Thursday, July 10, 2008

Tanraj Sohal: A Canadian Chess Champion

Clarification about Tanraj Sohal winning the "Canadian Chess Championship" as reported in many internet news articles the past day or two. Please note the failure to mention a key fact in the recent reports: IN HIS AGE GROUP. This is not a dis on the young champion chessplayer, but a dis on people who evidently deliberately omitted key information from their report(s) when they picked up the original reports out of Canada and republished them in modified form, thus, at best, causing confusion and, at worst, doing it for political reasons. I found this information at Voiceonline.com under a date of April 11, 2008: #4. TANRAJ SOHAL WINS B.C. CHESS CHAMPIONSHIP IN HIS AGE GROUP Tanraj Sohal won the BC Provincial Chess Championship in his age group. The BC Chess Challenge was held on March 9 in Burnaby. Tanraj is a Grade 6 student from Surrey. He earlier won the Fraser Valley Regional Chess Championship held in Surrey on February 17. This is the sixth year in a row that Tanraj has won the Fraser Valley Regional and BC Provincial Chess Championships in his grade level. Tanraj, son of Dr. Parmjit Sohal, is a 2007 Canadian Chess Champion in his age group. He along with other provincial winners will be representing the BC Chess Team at the Canadian Chess Challenge to be held in Edmonton in May. This year the BC Chess Challenge Champions are Edwin Xu (Grade 1), Jonah Lee (Grade 2), Janak Awatramani (Grade 3), Jeremy Hui (Grade 4), Frank Cheng (Grade 5), Tanraj Sohal (Grade 6), Yifei Han (Grade 7), Joshua Renaud (Grade 8), Richard Huang (Grade 9), Henry Ji (Grade 10), Tedging Pan (Grade 11) and Bindy Cheng (Grade 12). I also find this information from the same source, dated May 24, 2008: #1. TANRAJ SOHAL WINS CANADIAN CHESS CHAMPIONSHIP AGAIN Tanraj Sohal has done it once again. The 11-year-old Grade 6 student from Surrey won the 2008 Canadian Chess Championship held in Edmonton, Alberta, on May 18-19 in his grade level. This is the fourth time Tanraj has won the Canadian Chess Championship trophy. Tanraj earlier won the 2008 Fraser Valley Regional in Surrey and BC Provincial Chess Championship held in Burnaby. Canadian Chess Challenge is the annual event where each province is represented by their 12 Provincial Champions (one player each from Grades 1 to 12). Qualification to the nationals begins with school events, then regional and provincial events. Canadian Chess Challenge is organized and sponsored by the Chess’n Math Association, Canada's National Scholastic Chess Organization. Each player plays nine round robin matches over two days in their respective grade against each of the provincial champions. Tanraj had a perfect score of 9/9 and defeated all other nine provincial champions. Overall BC got two first place trophies: Tanraj Sohal (Grade 6) and Janak Awatramani (Grade 3) and one second place trophy, Jonah Lee (Grade 2) and one third place trophy, Yifei Han (Grade 7).

3 comments:

64 said...

This criticism is really unjustified. You haven't provided any background information to your accusation (i.e. "...deliberately omitted key information). The only site I could find was the World Sikh News. Is that who you are referring to? They are not chessplayers and probably did not understand the event. If you have a problem with them, you should contact them directly rather than posting this trash here.

I have been playing tournament chess for 40 years, have been a master for 25 years and am Tanraj's chess coach. Both I and the Sohal family were surprised and insulted to read this posting in your blog.

Brian McLaren

Jan said...

As I said at the beginning of my first post on the subject, Mr. McLaren, this was not a criticism of the young champion. It IS a criticism of the newspaper that reported a championship title without providing all of the facts, i.e., that Tanraj won the title in his age group. It is a newspaper's job to report facts and the title of the article was entirely misleading as it was stated. Tanraj is not THE national Canadian champion, is a national champion in his age group. This is a great accomplishment. As you no doubt saw if you read my entire post on the subject, other online reporting did manage to get this fact correct.

Anonymous said...

TANRAJ IS AWESOME HE HAS HIS OWN STYLLL ;) PRRRIIIDEE!

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