Warren Scholars attend GM Seminar

About 25 talented chess players from throughout the Chicago metropolitan area are brimming with new knowledge after participating an intensive day of study on Sunday, Feb. 28, with three of Chicago's grandmasters.

The instructors included grandmasters Nikola Mitkov, Dmitry Gurevich and Mesgen Amanov, the state's second, third, and fourth ranked players respectively, who put together a day of lectures tailored to the students' needs. Students ranged in age from 6 to 17 and in rating from about 1150 to over 2200, and were divided by rating into three groups. The modest tuition fee covered about 60 percent of the cost for the day, and the ICA Warren Junior Program contributed the remainder.

The invitation-only seminar was open to all ICA Warren Scholars, as well as other students based on instructor recommendation or recent strong tournament performances. ICA Warren Scholars are generally ranked within the top 35 or better for their age group in the country. The seminar took place at Niles North High School, which recently won the state high school chess championship.

The seminar fits in with the Warren program mission of developing the talents of the state's most promising chess players, not only to make them more competitive in chess but to expose them to an approach to rigorous study of a subject that will carry over to other disciplines later in life.

Many of the students who attended the seminar are academically gifted, and often don't feel properly challenged or stimulated at school. "I like that at chess you have a lot of time to think. You can keep thinking and thinking and thinking until you get the answer," said 13-year-old Warren Scholar Gavin McClanahan, a 7th grader from Glenview. "At school sometimes you have to rush--you might have a 20-minute timeframe to finish something, and it's not enough."

Gurevich, Mitkov and Amanov all prepared material designed to challenge the students at the levels they were at. Amanov presented a 14-point checklist he designed to help players evaluate their position on the board, including basic concepts of piece development, controlling the center, and king safety, as well as more advanced concepts of identifying weaknesses and weak squares and the ability to exchange or trade pieces.

Bill Peng, father of the newest and youngest Warren Scholar, 6-year old David Peng, said his son found Amanov's presentation very helpful. A few days after the seminar, he said, "My son and I have already used the checkpoints to analyze several games." At six, David has already attained a rating of more than 1300 and is ranked number 14 in the country for players under age 7.

Amanov, 23, a native of Turkmenistan, is Chicago's newest and youngest grandmaster. Earlier this month, he was happy to hear news that he has been issued a green card, giving him permanent U.S. residence status. This is good news for Chicago chess students as well, as Amanov may well be one of the few people in the U.S. whose college major was chess instruction. He is a graduate of the Turkmenistan Institute of Sport and Tourism, where chess is a serious college subject.

Mitkov, a Macedonian native who has lived in Chicago for several years and teaches for Chicago-based Chess Education Partners, covered the important topic of initiative--creating threats and forcing the other side to react--and how to gain it. Mitkov explained that this includes making active moves that reduce the number of choices your opponent has to react, playing with tempo and creating pressure on an opponent's position. Below is one of the games he covered in his lecture:

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The students said they found the presentation extremely worthwhile, and fellow instructor Gurevich was also impressed. "I wish I didn't have to teach so I could have attended his lecture," he said.

Gurevich, who was born and raised in Moscow but has lived in Chicago for more than two decades, gave presentations to the middle and top groups. For the middle group, he focused on the eternal struggle between the knight and the bishop, analyzed several examples of good knights versus bad knights, and reviewed some unusual tactical positions. He spent his time with the top group analyzing a complex endgame involving lots of calculations, and introduced some examples of miscalculations and blunders. "I tried to explain what types of mistakes GMs are making," he said. "Hopefully they got an impression that we are not that far ahead!"

Below is an example of a game he reviewed during his lecture.

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The seminar was timed so the K8 students could prepare for the upcoming Illinois K8 elementary championship, which will be held the weekend of March 13-14 in St. Charles, and some of the high school students and girls could prepare for the upcoming Illinois Denker high school qualifier and girls invitational tournaments, which will both begin on March 19.

A visitor to the seminar, Jerry Neugarten, who chairs the ICA's newly established youth committee, commented on how impressed he was to see students as young as grade-school age sitting in rapt attention for presentations lasting up to two hours. "I've been coaching kids for 15 years," Jerry said, "and I've never seen lessons of this quality. The coaches demanded deep and sustained concentration from the kids, and got it."

The ICA Warren Scholar program relies on the generous support of contributors. For more information about the program, visit www.il-chess.org.