Making all the right moves

At just 6, he’s already making all the right moves in chess
By Special to The Oregonian
May 20, 2010, 4:53AM

The chess champion sits on a straight-back chair, studying the tournament board marked with letters on one edge and numbers on the other.

He’s been playing for only a couple of years, but Praveer Sharan recently won both state and national championships in U.S. Chess Federation divisions.

Working with his coach, Romanian-born Radu Roua, he goes over moves he made in the recent national tournament in Atlanta. After a half-hour of concentrating on the chess pieces arranged on a sturdy coffee table, the champion changes position to sit on his knees. His feet, after all, don’t reach the floor.

Praveer Sharan is a 6-year-old kindergarten student at Lake Oswego’s Oak Creek Elementary School. He recently won both state and national titles for kindergarten and first-grade students in competitions put on by Scholastic Chess, a quickly growing section of the chess federation.

“He’s a great kid, and certainly one of the top primary school players in the nation,” said Dan Dalthorp, Oregon Scholastic Chess Federation president. In recent years, two Oregon players have captured junior high championships and two won high school honors. Praveer is believed to be the first elementary school champion from the state, Dalthorp said.

In his precise handwriting, Praveer had recorded moves in the Atlanta games on a special tournament tablet. With the written record, his coach reproduces the plays on the chess board. Roua sometimes exclaims, “Aaaah, fascinating.” Sometimes he says, “Praveer, why did you do that?”

The coach shows the champion how one move could have opened him to trouble — if his opponent had detected it — or how a slightly different strategy would have moved him faster to the goal of declaring, “Checkmate.”

Praveer has been playing chess since he was about 4, but Roua remembers him as a toddler, watching the coach working with Praveer’s older brother, Pranav, 12, who also plays in championship tournaments.

Something about the game seemed to fascinate Praveer from that beginning, said his mother, Gayathri Rao, an engineer at Intel.

Here is the full article.