
My Experience Running A Chess Blogging Competition
Kia ora, dear readers!
Welcome to my first blog of 2025! Before anything else, I hope you are all having a great start to the year. Once again, I will try my best to post twice a month until the end and keep you entertained with different content. As you probably know, the scheduled dates for my texts are usually the 15th and 30th of each month, except for February, which I will try to adjust somehow.
Anyway, as promised, the first one would be the most special, tied with all the other 23, of course. However, the goal today is slightly different than usual, but still strongly related to chess and especially to blogging. In this article, I will tell you more about a very cool competition that I have coordinated here on this platform. I am talking about BlogChamps Season 7. So, let's get started!
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
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1. Introduction - What is BlogChamps?
2. Season 6 -The one I competed in
3. Season 7 - The one I coordinated
3.1. Qualifiers
3.2. Knockout Rounds
3.3. Final Four and Season Awards
3.4. Final Results
4. But why exactly have I done it?
5. Conclusion
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1. INTRODUCTION - WHAT IS BLOGCHAMPS?
Ok, so the first thing I need to explain is what exactly BlogChamps is. I am not going to go into all the history and details, because some of them I am not even aware of, but basically it is a club of the blogging community. The biggest one.
The club was created by Top Bloggers @Lightning and @Rodgy, and is now run by @alphaous, the Super Admin, and admins/judges @KevinSmithIdiot, @nbrasington, @sleepyporcyy, @The_turtlepro, and well, the last one is a Kiwi girl who writes some silly stuff twice a month. I hope you have heard of her.

In this community, everyone who likes to write or read blogs is welcome to share with their peers some tips, experiences, "hacks", ask relevant questions, advertise their work (in the right place), learn from some more experienced people, and most importantly, have some fun in a competition that is organized there!
If you are an avid reader or writer and have never heard of it, feel free to join us after finishing this text. But anyway, the goal here is not to make a club advertisement. I just needed to introduce it to the readers, so you understand what we are talking about.
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2. SEASON 6 - THE ONE I COMPETED IN
Ok, so I joined in May last year after being invited by my friend @AstroTheoretical_Physics. Unfortunately, the club was going through some difficult times at that moment, with very few people writing and entering the competition. Season 6 had already started, but they were not even sure if it would finish.
It only took a few days for me to be informed that the first 3 seasons had been quite good, but that Seasons 4 and 5 had seen a huge decline in terms of engagement. The atmosphere was not the best, as you can see below:

But thanks to Astro, who persisted, never gave up, and encouraged more people to write and join in, we managed to get the minimum number of participants needed to at least run it decently. I was one of them. However, seeing these struggles and realizing that the club was almost dying, my main goal was not really to win, but to help it grow and be something cool again.
Well, despite the quantity being achieved, the same could not yet be said for the quality. Do you want to know what really sparked my desire to support them and made me think "OK, they have a great idea here, but these guys need help!”? It was this blog:
The study of ligaments - Chess.com Blog
If you clicked on the link, I am sorry for "promoting" such a thing here, but I had to illustrate and let you know how difficult the situation was. And don't worry, it didn't qualify for the knockout stages.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I qualified for the knockout rounds and kept messaging all the contestants to make sure they were writing and submitting their blogs on time. I must say that the quality of the entries, while not perfect, was pretty decent, with some great texts that I enjoyed reading. Also, there were no withdrawals or people missing deadlines during these stages, which had been a big problem in the previous two seasons.
And how did I perform? You may ask. Well, I finished runner-up, but honestly, that is not the most important thing. After completing the Season quite successfully, the club was finally starting to feel alive again. Then @alphaous promoted me to Admin, and I promised myself (and another person, read on) that I would do my best to run a great Season 7! It was time for an epic revival!

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3. SEASON 7 - THE ONE I COORDINATED
3.1. Qualifiers
Astro stepped down from his role as Admin and left me in charge of Season 7, which was scheduled to start on October 1st. The first step? Well, we urgently needed more people to write and compete. Of course, after so many seasons, it's understandable that the same guys don't want to keep competing repeatedly, so my goal was to find some hungry faces, new up-and-coming bloggers ready to show off their great work and prove their value.
The month of September was busy and exhausting, as I spent it reading the blogs on the "All Blogs" page almost every day, trying to recruit the ones I thought were worth a chance. And luckily, it paid off as we discovered many amazing writers. In total, BlogChamps went from 23 qualifier entries in Season 6 to 76(!!) in Season 7!

Also, the club felt alive again, with a lot of activity in the notes and forums, people asking questions, veterans motivated to come back, newcomers trying to improve, etc. Obviously, I was delighted to see that. Unfortunately, according to the rules, the other judges and I had to select only 16 of the qualifiers, who on average were of a very high quality, to go through to the knockout stages. You can find both announcements below:
But most importantly, as someone who loves chess and reading, you can imagine how cool it was for me to read so many blogs on different topics and how much I learned from each competitor. In a Herculean effort, we have provided individual feedback for everyone, explaining why they received the score we gave them, and where we saw their positive aspects and points for improvement. So, regardless of the results, I hope they all learned and improved from the experience.
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3.2. Knockout Rounds
In the knockout stages, the qualified bloggers are paired up in 1v1 matches, and the five judges vote on which blog they like better to decide who goes through. As one of the judges and the main organizer, I had no preference as to who should qualify or not, but was mainly hoping for some amazing entries that would give me true headaches in deciding the winner. And most of all, that everyone would do their best to submit a great blog before the deadline.
The good news is that this is exactly what happened! Both the Round of Sixteen and the Quarterfinals were full of solid entries, which made me happy to see the effort and dedication that went into them but also made me very sad to know that one of the bloggers had to be knocked out. I am not kidding when I say that, in almost every match, both would have deserved to go through given the quality of their articles.

Some of these people I had already expected to do well, given their experience and based on previous blogs I had read from them. Some others were big and welcome surprises, doing much better than initially expected and showing some pretty nice improvements. For me, that's the most important thing.
Anyway, rules are rules, so after two wild knockout rounds and twenty-four excellent texts, only four of the 56 who started the competition were left. I was very excited to see how they would do and what kind of topics and texts they would choose this time. However, I also felt that some of the other wonderful blogs that had been written throughout the season deserved a little more recognition, so I started to pick those that were worthy of an award in specific categories.
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3.3. Final Four and Season Awards
As expected, the Final Four, as we call the semi-finals, once again had four great blogs. I would like to thank and congratulate my friends @RookMindset, @DavidGaming08, @NDpatzer, and @JustGettingThisOffMyChess for their great work during the season. In my humble opinion, they're on the same level as the Top Bloggers.
Of course, this decision is not mine, but I feel it is important to let my readers know that many people here write and produce high-quality chess-related content, with their own unique styles and topics. Also, who knows, maybe someone from the staff will read this and decide to give them a chance.
The finalists chosen were @DavidGaming08 and @JustGettingThisOffMyChess, who would then compete for the Zachary Isaac Snow II Trophy, an award created in honor of one of the club's founders.

Additionally, I also gave out the Season Awards on Christmas Eve, as a gift to the bloggers who stood out in certain categories. You can check out the official announcement and read the work of some of the winners by clicking on the image below. I know the vast majority of the readers won't do this, but if it helps them get a bit more visibility and recognition, it will be worth it.

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3.4. Final Results
And the big moment finally arrived! The final match did not disappoint and both bloggers did their best to produce excellent blogs that I really enjoyed reading. We almost thought about letting them share the trophy and giving them both the season title. But unlike some of the federations out there, BlogChamps is a very serious institution and would never allow such a ridiculous thing to happen, so the judges had to choose just one of them to be crowned.

Our choice? @JustGettingThisOffMyChess has been declared champion. Well deserved, no doubt, as it would have also been if @DavidGaming08 had won. Most of all, I hope they and all the other contestants learned from the competition. Speaking for myself, I thoroughly had fun running it as it gave me some great new insights into blogging and even opened my mind to some new ideas and resources that I could use in my future articles.
I am not going to lie... I am very tired, as the process of thinking about everything that needed to be done was way more exhausting than I first thought, but it was definitely worth it! And of course, not wanting to leave you in the dark, here is the link to the winning blog. Click on the image to read it later if you like, and I am almost certain you will not regret this decision!
4. BUT WHY EXACTLY HAVE I DONE IT?
First and foremost, I naturally did it because I love writing and reading, so the more people I can encourage to do the same, the happier I will be, and that would be more than enough motivation. However, there is a hidden reason that I have never told anyone, not even the most active members of the club or my best friends, and which I will now reveal.
On Friday the 24th of May, I was having lunch with my boss at a KFC (fitness and healthy) near Panmure Station before catching the train to work. At that time, I was just an ordinary air traffic controller. He had no interest in chess, but I knew that he was an amateur writer in his youth, so I decided to tell him about my chess blog and that I had been selected as a Top Blogger one week earlier.
In the natural flow of the conversation, I ended up telling him the whole story about how I joined a blogging club/competition that looked cool but was facing hard times. I took out my phone and showed him notes similar to the screenshots you saw earlier, maybe even the exact ones.

In my annual evaluation form, there is an important part for projects. Usually, in October or November, we must present one work-related and one non-work-related project that we have done in the last 12 months. The latter is often anything that has helped the community, AKL employees, the airport environment, etc., while not directly related to my job.
After discussing it for a while, we decided that trying to revive the club would be a cool plan for me since I had not done anything concrete at that time and needed some ideas. It sounded a bit weird because it was something online that would not benefit anyone involved in my daily life, but well, if the boss had just agreed, why should I worry?

I started showing him the progress that was being made every two weeks... The good blogs of Season 6, the fact that no one withdrew, the recruitment process, the amazing number of qualifiers for Season 7, and of course, my efforts to make it possible and turn the competition back into something enjoyable.
On November 15, the day after the Round of 16 results were announced and the day before a business trip to Malaysia, came my performance review. My score on that particular topic? 95/100! To give you some context, this is extremely hard to get and was my best result on the entire scorecard. The second was 83.
The outcome? It was my last review with that department, as I changed roles in December, so I left them (and joined the new one) with my highest average ever, thanks to this specific item that helped raise it. Practical consequences? A very generous bonus in my December salary! I will not disclose the exact %, but believe me, it was well above what I normally get.
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5. CONCLUSION
I don't know if any of the club members had already suspected something like this, but if you somehow contributed to the season, whether by writing and participating, judging, or just watching and getting involved, my deepest and most sincere thanks for helping me. I could try all I wanted, but nothing would be possible if there weren't other people motivated to make it happen.
But if you are not part of this community and need some proof that the work was well done, I will drop below two screenshots that might convince you. I swear they were both spontaneous and no one was asked, forced, or hurt in the process of writing them. The first is from my good friend Astro, who wrote during the qualifiers:
And the second is from Top Blogger @colorfulcake, who "worked" as a judge in some of the early seasons and then dropped out for a while. Not too long ago, he came back to see how Season 7 was going and said:
I guess there is not much more to say. Thanks to you for reading it, and I hope you enjoyed a different kind of blog. Thanks again, for the tenth time only in this text, to all my friends and members of BlogChamps. Also, congratulations to @JustGettingThisOffMyChess for winning the season, it was well-deserved. Your articles were great, as were at least 80% of the others.
Oh, and if after reading the first sentence of this blog you were wondering what "Kia Ora" means, it's like "Hello" in New Zealand, and it's how I usually greeted everyone in the announcements during the competition, so I thought it would be cool to bring it here this time.
Interested in taking part in Season 8? I would love your participation!
I will see you again in 15 days with the series “Duel Of Nations”!