The End Game: SMC Chess Club hosts their final tournament of the semester.
On Friday, May 30, 2025, the Santa Monica College (SMC) Chess Club closed off the spring 2025 semester with its second open chess tournament held in the SMC Cafeteria. The top three players competed for the prize of two wooden chess sets and a chess clock.
Despite being only a week or so away from finals, players still showed up for an afternoon of chess. Winston Sharpe, the Communication Officer of the Chess Club, said, “It’s our hobby. This is what we do.”
The open competition attracted 10 players, including two club advisors, Aaron Simo and Alex Bene, both math professors at SMC. The tournament was played Swiss style with no eliminations, where everyone plays against people of similar skill level. Each player gets 10 minutes, an additional three seconds every time they make a move, and loses if they run out of clock time. Scores are tallied based on the number of wins, draws and losses.
After three hours, Simo pulled out of the game with Adam El-Sherief, Henry Navarro and Elijah Tipton emerging as top players in the tournament. Navarro and Tipton would compete in the final tie-breaker match, Armageddon, to determine the overall winner.
This match would be Sohei Okamoto’s last game as Chess Club President as he will be transferring to the University of California, Berkeley next year. Okamoto started playing chess only one year ago. He started hanging out in the cafeteria and noticed the open chessboards while watching his friends play chess.
Strategy games, however, are not new to Okamoto. He played Shogi, Japanese chess, for 10 years. After joining the chess club, with the encouragement from the club's past president, Michael Helfaud, Okamoto applied to be on the board.
With the last game to decide a winner, Navarro started with a shortened clock time of four minutes as black against Tipton, with a five minute clock time as white. The game started to heat up when the clock ticked down to 13 seconds left for Tipton and 58 seconds left for Navarro.
With only the king, pawn and rook remaining for both players, the game was headed to a draw if there was no clock time. Tipton had no choice but to force a win before his clock ran out.
In rapid-fire motion, Tipton moved and protected his pawn square by square to the edge of the board to aim for a queen promotion. The clock time for Tipton ran out as his pawn reached the edge. Tipton lost the game to Navarro.
When asked why he went for the “Hail Mary” moves trying to get a queen promotion with little time left, Tipton said, “... Just me being hopeful.”
The club ended the year by awarding the winners with big prizes. Navarro, the overall winner, took home a wooden chess set. Tipton, second place, being the winner from the last tournament, chose to concede his winnings to others. Finally, El-Sherief, third place, also took home a wooden chess set. The chess clock remained unclaimed, awaiting another round next year.