Christopher Smith from King Edward VI School, Birmingham was the star player in this year’s British Land UK Chess Challenge Worcestershire Megafinal held at the University of Worcester.

The Worcestershire Megafinal is the biggest chess event in Worcestershire and attracted nearly 150 young chess players. It is just part of a nationwide competition with over 70,000 entrants that finishes at the National Terafinal held in August where the best player can win a prize of £3000.

Local organiser Ray Collett said that entry was based on the old Worcestershire County boundaries and includes Dudley, Halesowen, Stourbridge as well as Quinton, Quinborne, Selly Oak, Bartley Green, Kings Heath, Northfield, Moseley, Hall Green and Yardley in Birmingham. Entrants to the Worcestershire Megafinal had all scored highly won in the school and club stage of this national competition.

The youngest player was Aroun Kalyana from Tony Miles' Checkmates Club in Quinborne who is just under 6 years old. He scored 2 points out of 6 in his debut, no mean achievement when some boys in his section were nearly 2 years older.

An outstanding performance was registered in the Friar family. The two brothers from Kidderminster attend Worcester Junior Chess Academy coached by English Chess Federation Coach Andy Moore. Both Joseph in the under-9s, and James in the under-11 boys got clean sweeps with 6 wins out of 6 games to win their Worcestershire Supremo titles.

In the secondary age groups, the previous success of Nunnery Wood High School Worcester was not to be repeated. The dominant chess schools this year were King Edward VI Camp Hill and King Edward VI Five Ways Schools in the Worcestershire part of Birmingham who battled it out with Tony Miles' Checkmates Club and Worcester Junior Chess Academy.

Christopher Smith (King Edward VI Five Ways School) is still an under-16 player and came first in his section with 5½ points beating older players. In addition to his trophy, at the next weekend, he went one better by drawing with the former World Chess Champion Boris Spassky at a simultaneous exhibition at the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival. You can see how well he played in this annotated game here.

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