OCA PRESIDENTS REPORT

Thanks to active participation throughout the province, this past year was very exciting and eventful! It is very encouraging to see such progress, and we must especially thanks the numerous organizers and tournament directors throughout Ontario. They are and will always continue to be the backbone of all our activities. In this regard the Ontario Chess Association is proud to recognize and award extraordinary individuals who give generously of their time and talent to help others and promote chess within Ontario. Five special people have been identified this year for special Achievement Awards. On January 16^th I had the privilege to present Gerry deLugt his award at a meeting of the Kinston Chess Club, in Kingston, Ontario. On 16 April I presented Erik Malmsten his award at the Annual General Meeting of the GTCL in Toronto. On 26 April I had the opportunity to personally present Hans Jung his award when he visited the Brampton Chess Club to compete in a GTCL Team March. Two more deserving volunteers will be presented their awards shortly, possibly at the upcoming OCA AGM.

The tournament activity was exciting and started with an excellent Ontario Open in May, in Brantford. A special thanks to Chris Mallon for a great event. This was followed by an historic Canadian Open in Kapuscasing in July. Ellen and Dennis Nadeau again showed their great organizational talents to run a very successful Canadian Open two years in a row. Not only did they conduct a great competition, they showed fantastic leadership on how to get visibility and sponsorships from government and business alike. When you consider that Kapuscasing has only a population of less than 10,000, it challenges all communities to follow their leadership and organize similar events. A few weeks later Hal Bond conducted another great Guelph Pro-Am tournament.

On August 20-29 the OCA held the Belzberg Invitational Canadian Chess Championship and Zonal. I am very pleased with the success and participation in this event. It was the 77^th Canadian Chess Championship, and represents Canada’s best chess players, where the winners represent Canada in the World Championship, and the Pan-American Championship. This championship had the largest number of players, 69, breaking the old record of 36, which was set in Richmond, B.C. in 2002. Our Canadian Youth Dominated! IM Pascal Charbonneau became Canadian Champion following a playoff with FM Erik Lawson. Mark Bluvshstein came Third, after a four person playoff. Prizes were awarded to the best players by province (excluding top 10 cash prize winners, and the top Ontario Player was Sebastien Predescu (who later in the year becomes the 2004 Ontario Champion by winning the Ontario Closed!)

This was the First Canadian Chess Championship with women competing! We had four women entered, including the current and previous Canadian Womens Champions. (All four women met the same event qualification standards as did male competitors.) One quarter of the players were under 21, with Shiyam Tharandiran, being only 12 years old! Canadian Junior Champion Zhe Quan was only 14! 16 year old Mark Bluvshtein had already achieved several GM norms, and officially became a GM last Fall!

Our tournament was privileged to have two International Arbiters direct the event. Mark S. Dutton, the Chief Arbiter, is one of Ontario’s most experienced and highly recognized Tournament Directors. International Arbiter David Cohen, was also responsible for ensuring daily PGN recording of all games and they were posted nightly on the chessontario.com website. Craig Thorvardson updated the website daily with information and pictures. The top five boards were displayed Live on the Internet by using DGT Boards from Patrick Mcdonald. Erik Malmsten was the Volunteer Chairman, and worked long hours every day to ensure all players were well taken care of. A special thanks to Tartu College for both their meeting facilities and incredible room accommodation at only $300 for 11 nights in Toronto!

Our news media coverage was fantastic. The games were posted and analysed daily by both the British and Russian Chess Websites. We had news coverage by the newspapers, and TV, and even a ½ hour chess documentary was produced by CTV with interviews and filming onsite. At the conclusion of the event was an excellent banquet which was attended by almost all players! A 60 page bound historical booklet was given to all players. With a beautiful color cover, the booklet contained live pictures throughout the event, and selected games from the event, ensuring every player had at least one game, and one personal picture recorded. It even had pictures of the champions and final crosstables and results even though the last games finished only ½ hour before the banquet began. Our sponsors, Sid and Alicia Belzberg, and all the players expressed congratulations to all the people who made this event so successful!

Numerous tournaments were held by our Leagues throughout the province. New Ontario Closed, Ontario Youth, Ontario Womens and Ontario Seniors Championships were held. We are proud of our Ontario Champions! Patrick Mcdonald ran the OYCC and Ontario Youth Championships in January and Raja Panjwani in our 2004 Ontario Youth Champion! Martin Jaegar ran the Ontario Seniors and Ontario Womens Championships in February. Wilf Ferner is the 2004 Ontario Seniors Champion! (Unfortunately no women attended their championship so there is no 2004 Ontario Womens Champion!). Roger Patterson ran the Ontario Closed event and was its major sponsor! An outstanding event, and Sebastien Predescu is the 2004 Ontario Chess Champion. Congratulations to the winners for their excellence and to the organizers who made these events possible.

As important as all this wonderful chess activity was, the OCA’s main achievement was in structural organization and progress towards longterm corporate and government sponsorships. This was a year of visibility and showed leadership, and ability to conduct events worthy of sponsorships. The Nadeaus raised over $40,000 in sponsorships, and the Belzbergs contributed $12500.

Furthermore a lot of hard work has been done towards obtaining major Trillium and Lottery Funding. It looks highly likely that we will achieve approval of our Pilot Project in York and Simcoe Region. We have requested a two year program, with the understanding that we then want to expand to three regions, one more in SWOCL Region and one more in EOCA Region, and five years later to go province wide. This project is to expand a proven model of community activities with a focus on chess and outdoor board games in downtown areas to encourage interaction among people of all ages and backgrounds through recreational activities. It will enhance city initiative for downtown revitalization. It will help create a sense on community and bring people downtown. It will encourage and enhance chess activities in the area, starting with improvement at all ages within the school systems and with outdoor recreational and summer camp activities. The Kitchener success has proven weekly participation of 400-600 per week and over 10,000 participants. Our project is an exciting activity to build and strengthen our community and supports volunteers and expands social activities within our schools and downtown areas. It emphasizes fun and participation, and provides specific chess training and competition which helps positively challenge our youth of all ages, from 6 to 100 years of age. We expect participation from all ages, with fastest acceptance from European and Asian communities in York Region which already highly value chess and mental board game activities. However we believe all Canadians benefit from this life long sport, and expect our ethic communities to come out and play and socialize together. It also supports economic growth by helping revitalize downtown communities which is good for the downtown businesses as well as the downtown community as it enhances quality of life! The Pilot Project will have a proposed budget of $220,000 over two years. It should serve as a benchmark and guideline to expand chess activity organization and develop governmental and corporate sponsors so the program continues on an ongoing basis. Approval is expected the middle of July 2005, with actual hiring and activity starting September 2005. If approved the OCA will be hiring a fulltime York Region Program Co-ordinator with a salary of $45,000-$50,000 per year and several camp Instructors by June 2006. Progress and visibility will be shown on a special York Region section on the chessontario.com website. The project is designed to work with the GTCL and organizations in the area, not to compete with them. The OCA is also working towards other Lottery and corporate funding and if successful will be hiring a part-time fundraiser to co-ordinate its efforts and help ensure effective returns for the sponsors.

The OCA wants to encourage and support all chess activity in the province. We are actively trying to work closer with the school systems and with the Chess’n Math Association. I strongly support an agreement with the CFC and Chess’n Math Association to adopt one CFC rating system as it will minimize confusion, and allow easier, logical, migration of school youth into all club and tournament activities. The OCA plans to add a database chess tournament central clearing house for all Ontario Chess activty on the chessontario.com website. This website has been greatly updated in style and will be the major OCA Publicity vehicle for the future. The Chess’n Math Association has already agreed to post all its events to our website as well. I am also please to report that the GTCL Board now has a representative of Chess’n Math. Working together, all chess organizations can benefit and support each other.

For the past two years I have had the added challenge and opportunity of not only serving as OCA President, but also serving as GTCL President. I am very pleased to report that the GTCL has a new and energetic Leadership Team, led by President Michael Barron. This will allow me to better focus on OCA leadership, if I am fortunate to be re-elected at the upcoming OCA AGM in Ottawa.

We should be very proud of the many achievements within the Ontario Chess Community this past year. Our organizers and volunteers deserve the credit! OCA Committees will be again activated as our funding and organizational efforts consolidate and allow them reasonable resources to achieve meaningful results.

I am proud to see that that we have volunteers nominated and prepared to serve in 2005/2006 OCA Executive positions. We have good momentum, and already an active and great year ahead. Our goals now are to implement planning for the next 2-5 years. When I first became OCA President I published a Vision for Chess in Ontario which is posted on our chessontario.com website. We are making significant progress. Let us all work together and make our Vision a reality.

S. Barry Thorvardson