President's Corner

Jeremy Madison will be representing Iowa at the Denker Tournament and Dhrooti Vyas will be representing Iowa at the Susan Polgar Tournament. I hope they do well and more importantly, enjoy the friendship of their fellow chess players.

One thing that is on the board priority list is to have the scholastic schedule available at the August Board Meeting. I will be talking about the whole schedule over the next few weeks, but this edition I wanted to discuss the Denker qualifier.

Here is my understanding on how we have arrived at the current system.

We used to have a K-12 Classic tournament and the top finishing high schooler would be the Denker representative. Then it was determined that basing it on one tournament and having non-high schoolers determine the qualifier was unfair. This led to a second tournament (Iowa high school closed) held after the K-12 Classic where the top 6 high schoolers would play a round robin to determine the qualifier. This was still viewed as unfair as the non-high schoolers had a say in who qualified for the Iowa high school closed. This year, the K-12 was split between K-8 and High School. The top 6 finishers from the High School tournament would meet in a round robin to determine the Denker qualifier.

Due to a variety of reasons, none of the 6 who qualified for the High School closed this year could make the Denker Tournament. We are truly appreciative of Jeremy stepping up and representing us at the Denker, but I want to toss out to the membership at large and scholastic players in particular: How should we determine our Denker representative? I got the impression at this year’s high school closed that playing in the Denker tournament was not the prize every one was after, but more to be high school champion.The main reason I bring this up now is not necessarily to change it, but to make sure that we like the structure. Once we finalize the scholastic schedule, we will not be able to change it till next year. So if any scholastic players have thoughts on the matter, feel free to post them on the bulletin board or you can send them to me.

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