Nine golds and a clean sweep of all three age groups: Kashi's girls are CBSE East Zone chess champions

Chess rarely gets a crowd, which is a pity, because Varanasi has just had one of its better results on a board. The girls of Sunbeam School Lahartara finished overall champions at the CBSE East Zone girls' chess championship — and they did it across the full range, taking the title in the under-11, under-17 and under-19 groups alike, with nine gold and three silver board prizes between them. The under-11 side was made up of Ramya, Sayali Agarwal, Parikshitta Dubey, Arika Pihlani and Avika Kanodia. The under-17 team had Punya Todi, Sarah Singh, Ananya Singh Chauhan and Yashika Pratap Singh. The under-19 group — Archita Agarwal, Samridhi Tiwari, Anvita Jalan, Shambhvi Gujarati, Anamika Gupta and Aarshiya Khandelwal — completed the sweep. The winners now go on to the national championship. A sweep of three age groups is not luck; it usually means a school has kept a coaching thread running for years, so that the under-11 board today is the under-19 board in eight years' time. For families in the city weighing whether a child's chess hours are worth it, this is the kind of local result that answers the question, and the nationals will now show how far the run goes.

Compiled by HelloBanaras from public sources: Amar Ujala — Varanasi