Aaron Gan of Lincolnshire's Half Day School won six of his seven games -- including his last five matches -- tying for third place in the K-3 section of the 2015 Elementary Championships.

On tiebreaks, Aaron took home fifth place hardware from the Nashville competition which concluded May 10.

Second grader Arthur Xu had the top tiebreak among 4.5 scorers, tying for 46th place out of 255 players competing in multiple rounds.

A half-point back was Vrishank Ramnath and Sohan Bendre, both with 4.0's.

Sohan's 4.0 paced Avery Coonley School to 15th place team honors. Yash Desai (3.0), Jaden Fauske (2.5) also contributed to the 11.5 team result, along with solid tallies from Abhi Batchu and Neola Edwin.

In fact, Neola was among a handful of players entering the K-3 Championship with ratings under 600 to compile a 2.0 result. On tiebreaks, she received the third place trophy for U600 entrants! 

While there were no USCF Masters or Experts in the section, there was a football team of Class A players participating, including Max Lu, rated 1998 coming into the competition.

Avery Coonley entered nine players in this section, more than any other team outside New York. Dalton placed second (15 entries) and Speyer Legacy (the K-1 and K-5 Champions) took third (10 entries). Hunter College Campus School took fifth (9 entries) and Collegiate School of New York City (9 entries) took sixth place.  Eight of the top 10 finishing teams were from New York City, including the champion NEST+m (New Explorations Into Science, Technology and Math) School. Even public schools got in on the action: PS 41 took 7th place, a half-point better than PS 11 which nabbed 8th. Both the 10th and 11th place schools were from the New York suburb of Greenwich, Connecticut.

So thanks to ACS for keeping the New York schools honest in the competition!

In the K-3 Under 800 section, Illinois Anish Deshpande compiled an impressive 5.0/7, tying for 25th place out of 333 entrants. The USCF awarded Anish, a Benjamin Elementary (Bloomington) student, a 35th place trophy, along with 26 others.

Rian Julka posted a 4.0 in the same section, tying for 81st, within the top quarter.