Yikes! My opponent is 11!
Hi!
It used to be, adults hated playing kids in the seventies and eighties, but they only had to do it once a tournament or once every two tournaments. And now it's every round, and those kids are good.
- Ben Finegold, Perpetual Chess Podcast episode 280 (as cited in Ben Johnson, Perpetual Chess Improvement, Chapter 17: "'Old man chess': playing against children")
The quote by Ben Finegold above indicates that the world of chess is getting younger. That's a very good sign, because that means that chess will have a future. Only this week the world of chess saw a new development in the rejuvenation process with the world record of Youngest IM in history being broken by almost half a year. All congratulations and compliments to Roman Shogdziev for achieving a monumental feat that many of us can only dream of.
As can be seen from the decreasing age by which players obtain titles, the young have been taking the world of chess by storm, and they've been doing so for decades. This poses very specific challenges to chess-players who are no longer ten years old. They have to face off against younger players increasingly more frequently, and often find themselves ill-equipped to pose a serious challenge to this plague of kids.
In this blog I'll shed some light on this phenomenon: how the landscape of chess has changed over the last several decades, the strengths and weaknesses of these little human beings, and how those of us who are no longer 11 years old can arm themselves against the legions of young foes that are and will be taking place across the table.
1. The rise of the new Angstgegner
2. The child prodigy
3. The age of modern technology
4. The tournament hall
5. The fear of making mistakes
6. The opening
7. Strategy
8. Calculation
9. The endgame
10. Time-management
11. Overconfidence
12. Conclusion
There's a lot of ground that I want to cover, so without further ado, let's get going.
1. The rise of the new Angstgegner
It hasn't been that long since the stereotypical chess-player was an old man with a handicapped social life who spends aeons of time in a smoky environment to approach the question of the game of chess in a quasi-scientific way. There were hardly women who played chess, and those who did weren't considered equals, as evidenced by the mockery of the "Menchik Club" (whenever a Master-level player lost to the first Women's World Champion Vera Menchik, he was said to be a member of this club).
It's not exactly a charming or inviting aura, but that's what it was: a long tradition of people with pompous prefixes like Prof.Dr.Ir. Schnurrbart von Rauchwolke. No offence to those who do subscribe to that image, but it's quite healthy that the public image of the typical chess-player has undergone significant changes over time.
The emergence of the Soviet Chess School in the Post-WWII Soviet Union coupled with the long list of world champions it produced over the decades gave rise to a new stereotype in non-Soviet territory: Soviet descent = GM in spe. Remnants of this stereotype Angstgegner (a German word that literally translates to "Opponent of Fear") can still be seen in the chess landscape of today: in the video description of this BotezLive video, Techniques of Positional Play by Anatoli Terekhin and Valeri Bronznik is being propagated as "the book on strategy every Russian kid has studied" (I had to strip it off its caps because reading caps-only text gives me an acute form of tinnitus).
Partly thanks to successful transitions of chess onto the screen, the vicious circle of gender inequality in chess is undergoing changes as well. Canadian streamer WFM Alexandra Botez has paved the way for many female chess-players and aspiring beginners to send their own efforts and journeys into the ether, whether they just started out playing chess (like Julia Schulman, Phoebe Witte, and Kiwhiskey, to name a few) or were already quite accomplished players on their own (such as WIM Anna-Maja Kazarian, WIM Svitlana Demchenko, and WFM Anna Cramling).
Another massive event that helped in making the world of chess aware of the fact that women are human beings is the 2020 Netflix screen adaptation of the 1983 novel The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis. As a rarity, Beth Harmon has to fight her way through a bulwark of men and machismo to the top of the world. She actively fights the stereotype: upon being given a doll for her efforts in a simultaneous play with Mr. Shaibel and Mr. Ganz, she promptly disposes of the doll in the waste-bin, and by so doing sends a very powerful message to the audience:
Don't treat me like a girl. Treat me like an equal.
These days, the only people who say that women can't play chess are benighted idiots.
The Queen's Gambit has arguably been the best advertisement that chess ever had. The world realised that chess isn't just for Prof.Dr.Ir. Schnurrbart von Rauchwolke. It's also for "normal" people (had to put that in parentheses: as chess-players we know very well how quirky we really are).
The beauty of chess is it can be whatever you want it to be. It transcends language, age, race, religion, politics, gender and socioeconomic background. Whatever your circumstances, anyone can enjoy a good fight to the death over the chess board.
- Simon Williams
There is one less obvious but distinct similarity between The Queen's Gambit and the YouTube video on the BotezLive channel: they treat "the child" with great reverence. They're not alone in this: a lot of attention is given to those who break youth records left and right. Nodirbek Abdusattorov becomes the youngest ever player winning the World Rapid in 2022. The popularity of Faustino Oro as the then-youngest-ever IM exceeds that of many contemporary GMs who are decades older. And what to think of the youngest Classical World Champion, Gukesh Dommaraju?
Staying with Gukesh for another second: he isn't the only young Indian chess-player who has made it to stardom over the last couple of years. Chess has become very popular in India in recent times. Two key influences on this are Viswanathan Anand's world championship in 2007 and the coaching successes of Ramachandran Ramesh. They are partly responsible for the success of a long list of successful young Indian talents that includes Gukesh and Praggnanandhaa.
The surge of popularity that chess has enjoyed is not unique to India: successful young chess-players are popping up like mushrooms all around the globe. Within the top 120 players of the world on the May 2025 rating list, 32 have a birth year that starts with a 2, and they are from 14 different countries (although it's only fair to mention that with 7 players, India is well represented in this small demographic).
In general it's fair to conclude that with the decay of the old stereotype, the world of chess came eye to eye with a new phenomenon, a new stereotypical Angstgegner:
The biggest challenge is getting over the psychological intimidation of the presence of kids at chess tournaments. And as funny as that sounds, I think that that can be a real struggle for a lot of adults. We can't help but notice that younger scholastic players tend to improve the fastest. They have so much energy, they have young brains and they're fresh.
- Megan Chen, Perpetual Chess Podcast episode 134 (as cited in Ben Johnson, Perpetual Chess Improvement, Chapter 17: "'Old man chess': playing against children")
Ask any random chess-player you know how they would characterise a youth player, and you'll very likely hear something very similar to Megan Chen's description. They calculate quickly, are tactically sharp, love to attack, and bide their time like hyenas to punish your slightest mistakes. They play the most cutting-edge opening lines and spend hours upon hours going over their opening drills to cement these lines. They gained 200 rating points since Christmas, scored their first GM scalp yesterday, and their rating growth doesn't seem to show the slightest inkling of stagnation.
Many chess-players genuinely experience anxiety when they have to play against much younger opponents. Don't think that that's just an old people's problem: many 16-year-olds experience the same issue when they have to face someone who's 12. Brain sports and e-sports are quite unique in this. At least I've yet to hear from a heavyweight boxing champion being afraid of a ten-year-old challenger. I'm quite sure he'd be more concerned about what the world will think of him if he batters the tyke unconscious.
What, then, makes young chess-players such feared opponents? Is it just ephebiphobia? Is it an existential battle with the ephemeral? Or is there a good basis for this fear?
In order to answer these questions, we first need to familiarise ourselves with the one single aspect that has drastically redefined the landscape of chess.
3. The age of modern technology
One whose spirit and mental strength have been strengthened by sparring with a never-say-die attitude should find no challenge too great to handle. One who has undergone long years of physical pain and mental agony to learn one punch, one kick, should be able to face any task, no matter how difficult, and carry it through to the end. A person like this can truly be said to have learned karate.
- Gichin Funakoshi, founder of Shotokan karate
There is no magic formula for success. Steinitz already acknowledged this when he disposed of the romantic myth that with strong enough play every position could be won in the attack: correct play leads one equal position into a new equal position. Although never categorically proven, the correct result of the game without mistakes is a draw. A win is never guaranteed. All we can do is to do our best, find as many good moves as we're able to do, and hope for a fair shot.
The goal of our work on our chess, is to better enable us to find these good moves on a consistent basis. It pays to note that the outcome of a game of chess is determined only by the quality of the moves played, not by the way in which these moves are picked. Guessing may produce results at times, but there are too many ways to go wrong in order to make it a consistent and reliable method. An ostrich egg can beat the world champion by guessing the correct move 200 times in a row. That doesn't make the ostrich egg a genius, nor does it make its method reliable.
Training and preparation are the areas of chess that are influenced the most by modern technology. Several tools have been developed that can greatly accelerate the process of gaining and processing chess-skills. This includes easier ways to store chess data, easier access to more available content (and a lot of it for free), and greater tools that can analyse your games much more precisely.
On average, older people tend to be more conservative and rigid in the methods and tools that they use. Chess isn't unique in this: the valves on brass instruments weren't immediately accepted as ways to enhance the trumpet and the French Horn. The old methods of approaching the game of chess have worked for the last two centuries. But the proof is in the pudding: younger players tend to be more versatile and adaptive to the current state of technology, and they've proven the effectiveness of the current methods by their hyperaccelerated learning curve. It's only a matter of time before the first 11-year-old will become a GM. That would've been unthinkable in 1925.
Duolingo started as a language app, but has expanded over the years to now include music and mathematics. The basic philosophy of Duolingo is that you can learn a language by cramming the vocabulary: you practice the same list of words over and over again until you're able to recite them like a machine.
Chessable works on the same basis, and it greatly falls in line with what Robert Greene discusses in Mastery:
The natural model for learning, largely based on the power of mirror neurons, came from watching and imitating others, then repeating the action over and over. Our brains are highly suited for this form of learning.
In an activity such as riding a bicycle, we all know that it is easier to watch someone and follow their lead than to listen to or read instructions. The more we do it, the easier it becomes. Even with skills that are primarily mental, such as computer programming or speaking a foreign language, it remains the case that we learn best through practice and repetition—the natural learning process. We learn a foreign language by actually speaking it as much as possible, not by reading books and absorbing theories. The more we speak and practice, the more fluent we become.
- Robert Greene, Mastery, Chapter 2: "Submit to Reality: The Ideal Apprenticeship"
This method of actively and repetitively engaging with the same material is also advocated in Pump Up Your Rating and The Woodpecker Method by Axel Smith and Hans Tikkanen. The power lies in repetition, and technology can enhance your performance to a very great extent.
[I]f used intelligently, [engines] can help a player improve in almost all aspects of the game.
- Jesús de la Villa García, 50 Mistakes You Should Know, Introduction
In spite of all the excellent results that people might attribute to their training efforts, repetition of the same material alone is not enough. As the above quote from Robert Greene illustrates, you can't learn a language only by practicing the same vocabulary. Likewise, you don't become a GM if you only stay within the comfort of your home. You have to put your knowledge to practice in the real world. As the famous saying goes: application of knowledge is power, and there is only one place where you can truly receive your "third education" and put your skills to the ultimate test:
Playing over the board is the best form of practice, by far.
- Andrew Tang, Perpetual Chess Podcast episode 244 (as cited in Perpetual Chess Improvement, Chapter 1: "You've got to play! Tournament games and their substitutes")
In terms of chess, nothing compares to the real world like the tournament hall. The reason why it's almost always recommended that you play OTB tournaments is because this will give you real-life experience, i.e.: the chess-version of the third education as meant by the Montesquieu quote above. The real-life experience of the seasoned player tends to outweigh much of the youngster's bravado, and is one of the greatest qualities that the youngest players lack.
Being able to play OTB games isn't a skill that you can learn from reading a blog online. It's something that you have to learn through experience. The same goes for playing against youth players. However, the young quickly catch up and learn what the OTB tournament environment feels like. There are many skills that you can't learn from reading a blog, watching a GothamChess video, or just doing your drills. Life doesn't work that way. You have to get out in the real world and put in the work.
It is my experience that new players tend to be quite naive when playing their first OTB tournaments. They aren't as aware of the differences between their training environments and the tournament hall, and in some cases seeing the pieces in 3D adds a dimension that they really need some time to get acquainted to. Youth players are quicker to adapt to this environment because they're not as much trapped in their built-up routines. That has a positive side-effect in that children may be less likely to fear making mistakes.
5. The fear of making mistakes
[Kids] are fine with being wrong. For them, that is how they learn.
- James Altucher, "How to Beat Your Kids at Chess," in New In Chess Magazine 2024#3
In the article mentioned above, Altucher points out that children progress faster than adults when learning a new language. One of the possible reasons that this is the case, Altucher coins, is because they're less afraid to make mistakes, and they learn quickly from the feedback they receive.
I think that there's a point in this, at least to some extent. Toddlers learning a language haven't yet developed a sensitivity for the erroneous sentiment that being wrong = failure, as many are made to believe along the way. They take in every bit of information that's relevant to their apprenticeship, they try out what they learn, and they forge the sword of their skills in the flames of the feedback.
The degree to which this is a valid point is the degree to which there are no ramifications for getting things wrong. If a young chess-player makes mistakes in the safe environment of the training session, they can repeat the drill until they get it right. Things tend to change when something is on the line and they have to put their skills to the test in an environment that judges them on their performance.
Once you enter the arena, you'll quickly discover that chess is relentless. You can no longer get away with your mistakes and you have to take accountability. That's easier said than done, but much harder for children. But the sooner you wrap your head around this, the better. Ultimately, setbacks are the precursor to growth, and dealing with losing is a valuable life-skill that you have to learn at some point.
I usually root for young players to do well, but not at my own expense. In tournament practice I refuse to play subnormally in order to protect a child's emotions. To my recollection I've never made any adult cry or ragequit, but I've sent several kids packing with tears in their eyes. I always feel a sting of compassion when this happens, and although I can't always help them cope with the pain I've just inflicted, I can at least make the effort to tell them (or their parents or coach) how well they did, and wish them the best of luck in their future endeavours.
What I think is important to note is that if you allow yourself the luxury to make mistakes, you're much more likely to grow because of them. It's the natural way to learn for children, but it can prove effective for adult improvers as well.
The importance of opening theory is grossly overestimated.
- Herman Grooten, Chess Strategy for Club Players, Chapter 1: "Steinitz's Elements"
Not long ago, an FM told me this snippet: "I once played against a kid in one of my pet lines, and I played my first 15 moves immediately. But that kid played 16 moves immediately. And you can guess the result of the game: I was cast aside. That's what happens in this day and age: these kids go on Chessable, they prep, prep, prep, and you lose."
The greatest merit of platforms like Chessable and Duolingo is their method. Young players can get a lot of practice reps in with an app that rewards them with points for doing it correctly. If this means one thing, it's that the youth player is rewarded for the hours they put into studying their opening lines, which motivates them to work harder. It's nonsensical to deny this reality:
[W]e should respect that they are, in fact, working hard on their games!
- Ben Johnson, Perpetual Chess Improvement, Chapter 17
These youngsters are often imagined to play the cutting-edge of contemporary opening theory: 1.e4 and all the aggressive lines with white, and the Najdorf, Dragon, Sveshnikov, Taimanov, King's Indian and Reversed Sicilians with black. This isn't ubiquitously true, however: for example, Romanian rising chess star Vladimir Sofronie has a great track record playing the London System:
To digress a little bit about the London: there are many hate-groups devoted to the London System, which in itself should be enough reason to consider adopting it into your repertoire. Played correctly, white gets a decent position that's rich in plans and possibilities. If you love to play setup-based chess openings (a great term, which I'm happily borrowing from this blog) and tempt your opponents to tilt and throw the point at you, then the London can be a great weapon in your arsenal.
In approximately 50 London System tournament games, I have produced exactly zero unwanted draws.
- James Schuyler, Your Opponent is Overrated, Chapter 1: "The Opening"
If you suspect that you're dealing with a theory monster, it can serve you well to have a few surprise lines up your sleeve that go against their proclivities. As an example, I've employed the following Anti-Sicilian on several occasions:
Although 2.Be2 isn't as theoretically cutting-edge as the Open Sicilian, it's a decent move that knows no refutation. I won't delve into the intricacies of this opening line here, but the bottom line is that my opponent has to show his non-book chess-skills right off the bat. A 12-year-old that I played this against started thinking for three minutes here, which is more than many youth-players tend to do for the first 15 moves.
Another line that I've enjoyed some success with against youth players is the Fort-Knox variation of the French:
One of the allures of this system is that it's not that well known (yet). Uninformed players on the white side tend to overestimate their position and will try to look for ways to break through the position. These options aren't always readily available, which might cause them to do one of two things:
- Spend a lot of clock time on calculating in an attempt to find what isn't there, or
- Make hasty, bold, rash decisions that backfire.
Some people get stuck with suboptimal lines for far too long and have much more to catch up on. Learning is easier than unlearning. If you're training young players, always encourage them to play good openings and preferably the main lines by default. They learn the good habit of playing good stuff.
One of the advantages that young players have is that they haven't learned as many bad habits as older people tend to have, and so they don't have as many bad habits to unlearn.
[M]y chess development would have proceeded more harmoniously, and moreover more painlessly, if I had learned the game not in childhood but in adolescence.
- Aron Nimzowitsch (as quoted in Raymond Keene, Aron Nimzowitsch: A Reappraisal, Chapter 2: "'How I became a Grandmaster'"
With the above quote, Nimzowitsch indicates that his early development was unbalanced. He excelled in combinative play, but lacked in positional understanding. Nimzowitsch thus subscribed to the stereotype that young players are strong in the concrete aspects of chess but not as much in the more abstract elements.
This very same stereotype permeates throughout many different texts. Johnson proposes the following lesson that he got from his time as a poker player:
All stereotypes are true.
- Ben Johnson's friend
Just like every other truism, this is an overexaggeration. The point is that in the long run it's more beneficial to presume that the stereotype is true and to act on it accordingly.
In Mental Toughness in Chess, Werner Schweitzer suggests that the older player use this prejudice to their advantage by employing openings that tend to lead to quieter positions with a less forcing nature. I fully agree with this strategy, as the section on Openings should make clear. In the following two examples I was able to put this to practice successfully.
The first position started from an extremely dry symmetrical position:
Johnson was bang on the money with the characterisation that my opponent in the above game was "tactical and at least a bit impetuous." It even cost him the game.
The same goes for my opponent in the excerpt below. This is my game against the 12-year-old in which I answered the Sicilian with 2.Be2. We join in after black's move 10...f7-f5:
By trying desperately to find activity, my young opponent committed a series of strategic mistakes and lost material because of this. However, this youngster beat a GM in the very same tournament. He's not an idiot. He's a great player that definitely deserves respect for his skills.
The two youth players in this section fully subscribed to the stereotype and went to some lengths to complicate the position. That went at the expense of the integrity of their position, which I was able to take advantage of.
Chess is 99 percent calculation.
- Andrew Soltis
Kasparov's famous loss to Deep Blue in 1997, as described by @ALondoninVienna in this blog, marked one of the most important landmarks in the history of our thinking about chess. Before it was always presumed that the insight of the grandmaster, backed by his experience and amassed expertise, would prevail over the computer's calculation. This debate has since been put to rest: calculation is the most important chess-skill.
A strength commonly attributed to youth players is their ability to calculate better. They have greatly developed tactical skill-sets and will try to showcase these skills as often as they can. They play those sharp opening lines for good reason. If you add the much stronger and easily accessible present-day chess software to the equation, you can imagine that the youngster equipped with these tools is armed to the teeth.
But do they necessarily always calculate better?
The game lasted for nine more moves after this, and my opponent was so kind as to allow me the checkmate.
By a combination of bad calculation and insufficient strategic understanding, my opponent turned a winning position into a losing one with one misguided move.
Citing a study that he didn't specify, Altucher challenges the view that kids calculate better:
It turns out that adults actually calculate better in terms of coming up with a better solution to a position. (...) Adults calculate slower because they look at many more candidate moves. So if an adult and a child are at about the same level, the child tends to move faster.
- James Altucher, "How to Beat Your Kids at Chess"
If children don't calculate better than adults and make their decisions quicker, you can use this against them. In the 2.Be2 Sicilian game that I mentioned above, the following position emerged after 28 moves:
Although the position was already losing for black before 29.e5, my opponent realised this only after I had played 34.g3. He had already entered the quagmire before realising there was no way out. That means that this excerpt does serve as a good example of bad calculation.
The following game also serves as an example of a young opponent missing the critical variation.
To improve at chess you should in the first instance study the endgame.
- José Raúl Capablanca
The endgame is a very difficult phase of the game in general. Many games don't reach the endgame because they're decided by a tactical oversight earlier on. Related to this, studying the endgame isn't as immediately rewarding as studying the opening because you're never sure that you'll reach the Lucena position. Many players find endgames boring and don't have as much patience to study the endgame properly.
These factors make the endgame one of the most ubiquitously underdeveloped aspects of the game. That's not unique to youth players, but it's particularly strong in them. This alone makes the endgame the perfect stage of the game in which to aim to excel: you'll be able to pick up a lot of points and save halves by taking the game into Act III.
In one of my blogs I pondered the question whether there are more grains of sand on the beach or stars in the universe, but I think that endgame mistakes takes the crown. Mark Dvoretsky has included endgame tragicomedies in many places in Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual and even wrote an entire addendum to his Manual in the form of Tragicomedy in the Endgame. I have my lovely share of endgame howlers as well, but I decided to go for the following comedy of errors (both players are in the 1900-2000 rating range):
Even theoretical mistakes happen at the highest echelons of chess. Look at this excerpt:
As described in Tragicomedy, Carlsen had studied these endgames, so he didn't lack basic theoretical endgame knowledge. What he lacked at age 15 was the practical experience to put his theory into practice. The lesson ought to be clear, but it's always worth repeating it here:
Good time management is a trainable skill, not a talent.
- Kelvin Finke
As a direct consequence of the technological progress, the media landscape has become increasingly more fasten-your-seatbelts. The attention spans of people have decreased massively: commercials used to take several minutes to carry home the message, while these days a pre-YouTube-video advertisement flash that takes 15 seconds is already considered excruciatingly long and a real test to your patience.
This technology-induced impatience has a high price, and it has a direct influence on people's expectations. Success has to be immediate, or in any case just around the corner, and must be attainable with minimal effort, and yesterday rather than today.
Whereas I do believe in the motivating factors that early quick success can have, mastery is not just bunny-slopes. At some point you have to make an effort and invest more time. Ironically, impatience is the greatest waster of time.
If results aren't immediately forthcoming, we quickly tend to abandon the process.
- Iain Abernethy, "10 things the martial arts should have taught you about life"
Time-management is one of those skills that you can't really learn from a book. You have to learn these skills by playing a lot, because time-management is greatly influenced by your mental make-up. Impatience, perfection, the ability to focus, your prep, familiarity with the position, tilt, level of derision for your opponent, all have an influence on when and how you use your clock-time.
If there's one thing that marked my results in my youth years, it was my abysmal time-management. I had the tendency to play too fast and not think things through properly. This may have made me a more dangerous blitz player, but resulted in some unnecessary and embarrassing losses in classical games. I still have the tendency to play too fast to some extent, but I've taken steps to deal with it much better.
I'm not unique in this. As can be taken from the quote by Altucher, a lot of youth-players tend to play too quickly. Let me show you an example from my own OTB practice against a 14-year-old:
This game was round 5 in a nine-round tournament and had a classical FIDE time control of 90+30+30. My opponent had blitzed out his first eight moves in this Closed Sicilian. Nothing bad so far, until we fast-forward a couple of moves and take stock of the situation again. Between move 8 and 23 he had used no more than 15 minutes, which included having to walk back to the table on every move, and keeping up with his notation sheet.
The position below arose after my 24th move. My opponent still had 73 minutes on the clock. Feel free to guess what my opponent played here.
The worst part about this howler of a move is that he didn't even spend more than a minute on playing it. Right after he had played it, he must have seen what was wrong with it, which his immediate resignation signals.
I knew this particular youth player before I had to face him. After the game I alerted his trainers to this tendency of his. I don't want to take credit for his results, but he won the four remaining games that tournament.
Just as there are youth-players who move too fast, there are also youth-players who move too slow. My opponent in the Fort Knox French was such an example:
I currently do a few things to deal with my time-management. One of them is that I keep track of the time on the clock during the game, for both myself and my opponent. This way I'm conscious about using my time, and I'm forced to hold myself accountable for any irrational use of time. And you're allowed to write that down on your notation-sheet because it's game-information.
Nobles' sons are one of nature's great destructive forces, like floods or tornadoes. When you're struck with one of these catastrophes, the only thing an average man can do is grit his teeth and try to minimize the damage.
- Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind, Chapter Thirty-One: "The Nature of Nobility"
Many of us have developed a certain degree of competence in our chess-abilities. It is often useful and sometimes necessary to develop some competence in order for us to feel confident in ourselves. However, there is an excess to this confidence. The dividing line between confidence and arrogance is sometimes very thin. It is difficult in general to know where this line is, and this is especially true for youth players.
There are two types of youthful overconfidence that I'll discuss here: the impish rash type who takes too much risk, and the entitled "nobles" that walk around the tournament hall and act like they own the place.
An example of the first type is my opponent in the miniature below. I had only just met this player half a year before I had to face him. He was a bit full of himself at that moment, and I wasn't exactly charmed by him then. This is how our very first encounter went:
This guy cleaned up his attitude towards me after his mishap in the above game. We can now laugh about it and consider this just an abysmal opening experiment. I've remained on very good terms with him since, and he's earned my full respect.
Much less so with the second type. It was brought to my attention on Twitch that in the final round of a weekend tournament some young child started his game with 1.h4, almost smashed the clock in two, played all his moves immediately, went to have lunch for half an hour during the game, and waited for no less than 40 minutes before resigning in a position that was mate in 3 for his opponent.
Unfortunately, those people also exist, and you have to deal with them in an appropriate way (i.e.: firmly get the message across without molesting the child physically or psychologically). I honestly don't know what I'd have done if I were in that situation, but I might've asked the arbiter for an extra hour of clock time for the opponent. Ironic encouragement might be the most child-friendly way to send the message: "I see through your act. The effort is lost on me. But if you so desire, feel free to take all the time in the world to put your dumb behaviour on full display for the whole world to see. Joke's on you."
Chess is getting flooded with increasingly younger great players. That's a good development, but many players fear these young ambassadors of the royal game that we've come to love so much. This fear is justified to the extent that you regard them as what they are. Ben Johnson words it well when he acknowledges the following:
[M]any kids are hard-working, great chess players — and there is no shortcut or workaround to beating a great chess player.
- Ben Johnson, Perpetual Chess Improvement, Chapter 17.
Fear of the youth player is often a form of self-sabotage. Throughout this blog I've aimed to shed light on the phenomenon of the youth player, and hoped to give the reader some tips and insights into how to approach the issue. It's my firm belief that if you cut them to size (not literally, of course), youth players aren't nearly as menacing as people often tend to make them out to be. If you have to showdown against them, make sure to get rid of any bogeys that you might have and treat them like the human beings that they are.
Courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.
- Nelson Mandela
The talents and skills of the youth player often tend to be unevenly developed. On average they know their openings well and have a proclivity for sharp positions and calculations, but tend to be weaker in the strategic middlegame and the endgame. You can use these discrepancies to your advantage by designing a battle plan that strategises around their (and your) proclivities and flaws.
In terms of uninhibitedness and flexibility of mind, there is a lot that you can learn from youth players. If despite everything you do lose to a youth player, there is absolutely no shame in it. You lost to a hard-working great chess-player, and you have a lesson that you can learn from. If, of course, you allow yourself the luxury of making mistakes.
Let me close with a quote from Ben Johnson:
As chess enthusiasts, we should also remember that youth are the lifeblood of the game and the ticket to a brighter future for chess. The more strong young chess players we have, the more chess fans we will have twenty years from now.
- Ben Johnson, Perpetual Chess Improvement, Chapter 17.
