Simone, A Small Girl in a Small Town

A cute story appears at Simone's Chess Blog. "When I started to play in scholastic tournaments outside my class in April, I was often at the bottom of the sheet looking up to the good players getting nice trophies and dreaming of one day I could just draw one of them," she says.

"After 100 or more days of studying and 10 or more tournaments, now I found myself at a position to compete for top spots in open sections of scholastic tourneys. My teacher told me at the beginning that getting into Top US 100 List would take me at least a couple years. Now I have been on it for a couple of times. This all happened in a little more than 7 months."

She includes a couple of interesting wins. She explains one:

"In one game, I was able to use a basic checkmate technique I reviewed in a book the day before to win a game in 10 moves." See her entry from December 25 for the game!