Sophomores Will Tsai and Jimmy Tang brought home a third place trophy after competing in the fourth annual K-12 Clackamas Open chess tournament on Oct. 17.

Clackamas took first in the Swiss-system format and LaSalle took second place. In the format, there are five rounds, each round taking about an hour. There is no elimination round. The tournament tries to ensure that competitors don’t have to face the same person twice, and accounts for points in a match for the overall team total. It took about eight hours of the day, Tsai said, and despite the long day, he said it was fun.

Tang went through each round, won three times, lost once and had one draw. Tang was nervous because the people were good and he was surprised that he won three times. He won second in the individual ranking and a student from Clackamas took first place. He was awarded the second individual ranking because he accumulated the second highest score from the points he got from his matches.

“How the chess team tournament works is that there are teams of four but we had only two people and faced a couple of four people teams and the score was added up and we won third place,” said Tang.

The chess tournament also wasn’t that big but it was funny to them that they won third place. For Tsai, he had a good time, considering that he hadn’t played for two years and that for Tang and Tsai the tournament wasn’t that big.

Yes, Tang and Tsai showed their spirit for Cleveland and our chess club. The chess club meets during lunch on Tuesday every week in room 382. So come and play chess with the chess club champions sometime.