Grumpy old git Steve Barrett bemoans the increasingly common experience of playing highly talented precocious youngsters at chess tournaments — and what to say to your friends when you lose to someone barely tall enough to see over the board.
Talented young chess players are not a new phenomenon, of course. There have been prodigies before. Think of Paul Morphy, already one of the best players in New Orleans by the age of nine; Sammy Reshevsky giving high-profile simultaneous displays aged six; and Capablanca beating his father in skittles games at the age of four.
What has changed is an explosion in youth and school chess that has multiplied the number of precocious young players on the scene. I didn’t even start playing chess competitively until I was 13 years old. These days, if you’re not on the path to becoming an IM by then, you’re as good as past it.
Chess is hard and stressful at the best of times. I was struck by Simon Williams’ and Lawrence Trent’s discussion on a recent episode of The Full English Breakfast podcast about how difficult it is to win any game these days, no matter who you are playing.
They were bemoaning their respective performances at the British Championship in Llandudno and noting how even lowly-rated players nowadays fight so hard and are capable of great chess. The days of cruising through the first few rounds of an open Swiss are long gone — you have to be on your mettle from the start.
But in addition to this it’s now quite possible to play a weekend tournament and not get to face off with an adult in any of the five or six rounds. There is little doubt chess is now a young person’s game, and this old timer has observed that good manners and attention to chess etiquette are not top of the new generation’s agenda.
Most regular tournament players have experienced it. You turn up for the round to be confronted by a small human who is barely big enough to lean over the board to shake hands, who frankly doesn’t know how to shake hands properly anyway. They display the brashness and confidence of youth and hundreds of hours playing online, bolstered by regular sessions with their IM or GM coaches. They rarely bother centring the pieces on the squares at the start of the game and they toss their moves out casually and with bravado.
I’m not sure if they are taught to play their games to the bitter end by their coaches, but their refusal to resign in totally lost positions is very irritating. I once played next to a former Russian GM now residing in Connecticut who was forced to checkmate his young opponent when two rooks and a knight up. He was not impressed and told the boy gruffly afterwards in no uncertain terms: “Why you not resign? I am Grand Master.”
The little mites also have an inappropriate tendency to offer multiple draws in the same game, when it is not their place to do so in the first place and is in fact against the laws of the game, as Nigel Short noted in his New in Chess column after drawing with an 11-year-old Indian player in the Abu Dhabi Masters this summer. They also like to stare you down during the game, presumably thinking you are going to be intimidated. And they never blow their noses, preferring instead to sniff constantly — and annoyingly.
Then there are their entourages of parents and siblings, who cluster in every available free space in the chess venues as they pass the interminable hours during and between games, causing you to trip over them when you head to the bathroom. And those parents so want their kids to do well. You can feel their vicarious ambition on behalf of their offspring as they survey their games and stock them up with drinks and snacks designed not to send their hyperactivity through the roof.
I’m being a grumpy old git of course. What is most annoying is that many of them are really good at the game I have spent decades trying unsuccessfully to master, despite being so young. They will outplay you if you give them the merest sniff of a chance, especially in sharp positions. Even the tried and trusted technique of taking them into endgames to neutralise their computer-like tactical abilities isn’t a sure-fire winner, because they never give up and are always looking for resources — another benefit of their coaching.
The worst part of all this, and what makes it particularly annoying, is trying to explain to your non-chess-playing friends how it is possible to lose at chess to a 9-year-old. They find it highly amusing of course.
I’ve tried numerous strategies to try and neutralise the fearlessness of youth over the chessboard, the most common of which is to head for endgames where your experience is likely to overcome their precocity. No ending should be too dry to aim for in this context.
Take this example from a recent weekend tournament I played in New York’s state capital of Albany, where I faced off against a 9-year-old in round 2.
Here’s another example, back up in Albany again a few weeks later for the longest-running tournament in U.S. chess history, against a 9-year-old this time.
Don’t assume they can’t play endings at all though. This example against an 11-year-old came from a tournament in Manhattan and rounded off a tough and frustrating weekend of chess grind for me.
But all of these examples are simply a preamble to the main point of this article, my latest ego-crushing defeat at the hands of one of the new generation of kids, from the first event up in Albany. I’d started the tournament pretty well, winning my first two games and going down in a tough encounter with GM Alexander Ivanov in the third round on Saturday evening in which I may have been better at one point.
As such, I was in reasonably good spirits when I rocked up on Sunday morning and looking forward to finishing the tournament strongly, only to be confronted with my nightmare scenario: a 9-year-old wunderkind named Liran Zhou. Zhou’s rating was an unassuming 1839 at the time, but he soon demonstrated he was much stronger than that by quickly and confidently outplaying me.
Zhou learned the game three years ago and recently went over the 2200 USCF rating barrier, becoming the youngest National Master in U.S. chess history. I must stress that, contrary to my curmudgeonly complaints above, he behaved impeccably at the board and was a pleasure to play against, apart from annoying me by continuing to find such good moves that is.
In August, Zhou won the World Cadets Under-10 Chess Championship in Brazil – essentially the World Youth Championship for younger kids. So maybe on reflection it wasn’t such a disaster to lose to him – and when he’s a Grandmaster and perhaps even one day U.S. Champion, at least I can say I played him.
As I told my friends once they’d picked themselves up from the floor after dissolving in laughter, that’s how to lose to a 9-year-old at chess.
Correction November 11: Frank Prestia is still 9 years old, not 10 as originally stated. His birthday is at the end of December.
Published in the November 2017 issue of CHESS and reproduced with kind permission.
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