Source: https://www.straitstimes.com/sport/footballer-vs-kitefoiler-a-joyous-chess-match-for-a-cause
Under an unfriendly sun at the Singapore Sports Hub, hell is joyously breaking loose. Bishops are casually tripping knights. Queens are being rudely felled. And a footballer is telling a kitefoiler, a grin pasted on her face, “the end is near”.
This what happens when you put two professional athletes across a giant chess board for a good cause. They tease a little, laugh a lot, trade respect and sweat competitiveness. And it ends with a champion of the water slightly chastened on land.
“Aarrgh,” says the sporting Max Maeder with a rueful grin. “I’m lost.”
It’s an August morning near the water and a game of blitz chess is underway. Max, 17, is playing Danelle Tan, 19, who has signed with Australian football club Brisbane Roar. The kitefoiler, with an agile brain, disentangles chess puzzles on his phone for fun. But Tan is a riddle not easily solved.
From Nov 23 to Dec 15, the world chess championships will be fought at Resorts World Sentosa. I use the word “fought” advisedly. Chess players might look innocuous, a case of badly dressed accountants with a fidgeting issue, but in their brains military-style campaigns are being plotted.
Chess in Singapore deserves more attention and so for the world championships Max and Tan have been roped in for this promotional exercise. Stars bring attention and this twosome, charming and thoughtful, are the right fit: one hails from a niche water sport, the other from a woman’s sport. Both know what it’s like to sit in the shadows.
Athletes, even on a field foreign to their own, are intriguing to observe. Tan has never met Max and they chat easily and exchange training information and later even quiz Kevin Goh, the CEO of the Singapore Chess Federation. Their inquisitive faces tell a story: At the heart of any truly ambitious athlete lies curiosity.
Max flips a coin on his phone. He arranges his pieces as fastidiously as he puts together his kitefoiling kit. He admires chess for the “zero factor of luck” involved. Teammates can’t be blamed, nor weather used as an excuse. “You could have played,” he says, “an almost perfect game of chess, but if you lost, somewhere, somehow you made some form of inaccuracy.”
In blitz chess each player has five minutes for the entire game. You make a move and then lunge to stop the clock. The game ends in checkmate or when one player has used up the five minutes. It makes for a hilarious spectacle because when they’re in time trouble the players are rushing and dancing around the outsized pieces.
And here’s the thing: Tan has the better footwork and is nimble in tight spaces. She’s also, and no one told Max this, a former Under-12 age group chess champ.
On the website of National Museums Liverpool is a story headlined: “Which is greater? The number of atoms in the universe or the number of chess moves?” That intensity will be kept for November, for now it’s light-hearted. Well, mainly. Truth is these are professional athletes for whom competitiveness is a daily itch. If they played tiddlywinks, their heart rate would delightedly accelerate.
The first game is on. Tan errs, Max takes her queen. But advantage is lost as fast as it is found. Tan sets a trap and Max loses his queen and the game.
“I messed it up,” he says.
“You had me panicking for a while,” she says.
Another game? Of course.
Tan’s instinct, she explains, is explosion not contemplation. And so when the choice came as a girl she chose boots over board. Yet no one can avoid chess, for it worms its way into sporting conversations everywhere. Every time an athlete, in almost any sport, wants to illustrate decision-making, strategy, calculation, they summon chess as an example.
It’s like the senior cousin of all sport, the ultimate mind game. It’s why Boris Becker, so it’s rumoured, once brought chess to Novak Djokovic’s camp. It’s why this year GQ magazine took us “Inside the NBA’s Chess Club” and The New York Times insisted in 2022 that “The Hottest Game in the NFL is Chess”.
On this day, Tan’s early chess education gives her an edge and she wins again and earns $1,000 to donate to her favourite charity. Max congratulates her and does what he’s trained to. Reflect. “I realised today that I don’t play (chess) enough.” But this day isn’t about results, it’s about hope. About two young athletes making generous moves to spark a passion among Singaporeans in another game.
Later I start to walk away and then look behind. Goh, a grandmaster, is standing at the chess board across from Jimmy Tan, marketing lead at the chess federation. The promotion is over but they cannot help themselves. Pieces are happily arranged, the clock is punched and it’s as if they’re sending a message to their fellow citizens. When you’re in love, there’s always time for play.
