Several Parents have asked where they can provide feedback to the folks running the event. You can send your comments to the WSEEC Policy Board (policy@wsecc.org) that oversees the event as well as this year’s organizer (weccboard@chesschampions.org).

We have a huge photo album and slide show for your enjoyment here, more than 340 pictures from photographers Ed McPherson and Barry Hansen. Or click here to download all photos to your local hard drive, a large Zip file (125 MB) containing 340+ high-resolution pictures.

Our top teams of Washington State:

1. Lakeside A (22 points)
2. Interlake (18.5 pt)
3. Newport (16.5 pt)
4. Garfield (16.5 pt)
5. Mercer Island (14 pt)

The top five Junior Varsity players:

1. Andrew Tat (Lakeside)
2. Kunal Roy (Interlake)
3. Richard Xu (Bellevue)
4. Zealous Zhu (Garfield)
5. Cameron Cameron (Interlake)

Many thanks to our hard-working WHSCA volunteers for a smooth-running event!

Congratulations to our winners:

• State champion Michael Omori from Lakeside School, scoring of 4.5 out of 5.0.
• Premier section winner Karen Marcjan
• Reserve section winner David Jorgensen

You can view and download photos here and get your new ratings from the State Championship Results here.

Many thanks to our hard-working WHSCA volunteers for a smooth-running event!

Register now for the state Team Championship coming up soon on February 24-25, 2012!

This year’s TEAM Match will be held in Lynnwood WA in May (after Elementary Nationals) – specific Date – TBD. If you would like to form a team for your school, contact rick.jorgensen@gmail.com.

You can view and download photos here and get your new ratings from the Mini-Teams results here.

Many thanks to our hard-working WHSCA volunteers for a fine event!

In case you’re interested in the webmaster’s perspective, here are statistics from my tracking tools and a gratuitous green chess image in honor of St Patrick’s Day:

• RatingsNW.com gets 400 – 600 visits per day, averaging 15,000 visits per month. This is a lot of traffic by any standard.
• Two-thirds of our visitors look at tournament reports
• One-third of our visitors look-up individual ratings
• Web browsers used are: IE 48%, Firefox 21%, Safari 17%, Chrome 13%
• Operating systems are: Windows 76%, Mac 15%, iPhone 2.3%, Android 1.6%, iPad 1.5%, Linux 1.4%
• 13 of our visitors like to capitalize just part of the domain name: www.ratingsNW.com
• Washington visitors outnumbered Oregon visitors by 8,800 visits to 4,700
• 8 – 10pm is our busiest time of the day, but one-third of our visits occur in working hours from 9am to 2pm (it’s okay, I won’t tell on you)
• Nobody has made any comments (yet!) under our headings for Elementary, Middle School or High School topics. Go ahead, this should be a good place to ask/share your school chess ideas.

Mobile users are up to almost 5% of our visits. Cool! Let me know how it’s working on your mobile device.

Webmaster Barry

• Our Home page at www.ratingsnw.com, or
• NWSRS Ratings at chess.ratingsnw.com/ratings.html, or
• Tournament reports at chess.ratingsnw.com/tournreports.html.

Next week I will expire some of the almost-empty WHSCA pages that are no longer needed and replace them with redirection to Ratings NW.

Remember: WHSCA.org remains focused on Washington state high school events, while RatingsNW.com brings you the NWSRS database.

Webmaster Barry

1. the USCF rating is established (i.e.; no rating adjustment is made based on USCF provisional ratings), and
2. the USCF rating is higher than the NWSRS rating.

All ratings were adjusted following this policy on March 26, 2010.

For more than you ever wanted to know about our rating system, see:

• Discussion about the addition of adults in September 2007
• Discussion of the NWSRS Ratings System
• Expansion of the WSRS to the NWSRS

We noticed that LOTS of parents were logging into the Ratings Pages of WHSCA all the time. When we decided to pay to host the service, we also wanted to do a lot more. We realized that there wasn’t a place to “get the word out” for discussion and changes that are going on. Everyone seems to have “their own site”. We are providing this as a place where most everyone goes and can choose to see what is going on in the Scholastic Community. We chose a blog format so you could contribute your thoughts as well.

To get to the reports and ratings, all you have to do is click one of the menu items above. There are also more detailed discussions specific to the general age of your child  (Elementary, MS and High School). This will let you see what is going on in the State without having to be “spammed” on an email list. You can stay connected for yourself whenever you check in on your child’s ratings. We hope to keep this open to the entire community and not represent a small group of coaches.

It’s our intention to provide a service to the community by keeping you informed not just of your child’s ratings, but also what is going on in the community as a whole.

Please let us know how we can improve the usability of this site to make it work better for you!

This year, WSHCA made a decision to focus more on High School Scholastic Chess and transferred the hosting of the “NWSRS System” to the Washington Middle School Chess Association. We wanted to keep the system free of charge to all the parents and other groups as well as expand what it offers. The Middle School Association is providing the funding along with the generous support from Barry Hansen (Web Master Extraordinaire).

We hope this will be more than just a place where you can see reports and ratings, but also a place to share information about what is happening in the Washington and Oregon chess communities. We are a non-profit group that provides this to promote parents with information about Scholastic Chess in the NorthWest. We hope you find the information here valuable and contribute to the discussion.