2025 Fremont Chess Festival

2025 Fremont Chess Festival on National Chess Day (Saturday October 11th, 2025) was held at Mission San Jose Elementary (MSJE), Fremont, CA. 58 players competed at the main event of festival, 2025 Fremont Scholastic (K-8) Championship. 

In the 14-player K-1 section. Anika Aravind, a first grader from Stratford School Fremont, achieved a perfect score of 4/4 and walked away with the title of Fremont K-1 Chess Champion and 1st Place trophy. Both Rihaan Choudhury (first grader from MSJE) and Owen Shen (kindergartener from Brewer Island Elementary in Foster City) achieved a strong score of 3/4, and took home 2nd Place trophy and 3rd Place trophy respectively in the tiebreaker order.  

In the 24-player Grade 2-4 section, both Austin Chen, a fourth grader from Walter Hays Elementary in Palo Alto, and Rishaan Arora, a fourth grader from MSJE, achieved perfect scores of 4/4 and shared the titles of Fremont Grade 2-4 Chess Co-Champions. In the tiebreaker order, Austin took home the 1st Place trophy and Rishaan took the 2nd Place trophy. Byron Li (MSJE), Adhvith Gautham (MSJE), Shivaansh Girish (Monte Vista Elementary in Rohnert Park), Santhrupth Gopinath (MSJE) all finished with strong scores of 3/4; by the tiebreaker, Byron took the 3rd Place trophy.  

In the 20-player Grade 5-8 section, three players were undefeated with scores of 3.5/4, and they shared the titles of Fremont Grade 5-8 Chess Co-Champions. In the tiebreaker order, Rohan Jain, a fifth grader from MSJE, took home the 1st Place trophy, George Chen, a fifth grader from Mission Valley Elementary, took the 2nd Place trophy, and Rohan Iyer, a sixth grader from Helios School in Sunnyvale, took the 3rd Place trophy. 

Final standings were posted on https://tinyurl.com/2025FremontChamp and USCF Cross Table is here https://www.uschess.org/msa/XtblMain.php?202510118062.0. Please note that the list on the US Chess cross table is not in the standard tiebreak order that we apply for scholastic tournaments, so there might be differences in the orders between the USCF cross table list and our posted results. 

Thank you

A big thank-you to Ava Community Energy’s sponsorship in making this event possible and free. We’re grateful for Ava’s generosity and commitment to creating opportunities for chess events like this. We would also like to thank Ava and ChessKid.com for sponsoring our raffle.  

We would like to thank our club volunteers: Pranavi Pramod, FIDE Master Aditya Arutla, and FIDE Master Lucas Jiang for hosting the simultaneous exhibitions; section chief tournament directors Jason Liu and Kavya Meiyappan; and Zhipeng (Chief Tournament Director), Rama, Gautham, Jamie, Deepika, Terry, Jay, Lionel, and many other volunteers, altogether made this event possible and successful.