2024 Maryland State Chess Championships

In April, the 2024 Maryland State Scholastic Chess Championship took place at Hammond High School in Columbia Maryland (shoutout to the booster club who hosts us!), and we're always excited to partner with Maryland Chess on this event.  498 players from all over the state participated, from kindergarten to 12th grade.

The event will be back at the end of April in 2025, and we're adding a Maryland Girls Championship on 3/1!

• What do you get for winning state?
• Survey of last year's parents and participants
• MD students at the national invitationals

What do you get for winning state?

Being the best chess player in Maryland for your grade level is quite an achievement on its own.  The champions are also invited to a “tournaments of champions,” where each state is sends their top players to compete.  Participating in one of these is a crowning achievement for a lot of scholastic players:

• Denker (High School 9-12)
• Haring (Girls Champion, K-12)
• Barber (Middle School 6-8)
• Rockefeller (Elementary School K-5)
  

How do you qualify?  It's simple, but hard: win your age group at state, or win the Girls Championship.

Survey: What did last year's parents and participants think?

40 families responded to the survey after the 2024 event.  By and large, it was a great experience, with 92.5% saying they'd recommend the event to a friend.

Families loved the site as well, which let us have beginner-intermediate players in the gym, and the champ sections in the library.  This allowed different schedules and longer games for the championship players.  It also let us treat the groups differently - players in the gym reviewed the expectations at chess tournaments, players in the library didn't because they didn't need to.

We made a few changes to the Champ sections from prior years:

• Changed the time control from G/45 to G/75
• Went from 4 rounds to 5 rounds
• Went from 1 day to 2 days

From players in those champ sections, they gave those changes 9/10.

MD Chess has a longstanding rule of having a hard rating floor on the Champ sections, so that there's a required minimum rating to play in the top sections.  We surveyed families about this as well, and families in the Champ sections really like having it, because it means that everyone in those sections belongs.

In 2022 and 2023, we let a few students in beneath the floor at parent requests, basically because there hadn't been many tournaments to play in locally during the pandemic.  We gave those students a warning along the lines of "you might get crushed!!  We strongly recommend the under section!"  What happened next?  They got crushed.

In 2024 we made it a hard floor, and that's going to continue.  If you're worried about this play in some tournaments to prove you belong.

What didn't families like?  Two main things:

• We needed more chairs
• The wifi struggled mightily with all the parents using it

For the chairs, we'll work on it for next year.  The wifi situation might not be something we can fix.

MD Players at the Tournaments of Champions

Maryland sent Angelina Verma to the Haring as the top girl, Jordan Go to the Denker as the high school champion, Architsai Ramnath to the Barber as the middle school champion, and Andy Yue to Rockefeller as the elementary champion.

These are challenging events because everyone playing is a state champion and the Maryland delegation represented itself well and finished in 13th place.  Here are some photos from the event, along with some of their best games!

The top row is Jordan, Angelina, and Archie, with Andy in the photo in the bottom middle.  GM Larry Kaufman is the state senior champion in the middle, and Wally (UT Denker representative and Academy alum) is also pictured.

Angelina tied for seventh and lost only to the top two finishers.  In her best win, she defeated the expert representing California.  Here's the game, annotated by IM Adarsh Tripathi:

Jordan won two upset prizes, in the first and third rounds.  Here's his third round win, with his own annotations:

Here's a nice win Archie had in the Barber, annotated by IM Adarsh Tripathi: