Students from around the county gathered in the Beechwood Elementary gymnasium Friday with the goal of saying one word: checkmate.

Cooper Orman, a sixth-grader at Beechwood Elementary, was one of 15 students out of 197 who finished all three rounds with a perfect score.

Orman said he has been playing chess since he learned how to play in GATES in the third grade.

“I got my opponents’ king twice, and the first round I didn’t lose any pieces,” he said. “If you don’t finish in time they count the pieces because each piece has a certain amount of points, and the person with the most points wins.”

Vicksburg Warren GATES coordinator Connie West said this is the first time they have tackled a full-on chess tournament.

“We started with the Vicksburg Chess Club coming to us saying they wanted to get kids more aware, especially seeing the research that has been done that correlates chess to student achievement,” she said. “Then in the gifted program we work with critical thinking, problem solving, real life application, and so all of those things that chess does correlates with the process skills we work on.”

Last year the teachers were trained and this year the kids were ready, West said.
“You have some more than others, but I’ve noticed, surprisingly, that the boys are way more into it,” she said. “I’m not sure if it’s the battleship aspect of it or what.”

West said the Vicksburg Chess Club members come out to the schools and work with the teachers and play one on one with the kids.

“It’s really grown in the two years that we’ve been working on it,” she said.

After the students played three rounds of chess, the Beechwood Elementary students performed a life-sized game of chess.

Morgan Nelson, a sixth-grader at Beechwood Elementary, played the queen for the blue team, and she said two members from the Vicksburg Chess Club called out moves to students on either the white or the blue team.

“There’s two columns, one with numbers and one with letters,” she said. “The callers would say like D1 — it’s like a coordinate plane — you have to travel to the square he says.”

Nelson, who learned to play chess through GATES, said she wanted to thank her teachers for allowing them to participate in this event.

“I thought it would be a really good experience to do it and it would be really fun,” she said. “Actually some third fourth and fifth graders also got to do it, and I thought it would be a really good experience for them to be part of the game too.”

Beechwood Elementary third-grader and pawn for the blue team Mallory Puckett said she’s been playing chess since she was five.

“My papaw taught me and my cousin,” she said.

Puckett said her favorite part of playing chess is when she gets a checkmate.

“It means you’ve got the other person’s king to where he can’t move,” she said. “That means you win; that’s a checkmate.”

Fifteen of the 197 students participating left the event with a perfect score after three matches: Tyler Dang, Wyatt Schrader, Cooper Orman and Shea Walls from Beechwood Elementary; Ibrahim Blake, Jacob Thomas Walker and Devin Parker from Bovina Elementary; Mae Vroman, Adan Byrd, Alex Tingle, Scott Wallace, Michael DeJesus, Madison Embry and Macy Watts from Bowmar Elementary; and Peyton Davidson from Redwood Elementary.