22 teams entered this year’s Winter Team Challenge, which was held on January 29th at the Holiday Inn Select in Woburn. In previous years the tournament, which was originally held in December, was called the Holiday Team Challenge but this year we decided to change the name because by the end of January the holidays are over. The event is open to players in grades K-12, with teams of four players, and allows both school teams and club teams, with rating restrictions on the club teams.
The K-12 section, with ten teams, was won by the Weston H.S. Wildcats (Akshay Saini, Sam Luri, Colin Luzzi, and Naveed Hedayat) on tiebreak over the Chess Patriots (Brandon Wu, Jenny Qiu, Samuel Qiu, and Justin Wu), both with 3½ match points out of 4. The K-5 section had only four teams. This may have been because the section breaks were changed this year, with a K-5 section instead of a K-6 section. Four White Knights (Nithin Kavi, Jonathan Yin, Maxwell Wang, and Adam Yang) won all their matches to win the section.
The K-3 section had eight teams. Perhaps it should be changed to K-2 next year to balance the sizes of the sections. “R2SJ” (Luke Randolph, Gavin Randolph, Toby Shu, and Alexander Jin) won the section with 3½ match points.
Brian Mottershead was the chief tournament director, assisted by George Mirijanian, Steve Frymer, and Bob Messenger.
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