The 2011-2012 MCA Scholastic season is underway, and one of the featured competitions is the Rally section qualification to the 2012 Maryland Sweet 16, where 16 of the top Maryland scholastic players compete at the UMBC Open in their own section where the winner receives a UMBC Chess scholarship. The 2012 Maryland Sweet 16 will be held Feb 25-26 at UMBC.

After the fourth event (MCA Boonsboro - 17 Dec 2011), here is the list of the 2012 Maryland Sweet 16 Rally leaders (two events remaining):

Top 6 (USCF rating): Bendeguz Offertaler, Sahil Sinha, Jerry Wu, Ronald Best Jr., Alex Li, Jason Zou

Next 10 (Rally Points): Madeline Kim, Pieter Heesters, Jordan Best, Sophia Hu, Justin Hung, Aditya Balasubramanian, Alex Hsu, Kushal Byatnal, Jeffrey Du, Charles Yang (*)

(* Rally points will count only if the player competes in all rounds of an upcoming Rally tournament.)

Alternates (next 4): David Neff, Benjamin Griffin, Audrey Grigore, Charlotte Kim

The Washington International will be the first major international tournament in the MD/DC/VA region in a long time. We plan to make this tournament different than most tournaments in the US. We're going to provide a top quality environment for the players and allow supporters to be involved with the event in various ways. We like to make this an ongoing tournament and make into a major international event. For this to work we need the help of the chess community. Our biggest need is for sponsors and donors to help cover the costs of bringing in the foreign titled players we need to allow US players to earn GM and IM norms.