Black to move
Caruana,Fabiano
Firouzja,Alireza
2023
The Starry Night
Vincent van Gogh
1889
Caruana,Fabiano
Firouzja,Alireza
2023
The Starry Night
Vincent van Gogh
1889
 In order to cooperate with the ongoing group buying, I write down some benefits of chess.com membership.
First of all, using chess.com is a necessary tool for almost all chess students. Because in 99% of families no one plays chess, and no one can become a child's opponent in practicing chess. So playing chess online is a must. A big problem with free accounts is ads. chess.com has only minimal control over the delivery and content of advertisements. Basically it's up to Google and other advertisers. Not only are these ads distracting, but they may also be harmful to children. Removing ads is the first priority, and this requires at least Gold membership. In addition to playing chess, another purpose of using the Internet is to solve chess problems. Five questions a day for a free account is far from enough for children who are in the growing stage. If you want unlimited puzzles, you also need Gold. So Gold is a basic necessity. Playing chess requires review. Without review, nothing is learned. Most junior chess children do not have a private coach to help them review their games, and even if they do, it would be impossible to review all online games. This requires machine review and analysis. The free account only allows one game a day, and growing-stage students need to play at least 2-5 games a day, so they need to seek help from Platinum membership. Diamond provides a virtual coach who points out your mistakes, gives you a chance to correct them, and evaluates your new moves. This is the function I use most often. Generally speaking, playing a game of chess can take 5 to 10 minutes, or even longer, and reviewing it should take at least 5-10 minutes. Diamond also has a function called Insight, which tells you your strengths and weaknesses. I don't fully understand utilization yet. I always choose Diamond. My reason is: Although chess.com does not clearly explain the difference between Diamond and Platinum, some unstated restrictions may limit your use and learning. To save $40, doesn't seem worth it. This is not even worth a group lesson, let alone a private lesson. My students don’t even blink if they miss a lesson due to holidays, school events, parties, or birthdays. So why save $40 a year on your most important tool? The above are my opinions and are for reference only. chess.com club "Princeton Chess" is having a new tournament schedule starting in Dec.
Everyone is welcome to join our club. Our main goal is to help our students and friends improve their chess everyday. https://www.chess.com/club/princeton-chess To provide the best service to our students and friends, we are offering online tournaments daily, with different time control. Monday to Friday, the tournament will start at 6:30pm EST, and Saturday and Sunday, 2pm EST. Here is the proposed schedule: Monday，6:30pm EST, 1+1 Tuesday，6:30pm EST, 3+2 Wednesday，6:30pm EST, 10+5 Thursday，6:30pm EST, 10+5 Friday，6:30pm EST, 15+10 (3 hours) Saturday，2:00pm EST, blitz （G5) Sunday，2:00pm EST, 15+10 (3 hours) All other tournament arena last for 2 hours. In Chinese 星期一，6:30pm EST, 1+1 星期二，6:30pm EST, 3+2 星期三，6:30pm EST, 10+5 星期四，6:30pm EST, 10+5 星期五，6:30pm EST, 15+10 星期六，2:00pm EST, blitz （G5) 星期日，2:00pm EST, 15+10
CIS is Chess in The School. It is the most famous national elephant non-profit organization in New York. Its school project is only for Title I schools in New York City. The so-called Title I is to receive federal subsidies. The majority of poor students in the school, at least 40% of the students are enjoying a free lunch (some including breakfast). It has about 48 schools under its umbrella, and its programs in schools do not charge students.
According to the website, CIS has taught approximately 600,000 students. Because it is non-profit, it has a lot of research on the relationship between chess and academic performance. (see picture 2) CIS organizes quite a few tournaments. Also CIS tournaments are free. Students who are not in its program schools can also sign up, but the number is limited to 20 at a time. There's a scene in the movie "Brooklyn Castle" where CIS helps Rochelle find a GM trainer for free. Among them, CIS director Shawn is my daughter's first opponent at Marshall, whom I still remember.  ChessNYC, as its name suggests, is New York City's chess. It was established in 2007, and its main business should also be after school chess classes or clubs. Its weekend tournaments are branded as "Play and Go". It is not clear from the website which schools it owns. If you know, you can tell it in the comment area. The sign of the organization is more obvious, the skyscraper skyline of New York. It was relatively hot in the past few years. For example, Tani's primary school was originally one of the ChessNYC's schools. (now under the ICN banner)
The organization also operates private lessons and small classes. I remember that the price can be found in the past. It is not cheap, and it is completely New York price. Look at the website and there are non-profit organizations that should be affiliated to it. Due to the impact of the epidemic, some of its classes are still online.  The first time I heard about ICN was because someone went to the Marshall Chess Club to take classes and said it was organized by ICN. The photo of the last national tournament was mixed-up, and someone pointed out that it was a photo of ICN. I always thought ICN was Impact Chess Network. After checking online, I found out that it is Impact Coaching Network. It has only appeared on the stage in New York City in recent years, or it may have been renamed from another institution. But the cooperation with Marshall really made it famous.
After checking the website, ICN mainly cooperates with schools to organize after school chess classes or chess clubs. There are already 27 schools under its banner, most of which are public schools of the PS series. PS 33 (aka Chelsea Prep) (photo) is probably the most famous one. With such a huge scale, there must be a coaching team. But because it is not directly under a school, the coaches are not necessarily the strongest, and the student stars among them are not the strongest. But it has a lot of activities. In addition to after school, and Marshall's class, there are also monthly training camps, and several tournaments every weekend. This has built a good mass base for the popularization of chess. ICN will definitely continue to expand, and maybe one day it will be bought by Play Magnus like Silver Knight (DC, an after school institution in the Pennsylvania area). This is a little prophecy of mine.  A piece of news today disrupted my plan for the series. But at least it is related to the chess in New York.
The three children mentioned in the movie "Brooklyn Castle" yesterday, Rochelle, Justus, and James, are all black children. In addition, Darrian in the comments, and Joshua Colas, one of the three musketeers (3 Js) at the time. Nowhere else do you see so many black kids who are good at chess. The latest example is Tani. Tani fled from Nigeria as a refugee in 2017, and today's news is that the Tani family's asylum application was approved. When the family first arrived here, they lived in a shelter for the homeless. Tani went to PS116. This school is now under the management of ICN, but telling from the team T-shirts at the time, it was ChessNYC, another famous institution. Tani joined the school's Chess Club and worked very hard. It is common for him to do 500 tactical problems a week. After hard work, his rating improved rapidly. He learned chess in 2018 and won the K-3 championship in New York State in 2019, becoming famous in one fell swoop. In 2021, when he was 10 years old, he achieved national master. Now that he has obtained three IM norms, only need a SuperSwiss norm to become an IM. Pictured above is Tani's autobiography. A very inspiring story. It seems that someone has already reserved the film rights. That quote from yesterday, "If you work hard enough, you will succeed!"  Yesterday I talked about the highly competitive nature of New York City. Let me take it easy today and introduce a movie. But after reading it, it will also make you feel excited, eager to try.
"Brooklyn Castle" is a documentary released in 2012. From April 2009 to June 2010, the film crew followed the New York PS318 chess team, filming daily training, study and life, and going to various places to compete. It took more than a year to shoot. Among them, the hardships of life, the hard work of studies, the pressure of entering a higher school, in front of the charm of chess, everything is calm and breezy. PS318 is a public school for underprivileged students (PS = Public School). To go to a national tournament, teachers and students need to organize fundraising activities together to have enough funds. Parents are often unable to accompany them. The teacher leads the team, and several students share a room. If it is close, take the school bus and go out, all in order to save money. Difficult conditions did not affect their performance. It can be said that their performance at th the national championship is not ideal. They don't seem to be fully recovered from the pandemic, but some have reported seeing their coach on the field. Their results in this national tournament are the fourth in the two teams of grade 7 and grade 8. The protagonists of the film have all grown up, Rochelle Ballantyne went to the University of Chicago, Justus Williams went to Webster, already IM, and James Black, Jr. unknown. Introduction in Baidu Encyclopedia: "No. 318 Junior High School in New York - Chess Movement Through the introduction of chess, PS318 Middle School became famous and now it has the best junior high school chess team in the United States. Chess not only keeps the students of PS318 Middle School away from violence, drug abuse and crime in society and other phenomena, but also cultivated the children's learning ability and improved their academic performance, so that many of them stood out, won scholarships, and entered high school and university. Chess has become the campus culture of 318 Middle School. The school's philosophy is There is no natural talent in chess, no need to have innate talent, "If you work really hard you can be successful"." Amazon Prime has the movie available.  Entering the core content today, I hope you will gain at least one thing after reading this article.
New York City's chess is strong for three reasons: 1. Most of the head coaches hired by the schools are GMs, and the coaching teams are very strong. Let's talk about each school in the future. 2. The school has clubs and teams, and there are regular activities every week, several times a week. This kind of atmosphere forces you have to make progress with everyone. 3. This is the most critical point, and it cannot be replicated elsewhere. Take a look at the picture above, this is a screenshot I took yesterday to see how many tournaments there are in each weekend, the first week is 3+6, the second week has the national, there is still 3+2, and the third week is 3+ 5. In the fourth week, the school began to have winter vacation. So on a typical weekend, New York City can find 8-9 games, which is enough exercise for USCF below 1500. And that doesn't include The Right Move's weekly tournaments, and the famous Marshall Chess Club's almost daily tournaments. Where would such conditions exist? I moved from Ohio to New Jersey because Ohio couldn't find two or three tournaments a month, let alone every week. New Jersey is slightly better, with at least 2-3 tournaments per week, but the distribution is very wide. Basically, you need one hour driving. Weekly tournament is the conclusion of my initial research. Will talk about it later. 90% of the parents say that I can't do it, but if we want our children to be successful, we have to try our best to get closer. To find the image above, or to find a tournament in New York City, search luckfactory chess (add chess to all searches if you can't find anything initially). The Right Move, just search for the name. Marshall can search their website, or go to uschess to search. In the future, we will look at famous institutions and schools in New York one by one. I'm not advertising for them. Research is part of my job as a teacher. I don't know how the market can do a good job in recruiting students, although New York is not my main battlefield at all. Sharing is also one of my purposes for writing this blog. If I wrote something wrong, please point it out in time, either in the comments or private message me.  Look at the results of this year's grade competition in New York, (All the first places, I removed the non-New York ones):
Kindergarten: WU, Darren, NY (five ties）（Photo） Team: 1st Grade: Team: The Speyer Legacy School, New York, NY 2nd Grade: SHEN, Alice, NY Team: 3rd Grade: Team: The Speyer Legacy School, NY 4th Grade: Team: The Speyer Legacy School, NY 5th Grade: Team: Hunter College Campus School, New York, NY; P.S. 10, Brooklyn, NY 6th Grade: Team: 7th Grade: Team: Hunter College Campus School, New York, NY 8th Grade: HARDAWAY, Brewington, NY Team: Success Academy Hudson Yards, New York, NY 9th Grade: Team: Stuyvesant HS, New York, NY (tie） 10th Grade: FM CHASIN, Nico Werner, NY (tie） Team: Columbia Grammar & Prep, New York, NY (tie） 11th Grade: Team: Dalton, New York, NY 12th Grade: Team: Columbia Grammar & Prep, New York, NY (tie） If you look at the top five, the ratio is even bigger. Take the sixth grade in which New York didn't take any first place as an example. The 2nd, 3rd, and 4th places of the group are all from New York. It can be seen that New York not only has a large number of chess players, but also has a lot of strength. Tomorrow we will talk about why New York is so strong. |
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