Check Mates

In Bungalow 16, toward the rear of Monroe High School, members of the school’s award-winning chess team took a break from their practice matches to do a little reading.

Not the John Updike story or Tennessee Williams play assigned to the other students in the classroom, but the latest newspaper account of the match between world chess champ Garry Kasparov and his wire-and-silicon opponent, Deep Blue.

In the same way baseball fans peruse the daily box scores after a ballgame, or investors compulsively reach for the stock tables, these students pore over every move taken by Kasparov and the IBM computer.

Then, their curiosity satisfied, the students put the newspapers into their knapsacks and it’s back to the collection of timers and chessboards to take a dry run through previous games, hoping to glean bits of strategy in this most cerebral of contests.

“It’s a mind game because it’s you against an opponent,” junior Santy Wong said Wednesday. “The challenge is grinding them down.”

In fact, grinding down opponents is something that Wong and his three teammates--Romeo dela Cruz Jr., Chad Yodvisitsak and Thinh Tran--have gotten quite good at.

The students recently won the Los Angeles Unified School District’s all-city chess championship, defeating Pacific Palisades High School.

Then, last month came the biggest accomplishment of all as the foursome captured second place in their division in the country’s largest national scholastic chess tournament in Knoxville, Tenn.

Billed as the chess “Super Nationals,” the three-day event included 4,000 young people from 45 states and was the first to combine national championships for elementary, junior high and high school divisions.

Enhancing Monroe High’s victory was senior dela Cruz, a Philippines native who captured the top individual honor for his division by beating out 840 other students and finishing a perfect 7-0 in tournament play. Wong captured third place in the division.

The tournament also proved fruitful for another Los Angeles-area student, freshman Harutyan “Harry” Akopyan of Arshag Dickranian High School in Hollywood.

The 16-year-old Armenian-born wunderkind, who has been playing chess since the age of 5, defeated a Massachusetts teenager to capture the division made up of the most skilled young chess players in the country. Monroe’s victories came in the second of three divisions representing students with mid-level chess and scholastic skills.

“The students worked very, very hard all year long and I’m delighted that it all came together for them at the Super Nationals,” said the team’s coach, English teacher Steve Hughes. “They are fierce competitors who are focused and positively addicted to chess.”

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It’s in the back of Hughes’ class that the team practices, even on days like Wednesday when the team members, all on the same year-round school track, are technically on vacation. Students said they weathered some early defeats against adults in local matches, which proved valuable against competitors their own age.

Still, Hughes, an accomplished player who is classified as a grandmaster, is trying to point out to his young proteges that there’s more to the game than wins, losses and perfection--Kasparov and Deep Blue notwithstanding.

“There’s been a debate over whether it’s an art, sport or a science,” Hughes said. “Many people have looked at it as a science.”

Wrong, he says.

“It has to be art, considering human creativity comes into play.”