An American Chess Prodigy

Playing for Keeps
Mental gymnastics: Lots of action, little money for three locals

The Bay Area is packed with brainiacs; there are the obvious ones – Steve Jobs, Jerry Yang, the Google guys. But what about the lesser-known, yet enormously talented ones?

Daniel Naroditsky ranks first in the world in chess for boys ages 12 and under. Chester Santos holds the USA Memory Championship title. And Leyan Lo won the most recent national Rubik’s Cube competition.

How did these people develop their obsessions? What does it take to dominate a game?

Chess prodigy

Daniel Naroditsky received an 800-page music encyclopedia when he turned 7. As he flipped through the book, he spotted an error: A composer’s birthday was one year off. None of the dozen adults in the room, including Daniel’s mother, a professional pianist, had heard of the composer. They checked an alternate source and confirmed the mistake.

A few years later, Daniel was traveling to a chess tournament four hours away. He was bored, opened his father’s computer and read through all of the countries and their capitals. He became very frustrated afterward when he couldn’t recall three of the countries.

Daniel’s phenomenal memory is just one of several driving forces behind his recent world victory in chess for boys ages 12 and under. Other factors include intelligence, discipline, talent, time and money.

I met Daniel recently at his father Vladimir’s office at the Vega Capital Group, a boutique investment firm in downtown San Francisco. I’d heard so much about his accomplishments that I forgot how young he’d look. When I greeted him and his brother Alan, 17, they didn’t smile and barely spoke.

“How’s your spring break?” I asked.

They haven’t had a vacation, Vladimir replied. Daniel, a sixth-grade student at Crystal Springs Upland School in Hillsborough, just returned from an adult chess tournament in Reno. He came to a draw with a 42-year-old grandmaster and tied two others for second place. Daniel was leaving for another tournament in Oklahoma in two days.

Daniel studies chess at least 24 hours a week. He plays 20-minute games, records every move of his tournaments and analyzes previous games for mistakes. He pores over the 1,000 chess books in his personal library, and sometimes Vladimir reads him chess books in Russian, their native language. They can spend two hours talking about one page.

“It’s like reading a graduate-level science textbook,” says Vladimir, who used to play chess competitively in his home country of Ukraine.

“We’ll talk about what the grandmaster thinks, his mistakes, and what Daniel thinks is the next move. He’ll often predict it.”

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