After more than two years, we were delighted to bring chess to real life!

Eager to get playing!

In March 2020, we moved our operations online (as did much of the world.)

On June 25 we hosted a rated five-round Swiss tournament at the lovely Lillian H. Smith Library in downtown Toronto. Thirty-eight CIC students, some of whom we had never met in person, took part in our tournament.

We had a great time, and we plan to host events like this in different places in the future.

One of our best students learning from one of our best teachers!

Our tournament had two sections, divided by skill level, and we welcomed young people who have been with CIC for many years, and some who are quite new.

In between rounds, players were invited to play and study with one of our most senior instructors, FM Michael Humphreys.

Here are the results from our tournament.

One of our future masters, thinking deeply about her next move!

In our top section, Noah Velasquez, one of our strongest students, won with a perfect 5/5. There was a three-way tie for second place (4/5) among Nolan Wu, Korbin Schantz and Vihaan Vyas, and a six-way tie for third place (3/5), going to Evan Banerjee, Daniel Davydov, Simon Murphy, Benjamin Xiong, Zachary Cormack and Jordan Vankay.

In our lower section we had a three-way tie for first place (4/5) between Rishva Dodhiwala, Miles Kim Yik and Allen Win. In second place, with 3.5/5, was Florence Garon and Henry Smith, and coming in third place with 3/5 points was Fernando Mavrogiannis.

Tournament Director Keith with some of our winners!

We also gave out two Spirit Awards to Sasha Basov and Chelcea Zhang for being terrific sports!

As we like to say to the participants in our tournaments: “No matter how well you did in this tournament, you should feel proud of yourself because you can do something that most people in the world cannot do: you can play chess!”