Lexington dominated last week’s Spiegel Cup scholastic singles event in Marlboro, as that town had three of the top four age section winners in the 50-player state singles finals. James Lung tied with Jacob Fauman of Newton in the open high school section, with Lung winning a blitz playoff to become the state’s representative to the August Denker tournament of state champions.

Mika Brattain won the age 14 and under crown, Evan Meyer of Newton took the age 11 and under title, and Jiaying “Lucy” Cai swept the age 8 and under section.

Winners of lower prizes from Central Mass. included Yi Yang and Tal Puhov, both of Shrewsbury, Andrew Liu of Westboro and Maxwell Zhao of Bolton. Full results are at www.masschess.org, and the next state scholastic event is the March 11 grade championships in Woburn, followed by the April 1 Hurvitz Cup team event in Boxboro.

Next weekend the 87th Western Massachusetts and Connecticut Valley Open in Amherst, and the 36th Queen City Open in Manchester, N.H., highlight a total of nine events.

Germany continues having the most FIDE “rated” players, according to analysis of the January world rating stats on www.chessbase.com. The United States, despite increasing the number of FIDE-rated players by about 48 percent since 2008 has dropped to having just 2 percent of the world’s total. Russia and Spain continue to have the most after Germany, all three accounting for 30 percent (42,000) of the world total of about 133,000.

Few American tournaments are FIDE rated, but the USCF ratings of most every event since 1992 can be found at www.uschess.org.

There are now dozens of discussions about chess on www.linkedin.com, the job networking social media site. There will be “jobs” in chess other than marketing chess books and videos if chess in education is recognized as a sociological and fine arts pursuit, in addition to its role as an emerging sport, as it has long been in Europe.

Answer to quiz: White begins with 1. Bxf7ch and mate is delivered by 4. f7. One of the “3 steppers” by John Herron in “Total Chess: Learn, Teach and Play the 1-2-3 Way,” almost 400 pages of chess knowledge.