National Middle School Championship: Only Two Perfect Scores Remain After Day Two

The start of round five (Photo Caroline King)

The penultimate round of the 2024 National Middle School (K-8) Championship is currently underway, with live commentary streaming on our Twitch. Commentary on the final round begins at 1:30 p.m. EDT.

Leaderboard Takes Shape

Entering last night's round, only four perfect scores remained in the K-8 Championship. Two of them might be familiar faces:

Vemparala (L) and Guo are our K-8 Blitz co-champs, with Guo taking first on tiebreaks (Photo Caroline King)

While CM Ethan Guo took the blitz tiebreaks over Nikash Vemparalala on Thursday, the Washington eighth-grader got his revenge in their head-to-head encounter yesterday:

Vemparalala is currently playing the other player on 5/5, FM Eric Chang Liu.

That's 12 straight wins in K-8 Championships for Liu! (Photo Caroline King)

Liu's win last night showed impressive command of the position:

Entering the final day of action, two players trail the leaders by a half-point:

Those two players with 4½/5 are New York fifth-grader (and 2024 FIDE Girls Under-12 World Rapid and Blitz champion) WFM Megan Paragua and Texan sixth-grader Kyle Wang. Paragua's third-round game and Wang's fifth-round game are included below:

At the time of writing, the two players with 4½/5 already drew their head-to-head game, which is important because a whopping 16 players entered the final day with 4/5 scores, meaning that Paragua and Wang will join a logjam of players on 5/6 chasing the leader(s). Stay tuned!

Girls Club

It was a full day in the Girls Club room yesterday, with special guests Adia Onyango and WIM Dr. Carolina Blanco interspersing a lesson and a tandem simul with full-family activities like "chess battleship" and a full-family roundtable on starting a chess club from scratch.

Friends and Family Tournament

35 parents, siblings, coaches, and friends took the opportunity to get a few games under their belt yesterday, with 30 competing in the rated section. It was a pair of brothers at the top, with Jose Gabriel Casares and Agrim Kumar both going 4/4 while their siblings competed in the main event. The players each earned $198 gift cards for their day of work. That's a lot of books!

Congratulations to Georgia's Matt Morton for winning the Unrated section while his son, Harrison, plays the K-8 Under-700 section as a fourth-grader. Matt won his own US Chess membership for his 4/4 score!

Quick Links

Official website

Results and pairings

Full schedule of events

Top boards on Chess.com

Follow rounds five through seven on Twitch

All Chess Life Online coverage of the 2024 National Scholastics

Use the hashtag #MSChessChamps on social media to follow the action