GameCie: Chess tournament

By: Tijke van der Lee

In January, the Gamecie organized the Alembic chess tournament. Due to the coronavirus, most of the matches had to be played online but this didn’t hinder us from having a great competition. We started out with twenty players split into four brackets based on perceived ranking for fair competition. Two pools for the strong and two for the beginners.

We all played four matches in which many queens were taken, pawns were pushed and pieces were hung. The first bracket, with all the best players, was on a completely different level than the lowest brackets. The highest bracket had an average rating of 1800 while the lower brackets were still struggling to make a coherent attack. Mario, Max, Tijke, and Jordi all came first in their respective pools while Tim and Chakshu came second in the highest two pools and also moved on to the finals. Mario fended off a Danish gambit and was ultimately victorious while Tim won an open Sicilian and Tijke with the London system.

The winners all got special prizes; Mario got a trophy as the grand winner while Tim and Tijke won a bubble blowing set, chocolate, and car cooling liquid as a consolation prize.

We as the Gamecie want to thank all participants for playing in the tournament. We got a lot of positive responses from the tournament participants which makes us think we could definitely do a chess tournament again in the future, with even higher stakes and even greater prizes.