CHESS PRODIGY MASTERS GAME
Jacob Findley tied for third at Colorado Scholastic State Chess Championship
“Chess is where you experience your greatest emotions. So you’re able to feel calm in everything else, because there’s nothing like chess that can make you feel so despondent about things.”
“Who is this wizard child?” That was Loveland High School Chess Club sponsor Carrie Lambert’s thought while she watched high school chess phenom Jacob Findley play two simultaneous chess games with his back turned, his opponents saying their moves aloud as they played them and then moving Findley’s pieces for him when he announced his countermoves.
“Chess is where you experience your greatest emotions,” Findley said between musings about the Sicilian Defense and the peculiar history of the en passant move. “So you’re able to feel calm in everything else, because there’s nothing like chess that can make you feel so despondent about things.”
Findley, whose father, 8th
Judicial District Judge Joseph Findley, taught him to play at the age of 5, recently tied for third place at the Colorado Scholastic State Chess Championship, although scoring oddities related to tiebreakers meant he technically placed ninth.
Now a senior at LHS, Findley has been playing competitively since he was 9, and essentially founded the chess club at the school.
Lambert, a physics teacher who had no previous knowledge of chess, agreed to host the club at Findley’s urging, and he was the one who bought the boards and chess sets that now fuel the school’s foray into the game.
Despite its infamous complexity, chess has always been accessible to young people. Bobby Fischer, one of the most famous chess players of all time, achieved grandmaster status when he was 15 years old. The youngest person ever to reach the title of grandmaster is Abhimanyu Mishra, an American chess player who earned the title at the age of 12. Findley himself remembers a match he played against a 6-year-old with a deceptively low rating, who ended up defeating him. What is responsible for the number of child prodigies in this game?
“Well, the first part is that you start on a higher platform, right?” Findley said as he breezily played a winning move against a Reporter-herald journalist in Lambert’s classroom Monday. “You have 1,000 years worth of experience to learn from, you’re standing on the shoulders of giants already. Or at least you’re able to, you have access to that, especially with the internet. So these kids are getting into chess really young, and they’re able to learn quickly, because they have all these resources.”
The internet has prompted something of a Renaissance for chess among younger players, dragging the millennia-old game out of stuffy parlors and onto the web. Sites like Chess. com, where players can create accounts and play against other enthusiasts across the globe for rating, have proliferated, and Findley himself is the moderator of several online forums devoted to chess on the message
Jacob Findley
board website Reddit, one of a handful of experts supervising and advising millions of active members.
Television shows like
“The Queen’s Gambit,” a Netflix endeavor starring Anya Taylor-joy depicting a fictional chess prodigy as she climbs through the ranks of the world’s great players, reflect this growing interest.
Amid this resurgence is a profound social aspect,
Findley said. He has developed friends through chess. He refers to it as “a common language” that can spark conversations with opponents and amateurs alike, and said that the interpersonal element of the game is what prompted him to shell out for boards and pieces to start a chess club at LHS.
“You don’t just spend a significant amount of money trying to make other people learn about chess if you think it’s just a game, right?” he said. “Part of the reason I’m willing to do that is the social aspect.”