U.S.A.
April 20, 2015
THE ASIAN REPORTER n Page 7
Andover girl is youngest U.S. female chess master
By Cristela Guerra
The Boston Globe
NDOVER, Mass. (AP) — Carissa
Yip can play chess with her eyes
closed.
The Andover sixth-grader doesn’t need a
board, no stoic chessmen at the ready. In
her mind, she can lead a kingdom into a
war of wits and strategy, visualizing each
move. And several that will follow.
That helps explain how, in February, the
11-year-old became the youngest female in
the United States to earn the title of chess
master. When she beat Alexander Ivanov
last fall at the New England Open, Carissa
became the youngest female ever to defeat
a grandmaster.
“It’s a challenging game and I like that
about it,” she says. “I prefer to play with
someone who’s actually good. And I also
like the pretty pieces.”
When Carissa knows she’s winning, her
eyes narrow and a look of glee floods her
face. A sideways grin forms. Her
opponents don’t always see it coming, but
that face symbolizes the end is near. Her
focus is always two, four, six, 10 moves
ahead of her opponent.
Carissa, who attends Doherty Middle
School in Andover, has interests other
than chess. She counts eating sushi,
reading, and playing with “Big Pea,” her
grandmother’s cat in China, among the
things she likes to do.
And always there is chess. She has
competed everywhere from Slovenia to the
United Arab Emirates. Like the legendary
chess prodigy Bobby Fischer, Carissa
learned to play at age six. She’d wanted to
join the chess club in kindergarten, but she
didn’t know how to play. Her father, Percy
Yip, an IT architect, began with the basics
in first grade.
She progressed quickly. After claiming
the title of chess expert, she needed just
609 days to reach master status in March,
according to the Massachusetts Chess
Association.
At tournaments, her father doesn’t
watch. He doesn’t want her to be nervous.
During games that can last hours, she
looks meditative and far older than her
years. She prefers long games because
A
they allow her to calculate. The concentra-
tion level of this petite girl with a barrette
in her hair intimidates some of her
opponents. When asked if she takes special
enjoyment in beating adults, Carissa
replied that she likes beating anybody.
Still, sometimes reactions from the
grownups she defeats aren’t as mature as
they could be. She remembered one of her
first tournaments and a particularly
unhappy competitor who did not like
losing to a seven-year-old girl.
“He threw a temper tantrum,” Carissa
said. He shouted that he hated playing
against kids.
“You lost to a little girl,” her father
recalls thinking to himself. “Why are you
yelling at her? You should be ashamed.”
Paul Godin, an electrical engineer and
computer scientist from Bedford who
participates in several chess clubs, is
proud to say that occasionally his games
with Carissa come to a draw. Most of the
draws are in quick turns of blitz chess, a
fast game played with timers that usually
lasts five minutes or less.
What differentiates Carissa from other
players, he says, is her ability to improvise.
The first 10 moves in many games are
often memorized theory or known methods
of attack. But Carissa is quick to adapt and
can usually find a way to win.
Chess, he says, is an “exercise in
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abstract, logical, deductive reasoning.” It’s
thinking and creating worlds. It’s
imagination.
As good as Carissa is, she is not beyond
making a careless blunder. “Oops”
occasionally slips out in play. Her chess
rating is 2203. By comparison, the
highest-ranked chess player in the world is
Magnus Carlsen, 24, of Norway, with a
rating of 2863, according to the World
Chess Federation.
In Massachusetts, there are seven male
grandmasters and one female grand-
master. There are 10 male international
masters and one woman international
master. And there are 73 masters, of which
47 are active, according to Francisco
Guadalupe, director of events for United
States Chess Federation (USCF). It takes
winning hundreds of games and beating
far stronger competitors to achieve master
status.
That happened for Carissa on February
21 at the Boylston Chess Club Legends of
Chess tournament. She was exhausted.
She’d just completed the World Amateur
Team tournament the week before in New
Jersey. She returned home, and that Sat-
urday, after winning two games against an
expert and a master, respectively, she was
ready to bow out. But playing a third round
against Chris Williams, a master, meant
earning 40 points and achieving the
STRATEGIC MASTER. Carissa Yip waits for her
father, Percy Yip, to make a move during a chess
match at their home in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, in
this July 9, 2013 file photo. Only five years or so since
first picking up the game, Carissa has risen so far up
the rankings that she has reached the expert level at a
younger age than anyone since the chess federation
began electronic recordkeeping in 1991. (AP Photo/
The Sun of Lowell, Julia Malakie, File)
master title herself.
She’d never beaten Williams before.
Torn and tired, Carissa was unable to
focus and afraid of losing. Losing, she says,
makes her feel empty.
Her father told her to not worry about
her rating. He said to follow her heart. She
won. USCF made it official last month,
proclaiming Carissa a chess master and
record-breaker.
“She’s persistent,” says her mother,
Irene Yip, a software engineer. “If she
wants something, she keeps asking you,
especially if she doesn’t like the answer.
She’s stubborn.”
Her mother maintains balance. If her
daughter were to decide tomorrow that she
no longer wanted to play chess, neither
parent would object, she says.
Carissa has said she wants to be a world
champion chess player, a professional
golfer, and a policewoman. Her mind flits,
finding new interests, as sixth graders do.
If a chess game bores her, she gets up and
wanders around the table. Her father
scolds her for not sitting still.
At a tournament recently she watched a
man perform magic tricks and begged him
to teach her. She couldn’t bear not under-
standing.
March 6 was a relaxed night with the
Billerica Chess Club. Carissa sits across
from Godin and the clock starts. Blitz
chess. She waits. She strikes the timer, her
plastic wristwatch peeking from under her
sleeve. Godin puts his head on his hands
and counters. The pint-sized chess master
calls his move “cheesy.” At another point,
she mutters, “You saw that coming to you.”
Sometimes she sacrifices a piece to gain
an advantage. She knows the king can be a
weakness but actually quite formidable in
the end game. But her favorite piece is the
queen, “the only lady” on the chessboard.
“Chess takes a lot of practice,” she says.
“It teaches you patience.”
First robot into
Fukushima
reactor stalls, but
gets some data
Continued from page 16
the plant damaged by the
2011 earthquake and tsu-
nami.
TEPCO plans to send in
a different, amphibious
robot next year for further
investigation of the three
reactors that suffered melt-
downs.
Computer
simulation
and cosmic ray examina-
tions have shown that
almost all fuel rods in the
Unit 1 reactor have melted,
breached the core, and fell
to the bottom of the
containment chamber.
TALKING STORY IN
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