Moving on up
When the Wu family received a chess board as a gift three years ago, none of them knew how to play. Now their 9-year-old son is nationally ranked.
By RODNEY THRASH
Published December 17, 2004
TAMPA PALMS - His eyes never move off the 64 green and white squares.
In chess, smack talk and other gimmicks won't win you games; outwitting and outlasting your opponent will.
And Weiwei Wu, a Tampa Palms Elementary fourth-grader whose star is rising in the chess world, knows it. Of all the 9-year-olds in the country, Weiwei ranks 17th with the U.S. Chess Federation.
"You have to think, "What problems I can give my opponent?' " he said. "How can I improve (my position)?"
It's a Wednesday afternoon, two days before the chess federation's championship games in Orlando. The 66-member Tampa Palms Elementary Chess Wizards, of which Weiwei is a part, are having their final practice. Weiwei nibbles his fingernails. He fidgets with his hands, plotting his next moves and his opponent's missteps.
"Six months ago, he was nowhere to be found on any list," Coach Tania Kranich-Ritter said of Weiwei's rapid ascent. "He has what it takes. He does not blunder. He takes his time and he thinks.
"... He's very special," continued Kranich-Ritter, who has competed in more than 1,000 tournaments and was New York's women's chess champion in 1983. "No question about it."
Weiwei's fascination with chess was sort of a fluke. He took up drawing, but it didn't pan out.
"I just felt it was kind of boring," he said.
Weiwei needed another hobby to fill his time.
Three Christmases ago, his dad's boss bought the family a gift: a chess board from Bombay Co.
"I didn't even realize that when I gave it to them that no one knew how to play it," said Dr. Amy Borenstein, who hired Dr. Yougui Wu in 2001 to work as a biostatistician at the University of South Florida.
It wasn't the first time Weiwei had seen a chess board. When he lived in Maryland, a friend tried persuading him to take up the game.
"I didn't really bother to listen," Weiwei said.
This time was different. The board looked expensive. The game pieces were made of wood, not plastic.
Weiwei picked up the instruction manual and fell in love.
"I'm in control," he said. "My opponent can't control it."
Weiwei studies the game like he would for a school test. He reads books such as Irving Chernev's The Most Instructive Games of Chess Ever Played: 62 Masterpieces of Modern Chess Strategy, which features winning games and strategies from the biggest names in chess. He sometimes practices online.
He entered his first competition, the Museum of Science and Industry's Grand Prix, in 2003 and won. Since then, he has competed in 22 other tournaments, most recently MOSI's Chess to the Max tournament. He won that, too.
Adults fear him.
Borenstein sure does and she has been playing since she was 7 years old. She played against him about six months ago. Or at least she tried challenging him to a game.
"Ten minutes into it, I gave up," Borenstein said. "I was being slaughtered."
Embarrassed, Borenstein said she asked her husband to finish the game for her.
"I didn't want to be beaten by a 9-year-old," she said.
Borenstein thinks she knows where she went wrong.
"I play haphazardly," she said. "I'm not thinking (about what's) the best move five or six moves from now. Weiwei has that intelligence where he can think not what's going to happen right now, but down the road."
So agrees Kranich-Ritter, coach of the Tampa Palms Chess Wizards.
"I've met the best," she said. "It's no telling how far he will go.
"He could be a Nakamura," as in Hikaru Nakamura, the current and youngest player to win the U.S. Chess Championship since Bobby Fischer in 1958.
Weiwei has other interests besides chess, stuff such as basketball and computers. He even dabbles in a game of Scrabble every now and then. But nothing, he said, beats chess. It's not so much the winning that he enjoys, but the game.
"It's very wild," Weiwei said.
- Rodney Thrash can be reached at 813 269-5313 or rthrash@sptimes.com
(HENGYI) WEIWEI WUBorn: Feb. 18, 1995, in Beijing; moved to College Park, Md. in 1996
Lived in Tampa Palms since: 2001
Favorite movie: Searching for Bobby Fischer
Favorite food: chicken
Favorite book: Bruce Coville's Aliens Ate My Homework
Favorite subject in school: math
Role model: Dr. Yougui Wu, his dad