Ashburn Chess Players Perform Well in State Competition

The Stone Bridge High School chess team scored its best finish ever with a second-place finish at the Virginia Scholastics competition. Each year, players from all over Virginia gather to compete for the state’s top chess prize. The event attracted 20 schools to this year’s venue, Grafton Middle School in Yorktown.

In only its third year at the competition, Stone Bridge forged ahead of perennial contender Patrick Henry High School. Thomas Jefferson won first place and retained its status as the team state champion.

Al Farone and Dino Obregon, coaches for Stone Bridge, both said that the results should inspire its players to gun for the title in the future. Seniors Jerad Engebreth, Matthew Montera and Eric Cawi, along with freshman prodigy Clark R. Smiley, led the team. William H, McNichols, Andy Wong, Nihar Sannala, Jared Daubenspeck, Divyanshu Srivastava and Kali Rose Cascio, the team’s only female ably assisted in the team competition.

Engebreth held the distinction of Top Under 1400, while Clark Smiley won a medal in the individual event. Compared to most schools in the competition, Stone Bridge is relatively new, but has placed well in the past two years. During its first competition, Stone Bridge placed third, slipping to fourth the next year.

In the younger categories, Ashburn Chess Club members became state champions in two areas. Trung Nguyen of Lansdowne beat his brother Tan Nguyen in the last round to take first in the K-3 group. In the K-5 section, member Alvin Cao of Fairfax tied for first and was also declared a state co-champion with Akhil Goel of Churchill Road Elementary and William Sun of Greenbriar West Elementary.

The Nguyens were the only perfect scorers going to the last round of the K-3 section. The top 4 in the section were all Ashburn Chess Club members: Trung Nguyen, first; Kevin Zhang, second; Tan Nguyen, third, and Bryant Lohr, fourth. Vivian Cao-Dao, younger sister of Alvin, also tied for third but ended in tenth place because of the tiebreak. Other players who regularly attend Ashburn tournaments were seventh-place winner Andrew Wang, ninth-place winner Neeyanth Kopparapu, and 11th place winner Elijah Kirtley.

In the team competition Ashburn’s Steuart W. Weller Elementary School placed fifth. Aneesh Boreda, Nithya Chintalapati, Viraj Boreda, and Nikhil Chintalapati represented the school. The home-schooled team Nguyen, represented by only the two brothers, finished sixth in the team competition.

In the K-5, Akshaj Kadaveru, Ashburn Chess Club member, placed fourth with 5 points, along with Justin Lohr, Shwetark Patel, and Nathan Lohr. Other players in various categories include Maggie Luo, Alexander Chang, Andrew Bo, Maggie Kirtley, Aaryan Balu, Jenny Smiley, Ryan Bo, Ajit Kadaveru and Vedant Balu.  In the K-8, Joie Wang placed 10th. In the blitz competion, Justin Lohr came in solo first.