I got a call from my friend Neeraj Singh last weekend. I was so excited by the news that only subcite training for the Blackletter Law Journal an entire week later brought me down enough to finally write up this glorious information.
The chess club has been packed for the last two weeks. So much so, in fact, that Neeraj could hardly find a place to sit down! Even better, AOB (NB: the schedule there is outdated) has 18 signups for the semester from the Dwight Hall Bazaar, about two-thirds of which Neeraj figures are promising, in addition to the current AOB volunteers.
And Neeraj has already started work on the Police Athletic League tournament this semester. Now for the news (as I heard it):
- Howard Nero and the kids at MicroSociety are going to start going to some USCF-sanctioned tournaments, and get ratings! David Lyons ‘08 and Jaison Oliver ‘09 are going to be helping some of their best kids train, so they’ll be ready to compete for glory at the CT Open (see below).
- Amistad high school (a new school in New Haven that Yale is heavily involved in starting, partly in hopes that it’ll become a feeder school for Yale) is bringing in Jim Celone (Yale ‘83 and the President of the Connecticut State Chess Association) for work on developing a chess club there. Right now the school has 50 students in 9th grade and no 10th graders. Sounds pretty cool.
- The Yale College Chess Club will be sending volunteers to a middle school in Hamden starting this semester to start a chess club there.
- Jim Celone will be putting on the CT Open in March in the Lanman Center at Payne-Whitney gymnasium! I’m hoping to see some Yale-trained teams winning at Yale in March!
But for all this news, Neeraj still didn’t know anything about how the team’s doing this year. So I called Dave Wang ‘08, the ever-impressive, rarely-sober team captain, and asked him if we have any good freshmen. I’ve always said that the club needs one good player a year, and we certainly got that this year. Among the freshman class is a master-level player from Philly. And as if just to prove that it’s a small world, he’s friends with Matt Traldi who was our board 2 until he graduated this year. I’m looking forward to seeing the team’s games on live broadcasts and then live here in Cambridge for The Game (which will also be put on live broadcast)!
And of course, since this is still filed under Chess, I don’t have much to say about Kramnik and Topalov except I’m glad that in a couple of weeks, the chess world will once again have a world champion! Gens una sumus.
Of course, if I left out some detail and you’re reading, please feel free to comment on it through the blog, or email me the error.
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