Young players challenge the world’s best
By Travis Webb
The boy stares at the chess board in front of him. He considers it for less than a minute before making a quick move and capturing an opponent’s piece.
His opponent begins to examine the new situation, but the boy has already moved on to the next challenger.
He has 19 more boards to visit and as many moves to make before he returns to this game. Just a few metres away, another boy competes against 20 mostly-adult opponents of his own.
Both boys are locked into rectangular pens formed by the tables at which their competition sits.
They work their way around the tables, normally spending only a few minutes at each board. Crowds of office workers look down on the action from the floor above.
“These kids are honed,” says Neil Frarey, president of the Ottawa Chess Club and one of the event organizers. “I think they’re going to clean house.”
Lloyd Mai, 10, and Gabriel Brown, 12, took part in the “simul-chess” exhibition earlier this month.
For more than five hours, the boys each took on up to 20 players at once.
Proceeds raised from the opponents’ $5 registration fee went to the United Way.
But Frarey said one of his main goals in setting up the exhibition was to raise the profile of competitive chess in Ottawa .
Mai and Brown are part of the Canadian Youth Chess Team — a 27-player squad that has been taking on the world’s best young players at this year’s World Youth Chess Championship in Kallithea, Greece, since Oct. 22.
“There are three million chess players in the country, but we’re regarded as a sub-culture,” said Frarey.
“We have to bring awareness to chess . . . That’s probably more important than funding for these kids to go to Greece.”
Mai and Brown are joined on the Canadian team by fellow Ottawa players Glen Barber, 17, and Yuanling Yuan, 9.
They qualified for the world championships by finishing in the top three in their age group at the Canadian Youth Chess Championship this past summer.
But Patrick McDonald, youth co-ordinator for the Chess Federation of Canada, says the scale of the world championship makes it unlike any tournament held in this country. Nearly 1,000 players from 80 countries are competing in the event.
“(The championship) is massive,” says McDonald, who attended the tournament last year with his son.
“There’s tremendous excitement — it feels like you’re at the Olympics.”
McDonald says another dramatic difference will be the level of competition.
He says other countries, particularly those in Eastern Europe, take a keener interest in chess.
And unlike Canada, some foreign governments even provide funding for chess programs.
The result is a stronger national team for those countries.
Frarey agrees. He says the discrepancy in talent is particularly obvious in Barber’s under-18 age bracket, because Canadian children tend to abandon chess in favour of physical activities as they reach their teens.
As a result, players like Barber, a Grade 12 student at Lisgar Collegiate Institute, don’t have many opponents their own age to practice against.
“I hear the competition is really extreme in Greece, but you can’t let it bog you down,” says Barber, who began playing chess 10 months ago. “You can’t get all scared or humbled – you have to go and play to win.”
To prepare, Barber says he reads chess books two hours a night, works with a coach, and plays as many matches as possible. Yuanling says she works at her game for nearly seven hours each day. Brown says he studies for 30 minutes a day and works with his own coach once a week.
“Overall, I think the Canadian kids are well balanced,” says McDonald. “I feel strongly that it’s good to work at [chess], but you’ve got to live the rest of your life too.”
But that didn’t stop Mai and Brown from taking the day off school to participate in the simul-chess exhibition. Over the course of the afternoon the boys took on both seasoned chess players and others who were playing for the first time in years. Frarey says the boys lost to around 13 of the 69 players that signed up to play.
“I think on a one-to-one basis he would have clobbered me big time,” said Stephen Reid, one of the few winners. “[I think] they’ll represent themselves and Canada well.”