Phillip Does It Again

Perennial Ray School chess star Phillip Parker-Turner is certainly starting off his senior year in grand fashion. Last weekend he defended his 2008 5th-grade title in the Illinois All-Grade Championship by winning this year’s 6th-grade trophy. For that he ventured to downstate Bloomington, a great Illinois chess mecca where the All Grade was held this year. Two weeks earlier Phillip had a great tournament closer to home—right here in Hyde Park at the University of Chicago. Among the high points of that event was Phillip’s victory over Expert Dusan Tutush (his first over a > 2000-rated player?) as well as wins over other higher-rated guys. His rating has skyrocketed of late to 1670. Congratulations, Phillip!

photo: Phillip Turner

Chess in the Park: the Threepeat

For the third year in a row, chess will be a part of the Hyde Park 4th of July festivities in Nichols Park. After crashing the picnic in 2007 and 2008 by simply showing up uninvited (though not unwelcomed) with chess equipment, this year we'll be there officially.

The neighborhood 4th of July parade down 53rd Street ends at the park, and the celebration there starts when the parade ends. If you're there, please stop by for a game of chess. We'll be in the middle of the park, around the two concrete chess tables by the big-kids playground.

We'll be playing chess and plugging the Ray School Club, the Chicago Blaze, and some ill-defined fledging neighborhood chess initiative I hope to launch. See you then.

Santa Visits Coach Wilson

Ray School chess coach Lamarr Wilson exercises his mind with chess, but he gives his body a good workout as well with this contraption. I don't know who Tony Little is, but he must be very rich.

The Basics for Tournament Players

This Saturday, the Youth Chess Foundation of Chicago will hold a scholastic chess tournament at Bell Elementary School, where they will introduce a new competition section for “novices,” kids who are playing in their very first tournament. The idea is to get novices playing other novices and avoid having some 8th-grade “Beginner” who’s played in ten tournaments but not yet advanced to Intermediate crush some kindergartener like an aluminum can and scare the latter away from chess competition forever.

Okay, so maybe the imagery is a bit over the top, but you get the idea. I think it’s a good one.

At least three Ray kids plan to play in the Novice section, and for them, as well as anyone else who needs a refresher on the basics for tournament play, we offer these aides for brushing up. The things your child should be prepared with are:

• Scholar’s Mate. Know how to use it and how to avoid having it used on you. Go here and here for the details.
• Basic Checkmates. The two main ones are rook & king vs. king and queen & king vs. king. These are basic techniques that are used to finish the kind of endgames that frequently come up. Once your child masters the techniques, winning these games is second nature.
• Opening Guidelines. Go here for the most common openings.
• Review GM Arthur Bisguier’s Ten Tips for Winning Chess.

Review these as well as you can with your kids before Saturday, and they should be ready. Now, as Bruce Pandolfini would say, go out there and be brilliant.

Lamarr Wilson's Geeky World

Here's what the Ray School chess coach does when he's not teaching the Royal Game to your kids.

Your Kids Playing Chess

Coach Lamarr Wilson and chess dad Phillip Turner have captured the action at the Ray School Chess Club beautifully. Want to see more? Go to Lamarr's flickr photostream. And see the "Wilson Warriors" at Lamarr's blog.

Wilson to Teach Chess at Ray

I’m delighted to announce that veteran Chicago scholastic chess coach Lamarr Wilson has joined the Ray School Chess Club and will be the club’s main chess teacher for the 2008-09 school year.

Lamarr is no stranger to Ray, having been a friend of the club for years. He used to be the coach at Joplin Elementary School and has been active in Chicago chess circles for a long time as a teacher and webmaster. Today he is the president of SchoolTech Consulting, Inc., where he advises and assists Chicago public schools on their technology needs. We’re thrilled that Lamarr has agreed to take over the teaching duties at Ray, following the departure of founding coach Emil Sidky.

Also, veteran Ray School chess mom Julie Vassilatos will manage the chess club meetings this year. Julie has been active in the club for the past three years and was one of the people most responsible for the success of the citywide chess tournament held at Ray in 2007. One of the things she plans is to have a special girls section of the chess club as part of an effort to attract more female players. Stay tuned for details.

Julie and Lamarr will, I trust, be ably assisted by other chess parents.

Your Moment of Zen X

Feel free to provide the caption

So Long, Coach—and Thanks

It was five years ago this summer that my son Michael and I ran into our friends Emil Sidky and his son Nikolaj Reiser in Nichols Park one afternoon and discovered that like us, they liked playing chess. Both kids were about to enter first grade at Ray, and almost instantly the thought of starting a chess club at the school struck all four of us as a brilliant idea.

That fall we founded the Ray School Chess Club, and since then I have been privileged to work in double harness with Emil to give the kids at our school a place to learn and play chess. He and I have had a division of labor, and there is no question whatsoever that Emil has done the most important work. It is he who has taught chess and run the meetings—sometimes with help, sometimes without it—probably 150 Monday afternoon sessions since that first one in 2003.

Emil has been the backbone of the Ray School Chess Club, the only person whom the club simply couldn’t have done without.

Of course, starting next fall we will have to do without him, since Nikolaj is leaving Ray and Emil will move on to other things. I would therefore like to take this occasion to thank him for all he has done these past five years to make Ray’s chess program one of the best in the city.

Thanks, Coach, and good luck always.

Another Year Come and Gone

This was the scene last Monday at the final meeting of the year for the Ray School Chess Club. It was pizza in the schoolyard and the traditional end-of-the-year chachkas for all the kids. This year, alas, we also bade farewell to the chess club’s founding coach, Emil Sidky, who is moving on after this year.

Photos by Chihlan Lu. More of them here.

Thanks to Lu and also to chess moms Teresa Parker and Julie Vassilatos for organizing the festivities.

And Howe!

It wasn’t the best of times, it wasn’t the worst of times; for the Ray School chess squad it was somewhere in between at yesterday’s tournament at the Julia Ward Howe School on the West Side, organized and directed by the Youth Chess Foundation of Chicago.

Ray’s Sonam Ford and George Vassilatos did win trophies at the sparsely attended meet, though the big winner of the day was Coach Trevor Scott’s Disney Magnet School, which won the team competition as it has so many times in the past year. Disney may now have eclipsed Burbank as the dominant elementary school in the Chicago public schools.

Peterson Elementary’s Jace Miyagi won the intermediate division, and top honors in the beginner’s section went to Justin Buschnyj of Burley School. The tournament’s overall champion was Brandon Truitt of Burbank, who won the advanced section, though not before Sonam spoiled Brandon’s perfect score for the day by beating him in a thrilling final-round game. Sonam finished in second place overall with 3.5/5. George’s 4.0/6 gave him an eighth-place finish and his second trophy this year in the beginner section.

More photos here; complete standings here.

Sonam's Triumph

Another member of the Ray School Chess Club has earned a national ranking.

Sonam Ford's name appears this month on the United States Chess Federation's Top 100 list of all eight-year-olds in the country. With a rating of 1276, he is No. 29 among kids his age nationally and the 4th-ranked eight-year-old in Illinois, which is increasingly one of the most competitive states for scholastic chess.


This is a huge accomplishment, and we should all be very proud of Sonam. In addition to playing with Ray, he works hard at chess, studying with Hyde Park resident and International Master Jan van de Mortel of the Chicago Blaze. Sonam is also a regular at the Borders on 53rd Street, where he makes the adult players very nervous when they see him coming.

Sonam follows in the footsteps of fellow club member Phillip Parker-Turner, who has also appeared in the USCF national rankings many times and is currently in the nation's top 100 nine-year-olds. Obviously, Ray kids love chess, and they're good at it.

Warming Up

The Ray School Chess Club will hold its first official meeting of the year on Monday, October 15, but a few members of the club—four, to be exact—held an informal practice session at the Hyde Park Neighborhood Club today. A tournament scheduled for this morning had been cancelled, but HPNC executive director Peter Cassel let the chess-hungry Ray kids have some skittles time nonetheless. (Thanks, Peter.) The foursome played a spirited round of Bughouse and some blitz. (Click on the arrow button to watch the video.)

Ray fourth-grader (please see comments) Phillip Parker-Turner won another tournament this weekend: Glenn Panner's Orland Park Scholastic. . . . Who is Mark Jutovsky, you ask? A guy who hasn't played a rated tournament in ten years, that's who. Mark's decade of inactivity, however, didn't stop him from winning Saturday's Evanston Chess Economy Open with a perfect 4.0/4 against a tough field. . . . In other news, the chess world has a new champion today. He’s Vishy Anand of India, and he’s been one of the top players in the world for many years. Now he’s the best. Vishy won a tough tournament in Mexico City against six other players, including the previous champ, Vladimir Kramnik.

Change of Venue: Hyde Park Chess

Yesterday I drove past the Hayden Market on 53rd Street between Greenwood and Ellis. That’s the convenience store that has let out its east room as a chess club for local blitz players in recent years. Apparently, not anymore. It’s now the Lundy Market, under new management, and from the look of things the chess club is gone. The store was closed when I stopped by and peeked in the window, but there was no sign of chess sets or tables anywhere.

So the Hyde Park chess diaspora continues, and once again the neighborhood’s itinerant players must find a new home.

Where have they gone? There hasn’t been much of a chess scene at the Starbucks at 53rd and Harper this summer, though I have seen people playing there a couple of times.

I went by Harold Washington Park at 53rd and Hyde Park Boulevard and was happy to see that both of the chess tables there were being used, and by chess players, not picnickers. It was encouraging, because chess players have been slow to make that spot a regular venue since the tables went up a few years ago.

Then there’s the second-floor café at Borders on 53rd and Lake Park, where some members of the Ray School Chess Club, such as Phillip Parker-Turner and Sonam Ford, like to play. There always seems to be a lively chess scene there whenever I stop in, and the store’s management has apparently relaxed its earlier rule that chess players could only gather on weekdays. I’ve seen two and three games going at a time on Saturdays and Sundays, and I commend the store’s proprietors for the welcome they have given to chess.

Finally, there are those two chess tables in Nichols Park near the 54th Street cul-du-sac that were hauled away from Harper Court and dumped in the park a few years ago when chess was banned from the shopping center. I can see them from my living room window; no one ever plays there. Pity.

Anyone have any other intelligence about the local chess scene, indoors or outdoors? Any ideas for livening things up? If so, please leave a comment.

Photo: Hyde Park Kenwood Community Conference

Chess Comes In from the Rain

Our first “Chess Alfresco” outdoor meeting didn’t work out exactly as planned, thanks to a driving rain that opened up right around 4:00 yesterday, but it turned out well all the same. The six intrepid chess players who showed up on the dismal Saturday afternoon—three kids and three parents—ducked into the University of Chicago’s “C Shop,” got some snacks, and played a few round of chess indoors.

Most likely the weather will be better next week, and we’ll play outside. Will you join us?

An intense game of blitz that turned heads among the normally blasé U of C crowd

Adults play chess too. Coaches Qing Dai and Emil Sidky battle it out in an exciting game that ended in a draw.

Chess Alfresco

The outdoor chess season begins

Is there anything more fun than playing chess outside in nice weather? Maybe, but I can’t think of what it is. This Saturday afternoon, June 26, we’ll find out just how much fun outdoor chess is at the first meeting of the Ray School Chess Club’s summer season.




Will you join us? We’ll meet on Saturdays at 4:00 for as long as there is significant interest from club members. If the time doesn’t work for many people, we’ll consider changing it. But for now, here are the details:

What: Ray School Chess Club

When: Saturdays at 4:00 PM

Where: Hutchinson Courtyard, University of Chicago campus

Yes, I know, it’s Memorial Day weekend, and some people will be away. So if you’re out of town or otherwise occupied, skip this week’s meeting and come next week. If you are around this weekend and feel like playing chess, come join us. We’ll provide the equipment; kids should just show up.

We won’t meet on June 9, since there's a chess tournament at the Hyde Park Neighborhood Club that day.

The U of C campus map is here. If you’re not familiar with it, the main campus, called “The Quads,” is bounded by 57th Street, 59th Street, University Ave., and Ellis Ave. It consists of one big, central quadrangle flanked on the corners by four small quandrangles. Hutchinson Courtyard is the small quad at the northeast corner of the complex. You can enter the campus from 57th Street (across from Regenstein Library) or University Ave. Write if you have questions. Otherwise, we’ll see you Saturday.

The Grand Finale

Scenes from the final indoor chess club meeting of the year

But watch this space for details about the forthcoming outdoor season, in which we will meet Saturdays at 4:00 PM on the University of Chicago Campus (Hutchinson Court), starting May 26. Pencil it in. More to come.

More photos here. All photos by Ms. Averill, Room 413 (Thanks, Jane!)

Give it up for Coach Emil Sidky!

Chess Miscellany

A hodge-podge of unrelated items:

• Tonight is Math Family Night at Ray School, and since chess and math are kindred pursuits, all chess players are hereby encouraged to attend. (And hey, how about that new Ray Web site?)


• Congraltulations to Phillip Parker-Turner, who won another tournament last weekend.


• Congratulations also to Sam Schmakel, a 5th-grader at Chicago's Decatur Classical School and possibly the best elementary school chess player in the state, who has been named “Chess Youth of the Month” by Chess4Chicago.com. And let us take the opportunity to offer kudos as well to Sam's mother, Eileen Schmakel, a benevolent force of nature in the chess world, who, when time comes for a “Chess Mom of the Month” award to be given, will surely be one of the first.


• New chess classes for players at all levels begin this weekend at Touch Move Chess Center, the new chess club started by IM Angelo Young, the defending Illinois state chess champion. Details here, or call or write for more information.