Kid Kings

Bellevue chess champs are kid kings: They even play an astronaut
Originally published April 25, 2009 at 12:49 AM Page modified April 25, 2009 at 12:53 AM

By Katherine Long
Seattle Times Eastside reporter

It’s Wednesday afternoon at the Stevenson Elementary chess-club meeting in Bellevue, and 20 antsy students sharpen their pencils, wriggle in their seats and play around with their chess pieces as they set up matches between one another.

Then Coach Elliott Neff gives the signal to begin, and it’s as if somebody has suddenly switched off the sound in the room.

All talk ceases. The students hunch over their boards in silent concentration, brows furrowed, eyes moving back and forth over the pieces, calculating possibilities. For almost half an hour, there is hardly any sound but the clink of chess pieces and the scratch of pencils recording each move.

Stevenson’s club is no ordinary chess team: The kids are the reigning national champions of the elementary chess circuit — so good that they were selected last year to play a much-publicized, virtual game of chess with NASA astronaut Gregory Chamitoff, which began while he was in orbit on the international space station.

These kids have been checkmating their parents since kindergarten. They can play the first 15 moves of a chess match in their heads, no pieces on the board. To practice, they played Stevenson grad Michael Lee, a ninth-grader at Interlake High in Bellevue who also happens to be the highest-rated 15-year-old chess player in the country. (Lee is still in a class of his own, though — he played 25 simultaneous matches with the Stevenson students for practice, lost one, played to a draw in two and won the rest.)

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