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Scholastics / Max Lu


MASTER MAX


Max Lu is the latest prodigy to break the record for youngest US Chess master.


By JAMAAL ABDUL-ALIM


Max Lu competing at the 2015 World Youth in Greece.


W


hen Max Lu first walked into an after- school chess class at Pear Tree Point School—an elite private school surrounded


by a short stonewall lined with neatly trimmed bushes— he hardly knew the first thing about chess. Like just about any child enamored with animals


and who should happen to encounter a chess set, Max took a special liking to the knight. “I like animals a lot,” the fourth-grader recalled of


his first experience with chess at the after-school program in Darien, Connecticut back in September 2011, when he was just five-years-old going on six. “I associated the knight with a horse.” But he didn’t know how the “horse”—or any of


the other pieces, for that matter—maneu vered, recalled Max’s former after-school chess program instructor, Alex Eydelman, president of the National Educational Chess Association, an organization that provides chess instruction in schools in Connecticut and New York State. “I taught him how the pieces are moving,” Eydelman


said in an accent that hearkens back to his native Russia. Max said he used to like the knight so much that


Eydelman had to prod him to move other pieces. After that, his game took off. “He picked up very quickly,” Eydelman said. “He


very quickly started beating everyone.” “Everyone,” of course, meant all the other kids in


the program, which Max’s father, David, said he quickly “outgrew.” But it wouldn’t be long—less than four years, in fact—before the term “everyone” would come to encompass Eydelman, a US Chess candidate master, too. “I was playing black and he just strangled me,” Eydelman recalled of the round two game he played against Max in a quad hosted this past August by the of Fairfield County Chess Club in Norwalk, Connecticut. “He played really solid chess,” Eydelman said. “I did some inaccuracies, and he capitalized on that.”


32 March 2016 | Chess Life


PHOTO CREDIT: REINT DYKEMA - CHESS BASE


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