Next weekend the Australian Schools Teams Chess Championship is on in Queensland. One of the teams representing the ACT is the Curtin Primary Girls Team, playing in the Primary Girls Section. As a warm up for the event they have been playing at Street Chess on Saturday mornings. The intention of this is to prepare themselves for the rigour of the event by pitting them against some wily old chessplayers, who have seen (or executed) just about every swindle in the book. As much as coaching you teaches you so much, there is nothing like the pain of an unlucky defeat to really ram home a lesson.
But not only are the girls enjoying the experience, the Street Chess regulars have enjoyed having new faces at the tables. And the last couple of weeks have seen fields of 20+ players battling it our for the $100 prize money.
This post also gives me a chance to show off a new blog gadget, with a slideshow of pictures from today's tournament located about halfway down the right hand side of the page. With the various extra real estate stealer's on the page (ads, video links, photos, pay pal buttons etc) it is getting hard to find space for everything. And if you find this page annoyingly slow to load, please tell me and I'll see what I can get rid of.
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Couple of things. The girls really did enjoy. They had a lot of fun, and isn't that what chess is all about?
The other thing is that a number of those "wily old chessplayers" were gracious in that they went through the game with these very young players pointing out good/bad moves and providing them with pointers.
I'll paraphrase one experienced player who, after a game, said "Damn, that was hard. She didn't give me a thing without fighting for it."
Finally, it was really nice to see the interaction of these young lasses and those "wily old chessplayers." Whoever says that the older generation cannot relate to the younger obviously does not play chess.
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