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Bob Armstrong
01-25-2011, 09:22 PM
Article by Joyce Hunter, Nov. 25, 2010, in Seven Magazine ( reprinted with permission )

Get your brain in the game

Tyson Nodin, a Grade 4 student attending Armstrong Public School, is all smiles after having qualified for the upcoming Canadian National Youth Chess Championships to be held in Toronto this coming July.

Whitesand’s Tyson Nodin, a Grade 4 student attending Armstrong Public School, has an innate ability to strategize and calculate the next moves of his opponents.


The 10-year-old proved this at the northern Ontario regional chess championships held recently in Thunder Bay where he won four of the five games he played.

“I lost the first game I played,” Nodin said after he’d finished his last of five rounds. “I think it was because I was nervous. The other four games I played were kind of hard, but I still beat them.”

Tournament Director Denis Nadeau said the two-player board game is the “aerobics of the mind.”

Nadeau said strategic play in chess consists of setting and achieving long-term goals during the game – including deciding where to place different pieces – and being tactical in response to the other player’s manoeuvres.

(The object of the game is to checkmate the opponent’s king, where the king is under immediate attack, or in “check”, and there is no way to remove or defend it from attack on the next move.)

A game of chess is normally divided into three phases: opening, typically the first 10 to 25 moves, when players move their pieces into useful positions for the coming battle; middlegame, usually the fiercest part of the game; and endgame, when most of the pieces are gone, kings typically take a more active part in the struggle, and pawn promotion is often decisive.

Nadeau also said chess has been shown to improve academic performance, that a youngster taking part in a chess program develops critical thinking; logic, reasoning, and problem solving abilities; memory, concentration and visualization skills; confidence; patience; determination; poise; self-expression; and good sportsmanship.

“In some places chess has been used to improve the outcomes of students who are in danger of failing out of school,” he said. “If you are a principal of a school, why do you want chess? It takes out about 50 per cent of the discipline problems in your school. However, I don’t think that’s a good reason to bring it to your school. I think the students should be playing it because the game is fantastic.”

And Nodin couldn’t agree more.

“Nicky, one of my friends from Armstrong, got me into chess when I went to his house and he asked me to play a game with him,” he said.

“I was six years old at the time and he was seven. I don’t play that often because I don’t have a chess board, but I’m just naturally good at it I guess.”

So good in fact, that Nodin qualified to compete in his age category at the upcoming Canadian National Youth Chess Championships to be held in Toronto this July.

Chess enthusiast Gay McDonald, who coaches the students at Wabaseemong School in White Dog First Nation, has been teaching the game to her students for about 15 years now, and she said there are naturals who just ‘seem to know’ how to play the game and then there are true students of the game.

“Some are naturals at it and are seeing all the angles and connections from the first time they play and some of the others learn it piece by piece,” she said. “Once you’re a player and you’ve played a while, you start to get to know the different strategies, then you really have to work at beating someone else who knows the strategies as well. You really have to figure out if they know your strategy and figure out how you are going to get around them.”

More than 200 students representing five age groups from nearly 30 communities came from all over northern Ontario including those from Wabaseemong and White Dog First Nations in the west to Kapuskasing and Haileybury in the east after qualifying to attend the regional tourn-ament in their respective communites.

Article: http://www.sevenyouthmedia.com/node/29541

Official CYCC Website: http://www.2011cycc.ca/

Bob Armstrong, CFC Public Relations Coordinator

Bob Armstrong
02-08-2011, 09:27 AM
Hi to all YCC organizers !

Write me a short report on your YCC - winners; no. participating; which age groups; time control; other interesting anecdotes.

Send them on to me ( bobarm@sympatico.ca ) and I'll post them here under this " news " thread on YCC's!

Help promote the YCC system, and show that it works for the CYCC !

Bob