This is a chess tournament for beginners. There are no time controls but the last few boards in each round will get a clock with 5 minutes for each player to finish their game. It will be a 5-6 round Swiss tournament and will likely take most of the day. Ratings will be calculated by the RatingsNW.com student rating service.
What to bring:
Lunch – none will be provided, but the venue does have ample room outside the chess area for eating.
No chess sets or clocks needed.
Only water is allowed into the chess area and may be consumed while playing.
Cell phones are not allowed to be used by players in the chess area. Anyone suspected of cheating with their phone will be asked to leave the chess area.
We will be taking photos of kids registering and playing their games. Registration assumes you accept being a potential model for advertising and other uses. (like the kid over there —>)
Donations for this tournament or to Sandy The Chess Guy can be deposited at any Freedom Northwest Credit Union branch into the account “The Chess Guy”. All donations will go toward tournament prizes, supplies, or fees incurred while running The Chess Guy’s operations.
When
January 10th, 9AM-6PM, 2026
Where
Saint Peter & Paul Elementary School, 330 S B St, Grangeville, Idaho
Who
Anyone can participate, but local kids are most likely to get the most prizes. We recommend players under the age of 5 not participate.
Cost and registration
$10 at the door. $5 if you pre-register online.
Click on the Event Pre-Registration Form to register oneline.
Payment will be accepted at the door.
We highly recommend registering online with a photo. You save $ and this will save us a lot of time during pre-tournament registration. We use photos to print pairing forms so kids get to know each other. At the end of the tournament, we print up detailed player reports that show images of players, games, and prizes.
Prizes
We have obtained a $1000 grant from Freedom NW Credit Union, so there will be cash and many, many other prizes being given out. The top student player will get their name on our perpetual “Trophy of Death”, forever remembered as a champ!
Below is a list of the prizes we gave away last time.
Thankyou, Freedom Northwest Credit Union!
I wanted to thank Freedom Northwest Credit Union for their generous support of this tournament, with a gift of $1000 given to me to market and get great prizes for this tournament. You can donate if you like to The Chess Guy at any FNWCU branch.
Some Tips and Rules for the Tournament
The following links will take you to some PDF files I have concerning etiquette and advice for prospective tournament players.
On January 10th at the St. Peter & Paul Elementary School in Grangeville, 30 players showed up to test their strategic and concentration skills against each other via the ancient game of chess. Many players helped me set up, and soon we began registrations, only to discover that, for some reason, running our new software on laptops exposed many bugs which made using it difficult. By the end of the second round, we realized we would have to conduct the tournament by hand. Luckily, my son, Jonathan Staab, who is a wiz-kid with AI, and our helper, Jim Wilcock, who is a handyman with a spreadsheet, were able to build, on-the-fly, sufficient reports and tools to continue the tournament! After 6 rounds of intense and fun chess (and much sweating the details on my part), the final standings were determined. But this was only half of our problems, because the reason I had developed the tool I did for managing chess tournaments was so I could give out LOTS of prizes. This turned out to be just as hard a problem to solve as was the one of continuing the tournament. Again, with the help of our intrepid crew and my wife, Kim, who organized and laid out all the prizes we had to give away, we managed to figure out roughly who gets what. I want to thank Freedom Northwest Credit Union for their generous gift of $1000 and for all of those community-minded donors who put money into our donation jars placed in many businesses around the area, to give me the resources needed to make this tournament a huge success! Every player received at least one prize, and many, more than one. I will never forget Nikolai Dieseldorff jumping for joy as he received his medal and prizes for 3rd place in the Grade 1 subsection. He was obsessed with getting prizes and had been asking me all through the tournament, “When do we get our prizes?” It was like having 50-odd people together for Christmas, unwrapping the gifts! Lots of cash ($640) was given out to adults, out-of-towners, and, of course, the kids. Prizes also included 27 medals, candy, and small fun goodies like fidget toys, goup balls, and electronic scratch pads for all ages. The tournament nearly didn’t happen, as getting the bugs out of my tool was just going too slowly. I had little time to market the tournament as I was heads-down fixing bugs. Luckily, in the last month or so, AI came to the rescue, and I anticipate that within a month or so, I will have it completed and working to help me run more tournaments in our area. Finishing this 3-year software project will then free me up to spend more time teaching chess to kids and adults in our area. A detailed chart of all winners and prizes will be published soon.
