Teenage chess king crowned
Maine State Chess Championship winner Matthew Fishbein is an eighth-grader in Cape Elizabeth.
By Glenn Jordan
Staff Writer

CAPE ELIZABETH – The King of Maine is a kid.

For the first time in the 54-year history of the Maine State Chess Championship, the championship plaque went home with someone who has yet to enter high school.

Matthew Fishbein, a 14-year-old eighth-grader at Cape Elizabeth Middle School, actually tied with two adults in this month’s annual two-day tournament in Waterville.

All three will share championship billing and have their names inscribed on the trophy, but tiebreaker rules fell in favor of Matthew, meaning he took home the first-place hardware.

“I kind of got lucky with it,” he said from behind a chess board in the daylight basement of his Cape Elizabeth home, “because I played both of them and they didn’t play each other.”

Matthew and Aaron Spencer each finished with a 4-1 record and Jarod Bryan was 3-0-2, giving them all the same number of points in the field of 29.

So perhaps fortune smiled upon Matthew, but the folks in Maine’s chess community aren’t at all surprised. They’ve seen him run the table in the four scholastic state titles — K-3, K-6, K-8 and K-12 — before he reached seventh grade.

“He’s quite an interesting kid,” said Dan DeLuca, who first taught Matthew the proper movement of chess pieces in a local recreation class in Cape Elizabeth designed for parents and young children.

DeLuca has since moved from Scarborough to Aurora, a small town north of Ellsworth, so he no longer teaches the class. But many of his former students got hooked on rooks. Brett Parker, a Cape Elizabeth junior, is the reigning high school state champion and will represent Maine at a national scholastic tournament in Washington state in August.

Matthew, who won the high school state title as a sixth- grader (only to learn the national tournament bars non-high school students), will represent Maine in a national junior high tournament at the same venue in Washington. A year ago in Orlando, he tied for fourth in the nation in the junior high tournament.

Full article here.

Chess Daily News from Susan Polgar
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