Keivom / News
Robert Hess is a 15-year-old chess prodigy & plays football
BY FILIP BONDY
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER
Sunday, September 2nd 2007, 4:00 AM
Robert Hess (top r.) won U.S. Junior championship in chess at age 14. Now 15, he’s just one of many playing linebacker for Stuyvesant High School’s junior varsity team and head coach Chris Burrows.
As Robert Hess peers from his linebacker position at a developing play, the football field suddenly resembles a more familiar chessboard that he can navigate with precise genius.
The opposing quarterback is the king. The running back is the rook. There are attacking lines and patterns to be solved, perhaps a sacrificial block to execute in order to allow another tackler a clearer shot.
“You’re looking through the offensive line, the pawns, the line of defense,” he says.
This is one of those rare instances when Hess’ dual existence is totally in sync, the yin of the nerd in lockstep with the yang of the jock. For fleeting seconds, chess on the world-class level and football on the Stuyvesant High School junior varsity team complement and enhance each other. If only it were this easy all the time, balancing an extraordinary talent with an abiding passion.
Hess attempts the acrobatics, anyway. You have to understand that this Manhattan teen is no ordinary pawn-pusher. Beneath the helmet and shoulder pads resides a legitimate chess prodigy. Hess captured the U.S. Junior Championship in 2006 at age 14. Bobby Fischer, the ultimate yardstick for American chess brilliance, accomplished the same feat at a comparable age of 13.
Hess, a 15-year-old sophomore at Stuyvesant, was unable to defend his title this June, because it conflicted with Regents exams. Several top young New York chess players suffered the same lot, and none is happy about it. But Hess achieved international master status recently and owns a FIDE rating of 2483. Former world champion Garry Kasparov peaked at 2851, the highest-ever mark. These are celestial numbers in the universe of competitive chess, and Hess hopes soon to achieve grandmaster status, a level reached by only about 500 other current players.
This is all fine and good, except that the kid prefers football. He is 5-9, 160 pounds, and he will never achieve the rank of master at an NFL combine. Still, he will not be discouraged by such harsh, biological facts.
“I love everything about football,” he says. “The excitement, the contact, the rush. Chess is more just about winning. If you win, you feel good about yourself. There’s a lot of mind and energy put into it.”
Here is the full story.
Hess will be a gm.
His FIDE rating is 2434. But chess journalism (by non-players) is always inaccurate.
Another example that you don’t have to turn your kid into an anti-social robot for him to excel in chess.
Another example that normal intelligent people can play football.
Perhaps he has played too much football without a helmet on.
The board is set up backward!!!
It is true.. I wonder, how come and they always put the board in a wrong way. And how come an IM didn’t notice it?
I just, honestly cannot understand.
Hess was coming off of hours of practice in the wicked heat & humidity.
That seems to me like an Excalibur Grandmaster chess computer. Perhaps also, the board was set up in such a hurry for this picture that it was wrongly done.
Nerd alert! You guys can’t see the forest from the trees. This is a positive piece in a mainstream newspaper about a good kid navigating through both high school and the chess world. And all you guys see is that during an impromptu photo shoot, the black square isn’t in the right place.
It is funny, though, about the white square on the right…you think even non-players would get it right, by random accident, about 50% of the time…but everytime I see a chessboard in a movie or advertisement it’s almost always wrong!
Hess rally should have said something….I would be embarassed to be pictured with a board set up wrong