Friday, December 12, 2008

Greetings from Florida! K-12 Championships

I am here for the National K-12 Championships. I figured while I had some spare moments before the start of the main tournament, I'd post some pictures from yesterday's blitz. Since I was shooting with no flash and had the pushed the ISO to 1600 some of these pictures may not be of the best quality. My photographic journey is a work in progress. I will give updates as the weekend progresses.


Coronado Springs Resort

This place is huge. It's not your standard high rise hotel with all the rooms in one building. There is the main building with the convention center, and then 7 -8 buildings with guest rooms scattered all around the resort property. Two years ago I was staying #7, and it was about a 20 minute walk to get to the main building. They have large golf cart shuttles to take guests who would rather not walk to their building. It's easy to get lost if you're walking back at night. This year our team is in building one.

Start of the blitz tournament.
Two Sections: K-6 and K-12
Young speed demon. Hard to freeze the action with no flash.

What to do between rounds? Play more blitz! Did you have to ask?

Chess parent who has more colorful chess themed attire then me.
Tournament director in the Christmas spirit.
Josh Colas, NY
Gavin Mc Clanahan, IL

These two scored 8.5 out of 10 in the K-6. I'm not sure who won on tie-breaks. They were having some rather spirited bullet (1 minute) games afterward to break the tie themselves. I think they took turns winning the bullet games.

Note to my regular readers: If the name Josh seems familiar, that's because he's the same Josh who is frequent topic of conversation in my posts about getting crushed by little kids. Watch out him for him!

4 comments:

From the patzer said...

I hope your team does well. Building one, is that the home of champions?

Ah, so that's Josh. He did well finishing shared first. I hope he does better in the main tournament.;-)

So you are the trainer, coach, mother, ... of your team?

es_trick said...

Don't remember ever seeing you mention what team you coach.(?)

Good luck to them.

-ES

Polly said...

CT: It was actually a 4 way tie for first. I didn't know that at the time. Josh ended out 4th on tie breaks. I'm rooting for him to kick butt in the 4th grade section. Josh is not one of my students, but I've watched kids like Josh start playing in the tournaments I've directed when they were in 1st grade. It's exciting to watch them progress to the point that they beat high rated kids and adults, even if it's me. :-)

I'm not actually the main coach for my team. Two of the kids are higher rated. Because of my directing expertise I'm the one they consult for rules questions and other technical stuff. The moms take care of the parenting, I just encourage them, and act as sparring partner, or what ever they need.

ES: I work with a number of different teams depending on the tournament. I generally don't mention team names in this blog. Right now we're in 2nd place, but 5 rounds to go, and anything can happen.

Anonymous said...

Re: the "speed demon" picture. Actually, it's very effective and it's probably good you didn't have flash. The blur gives a sense of motion and speed a frozen in time shot couldn't.

(For some unknown reason, one of my friends has "John Hedgecoe's Photography Course". Perusing it, this kind of shot was mentioned.)