Josh Lewis is Hawaii's first online Scholastic Chess960 Champion!

Congratulations to Josh Lewis (wishiwashijoshi) who is Hawaii's first online Chess960 Scholastic champion, winning the small 2022 online tournament.  He defeated twelfth-grader Erik Arikura in a wild tactical game for the title, shown below.  6th-grader Koa Satterfield gets honorable mention for holding Lewis to a draw in the final round. 

The year 2022 is the 50th anniversary of Bobby Fischer's historic victory over Boris Spassky and the "Soviet Chess Machine" in Reykjavic, Iceland.  It is also the 50th anniversary of Fischer's declaration that "chess is dead."  He meant that the top chess players are the best memorizers of deep opening theory, and the top grandmasters have to dedicate their brains, from a young age, to memorizing opening theory.  Opening theory fundamentally changed the game, so it is no longer a battle of strategy, tactics and new ideas from the first move.

In 2022 an American, HIkaru Nakamura, became the second official Chess960 FIDE World Champion.  The first official FIDE world champion was his American team mate Wesley So who demolished Magnus Carlsen in the final match in 2019.  Previous world champions, from the Mainz tournament in Germany, include Peter Leko, Peter Svidler, Levon Aronian and Alexandra Kosteniuk.

A few of us in Hawaii strongly prefer Chess960 to conventional chess, simply because we are not good memorizers and/or we are bored with playing the same chess openings over and over for decades.  But Chess960 enthusiasts are on the fringes of chess, like those who prefer Bughouse.  Maybe in 2023 the Chess960 championship will go live, like Bughouse did.