All-Girls
Fighting Spirit
11-year-old Anupama Rajendra is the
youngest player in the tournament’s nine years
to win the 18 and younger section.
By Jamaal Abdul-Alim
The first time I went to the All-Girls
National Chess Championships in Chicago,
which was back in 2011, I pretty much
took the organizers’ word when they told
me the strength of the tournament players had increased from the previous year.
But when I went to the All-Girls this
past April, I didn’t bother asking if the
players were getting stronger.
That’s because this time I decided to see
for myself.
My quest took me to a makeshift control
room for tournament directors (TDs) in
the ballroom level of the opulent Swissotel in downtown Chicago.
At a computer near a series of printers
sat Eric Heiser, son of David Heiser, who
is co-founder and president of the Renaissance Knights Chess Foundation, which
organized the event.
At the behest of his father, the younger
Heiser did this chess journalist a big favor:
Using players lists from 2011 and 2012
that were stored in Excel spreadsheets, he
calculated the average strength of the players in each section for both last year and
this year so that I could compare the two.
For convenience he omitted unrated
players from the equation, then added up
the ratings of all the players in each section,
then divided those totals by the number of
28
Chess Life — July 2012
players in each respective section.
Of course, I could have done this on my
own using the USCF website, but it would
be far more labor intensive than how
Heiser let the Excel spreadsheets do the
math for us.
In any event, what we discovered was
rather illuminating—from 2011 to 2012,
the strength of the players in each section
had gone up significantly in all but the 10
and Under section, which arguably went
down only because it drew a dozen more
players—many perhaps new to the game
—than last year.
Overall, the average rating strength of
the players in the All-Girls tournament
itself had increased from 995 in 2011 to
1010 in 2012. Of course, this average
strength reflects a wide variety of players,
from age five to age 18.
Since attendance this year was higher
than last year—238 in 2012 versus 224
in 2011—I can comfortably say that the
All-Girls National Chess Championships
not only grew a little bigger in 2012, but
it also got better.
Specifically, based on the spreadsheet
tabulations provided by Heiser, from
2011 to 2012, the average rating in the
various sections at the All-Girls changed
as listed below.
18 and younger: 1535 to 1567
16 and younger: 1293 to 1373
14 and younger: 1121 to 1447
12 and younger: 990 to 1034
10 and younger: 939 to 853
8 and younger: 591 to 694.
Before I tell you the official take on the
rating strength increases, you should know
a little bit about the selfish reason that led
me seek this analysis in the first place.
Since this year was the first time that
my daughter—Hadiyah, age 10—competed in the All-Girls, I wanted to give her
a sense as to what she would be up
against in the 10 and Under Section.
So I used last year’s player list on the
USCF website to calculate the average
strength of the players in her section last year.
It was a labor -intensive exercise—
hardly as easy as it would have been with
Excel—and I came up with 933, which is
why I pretty much trust the 939 figure
that Heiser reached.
Since my daughter has beaten me on
occasion, and my rating has been above
1300 all year, I told her that she had a
decent chance of beating many, if not,
most of the players she encountered in
her section.
But ultimately this information didn’t
help. No matter how much you know
uschess.org