On Saturday afternoon, members of the Carleton Chess Club rolled out vinyl chess mats on the tables in Sayles 252, laid out chess pieces, chess clocks, and drew a scoreboard on the blackboard. That’s all you need for a four-hour tournament of this old and devilishly hard game.
Faster than you could start playing Russian music in the background, Christoph Terwitte ’09 registered the participants on a laptop and used a computer program to determine who was going to play against whom each round. The Chess Club decided to hold the tournament according the Swiss system, which is ideal for situations where the players can only play a limited number of rounds. “The top player plays the second best player, the second plays the third, the third plays the fourth, and so on. No two players ever play each other twice,” explains Nathan King ’11, the club president. You get 1 point for a win, 0 for a loss, and ½ point for a draw. The player with the most points after a certain number of rounds wins the tournament.
Christoph instructed the plucky handful of hopefuls for chess-playing glory in the operation of a chess clock, and they were off, after some preliminary handshaking as if they were about to begin a duel. It became silent except for the soft ticking of the chess clocks as the participants began.
The chess clocks are another way in which tournament chess differs from a friendly game of chess in the park. Each player gets only twenty minutes of gameplay to either win or lose the game. A nifty-looking timer with two stopwatches in it keeps track of the time for each pair of players. In most situations, a player who runs out of time automatically loses the game.
The tournament is the club’s big event of the year. Otherwise, “Mostly we play chess on chess club days,” says Nathan. They also take an annual field trip to the big tournament in Chicago.
Four hours later, and after some intense rounds, Ben Guzick, a freshman, emerged as the champion with a perfect score of five wins, no losses, and no draws. The runners-up were Christoph (4/1/0) and Nathan, (3/2/0). Go freshmen!
