Preparing for unknown chess battles

Students prepare for a chess tournament as far ahead as they can

Sweat rolls down the nose. Time ticks on the clock and every second matters. The goal of the game is simple. It is to win. The prize: the perpetual trophy, medals, and bragging rights.  The game: the annual Santa Clara County Chess Tournament at the MVHS cafeteria on Jan. 29.“The best way to prepare for a tournament is playing chess regularly. We play chess online, we go over chess strategies, etc.,” Chess Club vice president sophomore Chris Wu said. “[We practice] throughout the months and years. It’s not something you do once, like for five hours, and get everything.”English teacher Scott Catrette, the advisor of Chess Club and the interim advisor of the league, agrees with Wu, believing that the best way to prepare for the tournament is to practice.  However, the officers of Chess Club teach the members what Catrette calls “home preparation”—pre-planning the beginning moves and predicting the other player’s beginning moves of the game so that the players can save time.“[Home preparation] can only go so far, and [it] depends how extensively you prepare,” Catrette said. “The question is how thoroughly and deeply you prepared. At most you can prepare 16-20 moves deep [into the game].”After the beginning phase is over, players must rely on strategy and skill. The players must move and think quickly, again with the sport parallelism, because each person only gets 45 minutes per game. In the tournament, each competitor plays five rounds. “The possibilities [of chess moves] are endless,” president junior Harsha Nukala said “[Chess] is not based on chance at all: its basically 100 percent skill. No chess game ever happens the same way twice.” To determine the winning school of the tournament, only the top three players’ scores are calculated so beginners can participate and not harm the school’s score. The club promoted the event to the whole school and to Kennedy Middle School since all middle school students can now participate. The middle school students would play for the high school that they will attend, not as a separate team. “It’s been a few years since we’ve won the tournament, so we’re very hungry and we’ll like to win this year,” Catrette said.For MVHS to reclaim the perpetual trophy they won back in 2008, they need to defeat their biggest competitors from Gunn and Saratoga High School, along with the other competitors, Saratoga, Lynbrook, and Palo Alto High School. The winner: the school with the best strategy, skill, and mental stability.{cc-by-sa}