Christian qualified for the state chess tournament a few months ago and the day has arrived!
Yesterday, we left right after school and arrived at Overlake Christian Church around 3:30. Wow, I had no idea just how big this place was, and there aren’t any words I can find to convey the sheer size of the building. It looks big but not formidable from the outside, but once inside you find it takes a long time to walk all of the big open hallways and check out all of the rooms. Their small chapel is bigger than our church’s sanctuary.
Christian and his friend Nik competed in a Bughouse tournament last night, which ran from 5 until 7:30 or so. The boys had fun but got creamed in 7 of 8 games. Bughouse is a fun chess-variation where you play with a partner and when you take a piece from your opponent, you hand it to your partner who can then use the piece in their game. On the bright side, the boys challenged us parents to a game or three and creamed us every time.
Christian also played me a variation of chess called Monster Chess… where I was white and played normally, he was black and had only his king and four pawns… the catch is, he gets two moves to every one of mine. Try wrapping your head around that 🙂
We enjoyed our hotel room. We were pleasantly surprised to have a room with a balcony. Our hotel was the Marriott at Redmond Towne Center, which was great. We walked across the street to Cold Stone Creamery and enjoyed our waffle bowls of ice cream on our balcony. I’m so grateful the weather finally felt like spring enough to enjoy being outside.
I didn’t sleep much, but Christian seems to have slept ok. At 1:20 am he managed to roll over and push a button on the alarm clock and the radio was blaring. I finally got the sound turned off, and Christian has no recollection of this at all. We were awakened by a little bit of sunlight streaming in the room this morning, around 6, well ahead of the 6:45 wakeup call we had scheduled.
A wonderful breakfast buffet was included in our stay. Christian had rice krispies, a cinnamon roll, yogurt, french toast, an orange juice and a hot chocolate.
The tournament has been fun. There are 12 kids from Seaview here, and our team has a great sunny corner to hang out. So far Christian has had 2 losses, and they’re running behind schedule. Three more rounds to go. I’m going to see if I can get more pictures 🙂
UPDATE: Round three, Christian had a loss. Then he convinced me he needed coffee. Round four, he had a draw, which was great. Round five he came back saying he won. Then he fessed up that his opponent didn’t show up, so it counted as a win 🙂
Next year state is in Spokane. I hope gas prices come down in the next year!
