Chat with Champion Children's Chess Team Members - Brooklyn 318

Chess blog for latest chess news and chess trivia (c) Alexandra Kosteniuk, 2012

Hi everyone,

 

These chess kids are not nerds and really popular in school. They are regular kids who have given a new cool image to chess. We found this nice interview with one of the members of the Brooklyn 318 chess team. Nice read.

Isaac Barayev, the teenage grandson of émigrés from the former Soviet Union on both sides of his family, doesn’t remember exactly when his introduction to the game of pawns and rooks and kings began. But he recalls how it happened.

He was about 4 years old. His grandfathers, who live a few blocks from each other and from him in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens, taught him the basics of chess. “They put me on their knees and showed me how to set up the pieces.” Within a few years, Isaac was beating his grandfathers.

Winning chess games against older opponents has become familiar territory for him. Now 13, an eighth grader at Intermediate School 318 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Isaac was part of the team that won the U.S. Chess Federation’s national high school championship earlier this month in Minneapolis. Over the weekend that coincided with the final days of Passover, he and the public school’s seven other top-ranked players triumphed over older, more-experienced high school competitors from around the country.

You can read the full story here.

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