see www.masschess.org, and for the rating stats see www.uschess.org, as technology now enables both groups to crunch all kinds of data on human abilities in the sport, hobby and educational fields.
In other results last weekend, Chris Gu of Wakefield, R.I., won the Providence College Open, Chris Chase of Somerville swept the Legends Mieses Open at the Boylston Chess Club in that city, and Denys Shmelov of Pepperell swept the 139th first Friday event at the Waltham Chess Club, 7-0.
Just the activities of the Wachusett Chess Club at Fitchburg State University could fill this column, with Mike Manisy of Otter River winning the 35-player Reggie Boone Memorial, and Carissa Yip taking second, both undefeated. A new “Chess Chat” may be viewed on demand at www.fatv.org, and the O’Rourke Memorial will start on Wednesday, details at www.wachusettchess.org. There will be at least one TV crew interviewing and filming Carissa Yip, 10, for CNN’s “Power of She” program, we are told.
A new chess program for teens is scheduled at the Worcester Public Library Thursday afternoon of this school vacation week. Attendance will determine the future format and frequency.
Source: http://www.telegram.com
Too much.