Chess Game Strategy
One of the leading chess game players in the United States, as identified by media sources and experts on the chess game field, is fourteen years old. Daniel Naroditsky is a student in the eighth grade whose reputation for being able to play a great chess game is such that he has already published a manual about his strategy and mindset as a player. He is renowned among players, beginning with those in his own family who taught him chess and played with him when he was a young child, for the virtues of subtlety and patience manifested by his playing, which are qualities well known as the ideal tools for winning a chess game but less recognized as the virtues to be found in a teenage boy. Daniel is said by those who have played against him and studied with him to present a model for the young chess game student to emulate in developing his or her abilities in the game and overall approach to besting opponents.
Daniel’s precocity as a player has drawn plentiful attention from the general and chess oriented media. He was first taught chess game rules by his father, Vladimir, a college math professor, when Daniel was six years old. After a steady chess game regimen of father-son matches that lasted for three years, Vladimir discovered that his son’s skills were so far in advance of his own that he was starting to feel distinctly uncomfortable in how easily he was being eaten by a nine-year old. At that point, Vladimir Naroditsky says today, he stopped playing with his son, at first simply to assuage his wounded pride, and then so the family, including mother Lena, a concert pianist, could focus on sending Daniel out into the wider world of chess game playing. By the age of eleven years old, Daniel had attained the point in his mastery of the game that he was officially considered a chess master. By the next year, his success on the chess game field had raised him to the level of a junior world champion. Though his achievements are clearly the result of some innate and already manifested gifts, in telling his story Daniel has emphasized that his remarkable chess game record is also due to the great amount of time he has given over to studying past chess masters and games and acquiring a firm literacy in the body of knowledge that has grown up around the game.
Building upon the achievements and experience he has already built up in playing chess, Daniel published a textbook on chess game strategy, “Mastering Positional Chess,” which seeks to impart the means through which he has steadily climbed the rungs of the chess world. The two strategies he has emphasized for use in playing a great chess game are those of subtlety and aggression. In the text of the book and in the lectures he has given to chess clubs, Daniel has pointed out that a chess player needs to know exactly what she or he hopes to accomplish.