3A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2016
Bellevue girl takes world chess title in Russia
Women have
struggled to
crack the elite
By ERIK LACITIS
Seattle Times
SEATTLE — So here is
how Naomi Bashkansky, 13,
explains her opening moves in
a chess game.
She is sitting in the dining
room of her family home in
Bellevue, Washington. Down
the hall is her bedroom, which
along one wall has a whole
bunch of chess tournament
trophies.
Along another wall is shelv-
ing containing toys from when
she was much, much younger.
Barbie dolls. Little horses.
That’s in the past.
“You try to get in a better
position,” Naomi says about
the opening moves, “so that
you keep crushing the oppo-
nent, and squeezing them.”
Crushing and squeezing
your opponent. Such descrip-
tions from an eighth-grader.
But that’s chess.
And that’s how Naomi won
first place in Girls Under 13
at the weeklong World School
Chess Championship that
ended this month in Sochi,
Russia.
And that’s how you com-
pete in a game in which there
are no women currently in the
Top 100 in the World Chess
Federation rankings. Only
a handful of women have
cracked that elite list.
These days, chess in the
U.S. doesn’t command any-
where near the coverage it had
when Bobby Fischer in 1972
mesmerized the world with his
brilliance and dramatic flair in
beating Boris Spassky for the
world title.
Still, the U.S. Chess Feder-
ation does have 85,000 mem-
bers and sponsors 10,000 tour-
naments a year. A girl like
Naomi represents the future of
chess here.
Sometimes Naomi gets too
aggressive.
A grandmaster’s advice
Her coach is Gregory Ser-
per, a grandmaster, the high-
U.S. Chess Federation
Naomi Bashkansky, a Bellevue, Washington, teenager,
competes internationally in chess.
est title attainable other than
world champion, and held for
life. At the heart of earning that
title is winning, and winning a
lot, against strong opponents.
There are currently 1,598 male
and 33 female grandmasters.
The explanations for this dis-
parity have created consider-
able controversy in the chess
world.
Serper meets with Naomi
weekly for two hours, and also
uses Skype to give her advice
when she’s at international
tournaments. In Sochi, Naomi
drew her first three of nine
games, and the coach had to
quiet down her game.
In nine games, Naomi
earned first place with four
draws and five wins.
Serper writes a column for
chess.com. Last year he wrote
about girls and chess:
“Now tell me, who is going
to succeed in the cutthroat
world of business and chess?
Wasn’t Bobby Fischer talking
about ‘the killer instinct’ you
need to have in order to thrive
in chess?
“So girls, you want to beat
the competition in chess (or
business)? Listen carefully, it is
very simple, just be as aggres-
sive as possible!”
But Skyping with Naomi at
the Sochi tournament, Serper
told her that there is aggressive
and there is aggressive.
“She’s very determined,”
he says. “I told her, ‘Young
lady, hold your horses. You’re
too aggressive. You cannot
attack from any position just
to attack. You need to prepare
your attack.”
figures that twice a year for
the past five years, the family
of four (although their older
son sometimes stays home)
has spent $4,000 to $8,000
each time to travel to not only
Sochi but to Brazil, Mex-
ico and Greece for Naomi’s
tournaments.
“What else can we do with
the money?” says the dad.
“We make it our vacation.
We go about town. We feel a
vacation without chess is not
interesting.”
The dad blogs all their chess
travels, obviously proud of
Naomi’s accomplishments.
Naomi’s mom, Ludmila
Bashkansky, a civil engineer
who stays at home, is the one
who finds local chess tourna-
ments for the daughter, and
drives her to them.
She’s also the one who
researches future opponents
and finds online games that
they’ve played so that Naomi
can prepare for them. That’s
how it is in the chess world.
“Everybody is preparing
against you,” says Ludmila.
Because it was held in
Sochi, players from Russia or
the former Soviet Union were
heavily represented at the tour-
nament. But chess has been a
passion in that region since the
tsarist days.
Then, for the Soviets, it was
a way to show off the country’s
intellectual talents. Passionate
chess players included Lenin
and Stalin.
In Armenia, President
Serzh Sargsyan is also head
of the nation’s chess federa-
tion. Chess is compulsory in
schools; grandmasters are sal-
aried and top players get the
same adulation as pop stars.
Serper is originally from
what is now Uzbekistan and he
lives in Bellevue.
Immigrant family
Private coaching
It’s not unusual for striving
young chess players to have a
private coach.
If you know of kids in AAU
basketball programs or select
club soccer, you have an idea
of the effort and expense in get-
ting them to an elite level.
Naomi’s dad, Guy Bash-
kansky, a software engineer,
The Bashkasnkys them-
selves migrated from Russia
to Israel (where Naomi and her
brother, Ethan, 18, were born)
and then to the United States.
A good number of kids play-
ing chess competitively in the
U.S. are from recent immigrant
families.
It is a family of very, very
smart people. At age 18, Ethan
already is a senior at the Uni-
versity of Washington, major-
ing in math. Naomi is in the
gifted program at Bellevue’s
Odle Middle School.
The parents say that they
themselves aren’t particularly
good chess players.
It was Ethan who first
began playing chess ate age
5, back when the family lived
in Israel. He saw older kids at
a chess club and thought they
were playing checkers, with
which he was familiar.
At home, the then-kinder-
gartner used a basic chess man-
ual to teach himself.
In first grade he joined the
chess club; “Pretty soon I was
beating everyone,” he says.
Then, when Naomi was 4
or 5, she began playing chess,
sometimes with her brother.
Ethan remembers the emo-
tions the game carried for some
kids.
“For me that was not the
case, but I’ve seen kids burst
into tears over losing a game,”
he says.
Naomi says that she has
shed tears after a loss.
The British journalist Dom-
inic Lawson, an avid chess
player, wrote in 2010 in Stand-
point Magazine:
“There is no game of
wits at which losing is more
unpleasant than chess. Any
game involving cards or dice
involves chance . Not so with
chess. Everything is visible .
“One reason why many
strong players give up the
game they love is that they
increasingly find that the agony
of losing so much outweighs
the ecstasy of winning that
they almost dread sitting down
at the board to play.”
Ethan dropped chess when
he entered college at a young
age.
It’s not uncommon for
young players to quit compet-
itive chess when college takes
up their time, says Serper.
Naomi says that also may
happen with her.
Disparity controversy
The chess world has many
titles, and there are also cate-
gories just for women. It’s an
acknowledgment of disparity
in how, using the same crite-
ria, women rank considerably
lower.
It is a topic of controversy.
In 2015, Nigel Short, an
English grandmaster, wrote in
the magazine New in Chess,
“Men and women’s brains are
hard-wired very differently, so
why should they function in the
same way?”
He concluded, “It would
be wonderful to see more girls
playing chess, and at a higher
level, but rather than fretting
about inequality, perhaps we
should just gracefully accept it
as a fact.”
That resulted in Short being
described as “sexist” and a
“Neanderthal.”
Maybe, says Naomi, the
points difference is because
women play less aggressively
than men.
Although with Serper’s
influence, that’s certainly not
the case with Naomi.
Her goal, she says, is to earn
a Woman Grandmaster title
(there are so few women in the
general grandmaster category
open to all that one was cre-
ated just for women) or Inter-
national Master (a lesser title
than grandmaster) by the end
of high school.
That’ll be a big leap from
being ranked No. 24 in the U.S.
for girls and boys age 13.
“It takes time. It’s all about
opportunity,” says Serper.
She has literally spent thou-
sands of hours on the game.
She says, “I just love play-
ing it. I mean, it is a game. It’s a
game that requires strategy and
calculations and precision. I’m
good at it. I can play near-per-
fectly in my better games.
What’s not to like?”
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