GM Hikaru Nakamura Makes Visit to Durham
Durham News, 7-21-07

Jean Bethea stood outside the classroom at Durham Academy nervously checking her camera. Every few minutes, she stuck her blond head into the classroom, clicking and leaning to get a photo of her son, 13-year-old Alan, playing chess with a champion.

"This is the creme de la creme," Bethea whispered, so she didn't distract the players. "Such a golden opportunity."

Chess Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura, 19, stood in the center of the room, playing a dozen simultaneous games. His 12 opponents were students who paid to spend four hours observing the champion. They all got beat -- badly -- in order to get better.

Simply put, "he's awesome," said 11-year-old Nishanth Shah of Apex, one of the top elementary school-aged players in the state.

Nakamura, of White Plains, N.Y., is currently the youngest American Grandmaster, a title from the World Chess Federation based on his skill and rankings in certain tournaments. Since age 10, Nakamura has traveled for the game and broken records along the way, becoming one of the strongest players in the world.

Last week, he went to Durham Academy on the invitation of Chess Coach Craig Jones. Jones said he hoped the visit would boost local players' skills and generate more interest in the game.

Nakamura floated from board to board. Sometimes, he rubbed his chin or slung a thumb in the pocket of his Dockers. With each turn, he swept a hand over the board, moved a piece and tapped the timer, all in one motion.

Alan, Nishanth and the other competitors recorded each move so later, they could review their games with Nakamura.

Though more than a dozen people occupied the small room, only clicks of the chess timers and heavy breaths, born of concentration and caution, were audible.

Before the competition began, Jones had made a deferential offer to help the dozen boys strategize against Nakamura.

"You're playing a machine," Jones warned. "I don't know how much I'm going to help anyway."

"Resistance is futile," 8th-grader Matthew Novak responded.

It probably was. Jones had set up two seminars at Durham Academy. At the first one, Nakamura played nine simultaneous games while blindfolded, Jones said. He imagined the boards and dictated moves, he said.

Despite the inevitable kills Nakamura would make, the opportunity for feedback from the respected chess commander was an opportunity to behold. When Bethea learned Nakamura would be in Durham, she tried to prepare her son Alan.

"I told him, 'Put some questions together before you go'," she said.

But based on the quiet in the room, one wondered whether any student would summon the nerve to say much of anything.

Nakamura said he wasn't always so good. He started playing chess at age 7 -- later than many prodigies -- and repeated defeats made it an inauspicious start.

"It was because I was bad at the beginning that I became so much better," Nakamura said.

Nishanth, the boy from Apex, wiggled in his seat and strategized with Jones, the coach. He had been to camps before where "there were, like, a million grandmasters." (Really, there are only 60 in the U.S.)

So he wasn't really nervous, he said, just before he took one of Nakamura's ivory-colored bishops and it bounced from the table to the floor. The boy's hand jumped up and covered an embarrassed smirk.

No, not nervous at all.