This past week Prairie’s very own chess club went to SW Washington Regional Chess Tournament in Centralia for their very first tournament, out of 11 High School teams they placed 3rd overall.
Individual rankings consisted of 6th rank to Luck Sears, 19th rank to Justin Cruz, 25th rank to Eric Carbajal-Vargas, 51st rank to Diego Garcia, and 58th rank to Tein Truong.
Overall Mr Ferris said “I was just proud of the students you know they really did a nice job”
Unfortunately, Jack Sears, one of our top 2 players was out and couldn’t make it to the tournament with his club, fortunately by placing the club earned themselves invitations to the state championship tournament. Bound to make it far in chess, as they all have their own playing style.
Justin describes his style of playing as “ more defensive sense, that’s kind of like my openings and I kinda flank around the center and I don’t attack as much, but that’s something I’m trying to improve on.” Luke explained his style as “I stare out defensive but then if I see an opportunity I’ll start attacking” Though they may start in the same mindset they both move on out in different ways.
Mr Ferris talked about how impressed he was with the 8 students that got to compete “It was really fun because we took 8 people, 6 of them had not been to a tournament like that so it was kind of a new experience for them and I was really impressed just how they handled themselves, it’s not easy with the pressure of the situation and you lose your first 2 or 3 games and start to feel down but you gotta just keep going. And that everybody won at least one game because its a round of five games, five 50-minute games and everybody managed to win at least one and as a team you know we haven’t gone to something like that before, so the fact that we got 3rd out of 11 and I was really happy with it”
Overall the chess club did enjoy the more serious part of these chess games as well and Mr farries what to help them so that they could continue to play in tournaments, he said “I wanna get them better at analyzing their games so once you play a game go back and really figure out what did you do well? What did you not do well? Cause if you just play you tend to make the same mistakes over and over, if you go back and analyze then you can start saying “I’ve got this bad habit, I need to get rid of that bad habit in order to get better” so that’s the intentional part of studying your game and really improving,” overall it seems that the team had a good time, more pumped to train then before to continue to play in tournaments and “Just get better and win” adds Justin but overall “play chess because it’s fun,” says Luke.
