This was an interesting event, one that I hadn’t seen offered before: a chess meet! It had individual chess matches between members of the Zoom call, hosted on a website online. There was a logistical preamble to matching up students, and then we were set off to complete the matches with the specific restraints.

For the matches, we had time constraints, so each side had to battle within limits. Myself, I’m very new to chess, so I had some trial and error before I realized some key aspects of the game. Using a pawn to reach the other side creates a new piece, one that is much more powerful: the app allowed me to choose, so I usually chose to add another queen to the board.

Knowing this, my strategy quickly became to just launch my players across the board as quickly as possible. This didn’t work out for me in most matches, because when the time ran out, I was usually way behind in terms of points. I was able to win a match toward the end, though, which felt great!