Discovering A Chess Prodigy

The game of chess as beautiful as it is with all the lessons therein, is not as simple as it appears on the surface.

I have volunteered as a chess tutor in the past when I had more time and mobility but these days, I don't even get enough time to play.

During my volunteering days, I thought children in an orphanage/home of the needy the beautiful game.

My team took charge of 3 orphanage homes, we shared ourselves to teach them and get them ready for a chess competition.

The children had an average age of 9 years or thereabouts. The youngest child, Daniel was 5 years old, which was very impressive. Not just because of his interest in the game but because of his outstanding ability, easy understanding of the workings of the game and fine decision making.

He was not under my tutelage but my boss, the Chess doctor would always tell me about him and I would brag about my own students and how they would easily beat him. She would disagree and tell me to wait till the competition day to find out.

I got a glimpse of the young chap when we hosted an outreach and had the children come around for fun and chess was brought for any interested person to play as a team game consisting of two people.

The young boy was paired with another child while two of my classmates were paired together. The idea was that a teammate would make a move, then an opponent would make the second move, then the second teammate would play before the other opponent teammate would then play and the cycle begins again.

Within the first 10 moves, I already realised that the boy had great vision and decision making ability. My colleagues were not very good chess players but they were not playing for the first time yet their moves was full of errors. The game ended badly because my colleagues didn't want to continue at some stage when it was obvious that only a miracle would help them win and they wanted to "save face", so they abandoned the game 😂

Fast forward to the chess competition, the children were put in random groups to play till final, Daniel played well, winning his first two games against older children before loosing in the semi final. Funny enough one of the two he won was my own student, which made me a little bit dumbfounded but also spoke volumes about his level of skill. Consequently he got the bronze medal and also a special award for his age and effort.

After the competition, some other chess enthusiasts who were in the audience wished to play with Daniel, he won most of them, loosing only two games. This earned him some cash gifts to go home with which he so much appreciated.

There were some other gifted children I observed but Daniel's case stood out for me because of his age and ability combined. I know what it means because I have taught chess to grown ups before and I know what it took for some of them to begin to play well. Learning the moves alone is not even easy for some of them especially the movement of the knight and castling but Daniel could do all these effortlessly.

Inspired by the Hivelearners Prompt
All images are mine