For the students of Garfield, the month of April brings everything from those first sunny days spent inside to April showers of all kinds. This new sun reveals an open expanse devoid of breaks and days off between now and the end of the year. For some, this last stretch seems much like Frodo and Sam’s final trudging climb up Mt. Doom, but April also brings a new kind of challenge. During lunch, Mr. Nomura’s room plays host to titanic battles of the brain of the same epic proportions as Frodo’s quest.

These competitions are part of the battlefield that is April Insanity, the lunchtime tournament where students form teams of four and spend their days wrapped in chess games.

As with its similarly-named but more athletic cousin March Madness, April Insanity is done in double-elimination format. This means that each team is allowed to lose two rounds, after which they say goodbye to dreams of check-ing into the ranks of Garfield’s intelligent elite. Each day of April Insanity is a single 10– to 15-minute round.

Prior to the first day of the tournament, the teams decide who the best, second-best and worst members are on the team. The best player is signed up as the “first board” player, the second-best as the “second board,” and the worst as the “third board.”

As teams go head-to-head, each team’s first board takes on the opposing team’s first board and so on, ensuring the difference in skill level between opponents is as little as possible. This doesn’t always work out that well, as my ex-April Insanity team ‘Pawnage’ signed me up as first board, undoubtedly contributing to our rapid loss in the first two rounds.

But in each round, there is also a match between the fourth player of each team, taking place in the dicy, estrogen-cloaked land of the “Queen’s Board.” It’s a requirement, to the dismay of some, that each team have a female member. This is often the toss-up game for a team, as the females play each other no matter their level of skill. Pawnage, for example, received 15th seed (out of 16) but was able to put one of our only wins in the bag thanks to female sophomore Emily Ostrove.

At the opposite end of the seeded bracket is sophomore Tal Levy, the first board on the team seeded second.

“It’s a great time because enough people show up that it turns into a big event, and most of the kids aren’t on chess team,” says Levy, who handily defeated me in the first round.

The mystery of the opposing team is a large draw for April Insanity, as a player may face anything, from the terrifying talent of a Garfield Chess Team member to one of many who come just to try it out.

“It’s exciting to play against someone you don’t know and crush them,” says sophomore Michael Proulx.

Proulx claims he was the state’s third best chess player in his age group in third grade, and in this year’s tournament, played on a team with Mr. Nomura. There are many like him in the competition, who return to a previous interest in chess, and this might be the reason that his team lost a few days away from the finals. Proulx is the epitome of April Insanity, where current chess aficionados and bishop burnouts clash over lunch.