Another month has passed, which was another month with plenty of chess and such going on in Noesis. Given the events that happened in this month, memorable is indeed the word to describe it. In this update, we will give you a recap of what has been happening in March, and what we have coming up for the future!
100 members!
Yes indeed, we hit this huge milestone this memorable month: Noesis now has more than 100 members! We are extremely happy about the extremely fast growth of our association. At the time of writing this article, it is precisely 1 year ago that the first meeting took place about a student chess club in Eindhoven. At that time, we thought 25-30 members would be nice, and 50 would be absolutely amazing. Noesis was officially established on August 17 2021, right before the introduction week. It took us 23 days from that point on to cross the 50 member-barrier. The way from 50 to 100 took a bit longer: the 100th member subscribed about 6 months later, which was this month. We are looking forward to seeing all of you at the club nights soon!
Noesis vlog
During the Open Culture Week in February, our members Levi Baruch and Nicole Vermeulen were kind enough to make a vlog of Noesis. After extensive editing, the result is here!
The history of chess
After the carnival break, we resumed our club nights with a talk by Alessandro di Bucchianico. Alessandro has been a part of the chess world for a long time: being the Dutch Correspondence Chess Champion of 1987, and part of the TU/e team that won the National Company Chess Championship in 2012. In his daily life, he is an associate professor in statistics, and head of the master Industrial and Applied Mathematics at the TU/e.
Alessandro knows a lot about the chess world, and he educated and entertained us for about an hour with an overview of the history of chess, filled with all kinds of anecdotes and stories. After that, he stuck around a bit to take challenges from our members.
Chess afternoon outside
On a sunny Monday in march, the activity committee decided that it was time to take the chess boards outside and play games in the sun. Although this idea came into being very last-minute, and there was little time to promote it amongst members, there were people dropping on and off all through the afternoon. It was a gezellige get-together, that reminded me of the old days of Noesis, before we had an actual club night. Hopefully, we will see more of these sessions in the future!
On the photo, you can see Max nicely taking the time to smile for the picture, while Nino has sunk into deep concentration. If you look closely, you can see that this politeness cost him the game, as his clock run out in the meantime. Better luck next time Max 🙂
Max and Jitze's weekend adventure + rapid
The weekend after, Max and Jitze participated in the Noord-Brabant chess championship. At the club night, they shared some interesting moments in their games with us. You can find more about their brilliancies in this article . After that, we had a small rapid tournament, which was won by no other than Bart Borm. He was particularly pleased about this, and we celebrated this with some drinks in Hubble afterwards.
Professional chess trainer
On March 23, we finally had our long-awaited professional chess training: Marcos Quintana, an official FIDE chess trainer came by to our club to share his knowledge and enthusiasm with us. This session was originally already on the planning for December 15, but due to the lockdown, it was postponed.
The training was titled How to improve tactics. However, it went in a different direction than many people expected: the first part of the training did not seem to be about chess at all. Our members learned about how to train in general, how this works in relation to your brain, and why we are motivated to get better at chess. It got really interesting when we got to the practical part: inspired by a Chinese wonderboy, our members had to learn how to juggle with Rubix cubes, while solving them! The group was split up into smaller teams, and everybody got to work. Although the final demonstration was not particularly successful, it did give us some beautiful pictures!
In the end, we did get around to practising tactics, maybe even using the non-chess knowledge from the previous part of the training. If you want to have another look at the slides of the presentation, you can find them under the tab ‘Files’ on our website (if you are a member!).
Jitze's Birthday Party
We ended off the month with a fun event: on March 30, it was Jitze’s birthday! Jitze is a very active member of Noesis, being active in the activity, promotion, tournament, and website committee. On his birthday, he organized a fun evening with free pie, party hats, and blitz fun. In order to make the party complete, 1.b4 was the mandatory opening move for all the participants. This led to many gorgeous miniature games like the one below.
Armed to the teeth with novelties in the Orang-Utan opening and driven by the Flemish party-music, the winner Chiel was able to snatch victory and seemed very pleased with his prize: an artisinal, hand-crafted paper party hat! Joost and Thomas laid claim to the other podium places. All in all, it was a memorable and well succeeded party.
In memoriam: Armin Kohlrausch
Unfortunately, we have to end this month with a sad message. Armin Kohlrausch, ex-professor at the TU/e and avid chess player, passed away. On Friday March 25, he collapsed at a congress in Stuttgart.
After his retirement, he dove into the world of chess. He was an active member of WLC (one of the other chess clubs in Eindhoven), and most of all, a warm person and friendly presence to be around. When he heard about the establishing of Noesis in September 2021, he was extremely enthusiastic and immediately made a donation to the club. Besides that, Armin took trainings from IM Herman Grooten, and taught chess at primary schools.
We were extremely sad to hear this news, and we wish all the best to his relatives.
