Boy making chess-playing history
South Africa
Saturday 4 January 2014 – 8:29am
He’s only the second South African player to win the majority of his matches at a World Youth Championship.
Joshua Dykema recently achieved this feat in the United Arab Emirates.
He’s got all the right moves and before you can even say “checkmate”, Joshua will have taken your king from right under your nose.
“When I was five years old, I used to sit alongside my dad’s bed and watch him play, and I started to like it, so he taught me,” said Joshua.
In every nerve-wrecking match he had to concentrate for up to five hours at a time, particularly to beat the stiff competition from opponents from America and China.
Sitting barefoot at the table especially got a lot of attention from the other kids.
“I prefer to walk barefoot, I don’t like shoes at all. As soon as I put them on, I take them off again.”
This year South Africa will host the World Youth Championships in Durban, in September.
And Joshua is hoping that he will do even better on home soil.
Source: http://www.enca.com
Impressive indeed.