Girl just wants to have fun

Richmond Hill chess phenom Jackie Peng just wants to have fun
Published on Wednesday July 11, 2012

Jackie Peng likes to get her homework done early, so she can move on to the fun stuff. Like chess.

“I have a good sense of intuition. I can find moves just by looking at the board. And also I’m good at calculating because I do other stuff like math,” she says.

Math, as in, math class. At just 14 — and just four years after picking up her first pawn — the soon-to-be Grade 9 student is the second-youngest person to ever play on either of Canada’s national chess teams. (The youngest was 13-year-old Stefanie Chu in 1996.)

Jackie will represent the country as second board (playing the second best players in each country) on the women’s team at the 2012 World Chess Olympiad in Turkey, which starts Aug. 27 in Istanbul. According to Jackie, “It’s going to be fun.”

The Richmond Hill teen, who studies at the highly competitive University of Toronto Schools, does not come from a long line of chess players. Her parents don’t even play the game. And yet she is on her way to becoming Canada’s first woman grandmaster – the highest title in the game.

“She’s on a rampage,” said Hal Bond, Canada’s delegate at the World Chess Federation. “She’s one of our rising stars and it’s great to see.”

Her coaches — yes, there are coaches — believe Jackie can achieve the highest level. But like everything, it will take hard work.

“She’s a good promising young player. I think she’s talented,” says Youri Otchkous, who trains Jackie once a week while her 12-year-old sister Janet tags along.

Otchkous also coached Russian-born Mark Bluvshtein, who played in the Olympiad at 14 and became the youngest Canadian grandmaster at 16.

“Old players, they know their limits. They know what they can reach. Young, they have no limits. Everything is possible,” said Otchkous.

It’s an important notion in a country not known for its dedication to kings and queens (on the chess board that is) beyond a sometimes childhood fascination. Canada ranks somewhere in the 40s internationally, according to Bond.

“There’s a lot of countries with a much deeper chess tradition, where a lot of people play after the novelty wears off,” he said.

It all started for Jackie when she joined the chess club at her elementary school. Jackie — and her parents — soon discovered she was pretty good, winning both the Ontario and Canadian youth chess championships in 2008.

Last year, she took top honours in amateur and junior chess competitions in Canada, and in 2010 she won third place in the Pan-American girls under-12 championship in Brazil.

“We were surprised because she did not have any training,” said her mother, Xuekun Xing, a foreign-trained cardiologist who immigrated to Canada from China in 1994 and now monitors clinical trials. Jackie’s father, Henry Peng, is a scientist at the Department of National Defence.

“She just all of a sudden loved the game,” said Xing.

Since then, the student who also swims and plays piano has travelled the world to play chess in competitions as far away as Vietnam and Colombia.

These days Jackie’s training regime includes two to three hours of chess a day with computer programs, along with one coaching session a week. She recently started training twice a month online with a grandmaster coach in Montreal.

For now, she’s doing it all for the love of the game.

“Chess has to do a lot … with life,” said Jackie.

“You have to choose your move and the move that you make decides the game. So you can’t really take the moves back. There’s a lot of calculation and you have to think.”

Source: http://www.thestar.com