This is about the largest chess tournament in the world.
The fifth installment of the K-12 Supernationals chess tournament is being held this weekend at the Gaylord Opryland Resort Hotel in Nashville, TN. More than 5200 chess playing kids have arrived in Music City for the Quadrennial event.
So that means that the event was once a situation in which they were probably using slow computers, and those old, old printers that went "bzzzzzzhhhht, bzzzzzzht" for about an hour before you got your first page printed out. Now, however, the event uses the latest technology to efficiently pair and post games, and their results.
Someone told me about how our tournaments have been run in the past in Washington State. They were run with a system of index cards that were used to match up opponents. In fact, at one event, the entire box of cards flew into the air, and landed on the floor. A couple hundred cards, randomly littered about the gymnasium floor was enough to send chess parents into violent outbursts of entitled whining about waiting too long.
Four years ago, we came to this event. Ever since then, we've been planning on returning. My son is a 15 year old, and I was prepared to allow him to come on his own and stay with a friend here at the hotel.
However...
When I was going to bed two nights before the event, I had a massive panic attack. I don't have those. Anxiety is not an issue I have to deal with. In fact, it's more likely that I suffer from a lack of it. My wife was trying to find a way to shut me up, so she booked me a flight, and she got me a hotel room. Boom. Here I am, a short walk down the road from this massive, Logan's Run-esque domed village.
http://www.marriott.com/...
On the first day, there were two chess events held. There was the Bughouse tournament, and the blitz tournament.
Bughouse is a game of chess that is played by four players. A team of two players each plays one game. One player is white, the other black. When you win pieces on your board, you may transfer them to your teammate who is then able to place them on the board for use in their own game.
Blitz chess is short format chess. Speed chess, or whatever you want to call it. It's 5-15 minutes per side. It's the kind of chess that is exciting to watch, because you don't have to wait around ten minutes for someone to move a piece. There's only so much spectator excitement to be had when you're watching some guy sit in a chair.
Unfortunately, if I relate too much of what's going on, it will be incomprehensible for people who are not familiar with the whole scene at chess tournaments.
There are kids from all over the country. Home schooled kids, private schools, public schools, and any other way that schooling can take place. Many wonderfully supportive adults have volunteered their precious time to support their kids or the children of others.
The clocks for the tournaments are set to 2 hours per side. IN my kid's most recent game, he went from 9AM until 1PM, and was able to win when his opponent was down to thirty seconds, and my son was down to 2 min. It is mentally and physically an incredibly fatiguing undertaking to try to do that. Not only is it a mental challenge to do that for so long, but in the end, it can come down to a game of seconds. So you have to switch from this long term, very deep thinking. You have to all of a sudden, start ramping up the speed of your thinking. You have to completely and totally change the way your doing the thing you've been doing for the past four hours.
I walked the short route from my hotel to the larger hotel this morning. As I walked, I thought about how brave this kid, and all the other kids are. Thinking about how I would tell my kid that I am proud of him for being this brave, I started to tear up. It's a personal game. You see your opponent eye to eye. You put your hours, days, months, and years of practice out in public view. All of that time, all of that work... sometimes, it's not enough. I think it takes quite a bit of bravery and self confidence to do this. I may never be brave enough to do it.