Head's Newsletter 17 December 2021

the National Schools Chess Championship. The last two to attempt qualification for the knockout stages, the E and F teams, which were composed almost entirely of year 7s, headed down to King ’ s College on Wednesday 24th November. The E ’ s started strong with a 5 - 1 win against JAGS B but lost a fighting match against a very strong KCS U13B team in the final round and lost 2 - 4. The F team lost their first two games but came back with a 6 - 0 consolation win against JAGS B. Despite neither team qualifying, there were still some fantastic games played, most notably by David Varghese, Nyill Ikram and Leo Klimov. Lastly, the D team, bolstered by some of the best players of the E and F teams sought qualification for the knockout stages in an online repechage event. Over the course of a hectic hour, Tiffin established themselves as one of the front runners and then in the dying minutes amidst a flurry of hastily accepted draws and Wayward Queen attacks, Tiffin placed 3rd, thereby qualifying! Particular congratulations are in order to Nyill Ikram (+6=0 - 1) and David Varghese (+5=3 - 2) who both scored 12 points and Ryan Karmaker (+7=0 - 4) who scored 14 points and placed 4th out of all 83 players in the arena. This all means that Tiffin have 4 teams through to the knockout stages of the NSCC, joint most in the country with RGS Guildford and Wilson ’ s.

ALUMNI RETURN TO SUPPORT YEAR 13

We have been really pleased to liaise with so many of our alumni over the last few weeks, who have helped Year 13 students to prepare for upcoming university interviews in a range of subject areas. Gurshant and Alex, pictured here, are currently studying medicine at university and returned to school to test our medicine applicants in our recent mock interview circuit, organised by the Careers team. Thank you to all of the alumni who have offered our Year 13 students support, guidance and experience this term. CHESS Tiffin ’ s A and B teams have continued to perform fantastically in the Ivan Gromov Chess league - a fortnightly classical chess tournament. The A ’ s completed a decisive 5 - 1 thrashing of Eton ’ s B team while the B ’ s beat Brentwood ’ s A team 4 - 2, only losing 2 as a result of defaults. This puts our teams at 4th and 3rd overall in the standings at this stage of the league. The tremendous popularity of chess at Tiffin has led to us entering 6 teams into