Hart House Students Win 2023 GTCL Team Chess Championship

Published on by harthousechess

From January 10th to February 28th, 2023, Hart House Chess Club hosted the Greater Toronto Chess League Team Chess Championship at Hart House at the University of Toronto. The championship was free to enter and featured 12 teams from across the Greater Toronto Area. The winning team was the Hart House Students team, followed by Bing Chilling, Hart House 20th Century Juniors, and Chess Stars.

The format was modified from the traditional 9-round, 10 team format. With 12 teams, 2 pools of 6 were created for the 5 “pool play” weeks. Then, the top 2 teams would go to section Gold to be crowned the winner of the Championship over a playoff “pool format” for the final 3 weeks. The Silver and Bronze section playoffs were also held to provide each team with 8 matches.. Games were played on Tuesday nights starting at 7:10 pm using a 90+30 time control.

Hart House Chess Club had 3 teams represented,: Students, Alumni, and 20th Century Juniors. The Students team consisted of all U of T students and a couple high-school substitutes, the Alumni team consisted of majority recently graduated U of T students in the 90s, 2000s, and 2010s, and the 20th Century Juniors Team consisted of those who played for the Club in the 70s and 80s. We were very happy to see such amazing variety and representation from all of our alumni and students. It was the first time that Hart House held this version of the Toronto Team Championships, and it was fitting that one of our teams came out on top!

Congratulations to the Hart House Students team on an amazing tournament and making the Club proud! In particular, congratulations to IM Nicholas Vettese, WIM Yunshan Li, Derek Ma, and Wenzhi Dai for playing the bulk of the matches. The other players who contributed to the team’s success were Ande Li, Anna Gavrileva, and Joshua Bakradze.

The 2nd place team, Bing Chilling, also consisted of Hart House regulars and current/past students. The team was led by IM Mark Plotkin (alumni) and William Li (UWaterloo). Eric Ning, Ethan Moon (student), and WFM Cindy Qiao (student) rounded out their team.

Another congratulations goes to the Hart House 20th Century Juniors team for finishing 3rd, consisting of IM David Cummings, Michael Dougherty, David Filipovich, Ian Loadman, Andrei Moffat, and David Macleod.

Chess Stars finished fourth, led by NM Roman Gavrilin, IM Michael Barron, Michael Kimelman, and Ilia Bluvshtein.

Finally, Hart House Alumni rounded out the top-5, finishing first overall in the Silver Cup. They were led by: IM Peter Vavrak, Daniel Abrahams, Leon Perelman, and Ben Hahn. This meant that teams from the Hart House Chess Club placed 1st, 3rd, and 5th out of 12 teams!

Results and Games

Those interested in viewing the games can do so on lichess.org, view the games.

Results are viewable on chess results.

Pool Stage:

Finals Stage

Gallery

Annex Chess Club vs HH Alumni
Final Round at the 2023 GTCL Team CC
Chess Stars vs Annex Chess Club
The winning team: Derek Ma, IM Nicholas Vettese, WIM Yunshan Li, Wenzhi Dai
Scenes from the final day
Scenes from Round 1
Hart House Students vs 20th Century Juniors in Round 1.
Round 3 action
Round 2 action
Hart House Winter Weekly Swiss happened concurrently
Students vs Mississauga CC
Alumni vs Bing Chilling
20th Century Juniors vs Chess Stars and Bing Chilling vs Students in Round 7.
The organizers with the winning team. All are students at U of T.
Students vs Bing Chilling, arguably the deciding match of the tournament.

This version of the GTCL Team CC was organized by the Club for the first time thanks to efforts led by the Victor Zheng and Tanner McNamara on the HHCC Executive Board. Alex Ferreira was the pairings arbiter and provided support. Michael Barron, GTCL President, also provided additional organizational support. Until next time!

For details on the original event post, see here.