By Esra Balkas

Despite the SAT stealing some of our team members, our team for the NC State chess tournament, composed of Tommy Bright (’17), Jonathan Kacvinsky (’17), Shane Hoffman(’18), and myself, powered through, placing 8th out of 30 teams. Additionally, we have had many successes at local team tournaments with significant rating improvements for some of our newer club members. But it’s not only about the competitions – with a consistent membership base this year, chess players ranging from freshmen to seniors have come and played rounds of blitz chess, monster chess, bug house and other variations in addition to picking up new openings to try out either against each other or their opponents at the tournaments. The  experience level ranges from students interested in learning basic game play to 1000 and above rated players; everyone is able to find an opponent to either learn from or practice with. It is a quickly growing club and we hope even more talented chess players will join us next year!