Daniel Naroditsky, front row, second from right, attended the U.S. Chess School in Lexington, Ky., in July.
January 03, 2008
At some point, journalists interviewing Daniel Naroditsky — and this has become a popular activity since he won the under-12 world chess title in November — may entertain the same thought: “Joke’s over. I’ve been interviewing a midget for the last 15 minutes here. Where’s the kid?”
It’s not that Daniel looks like an adult — the Foster City, Calif., resident is well under five feet tall, is slightly built, and has a boy’s high-pitched voice and vocal patterns.
It’s the way the chess prodigy organizes and articulates his thoughts that gives the impression of maturity beyond his years.
“I couldn’t play chess without loving it,” Daniel says. “You think it seems like only a position and only one move, but it’s a whole new world.
“There are 64 squares, and it takes up a lot of your brain power. It’s not so much that I’m thinking or concentrating, but going into another world. And I just sit there until the game is over.”
And four times out of five, when he’s playing against opponents at his skill level, Daniel emerges from that other world victorious. Last month he beat a field of 160 opponents in Antalya, Turkey. (The girls’ under-12 championship, incidentally, was won by Israeli Marsel Efroimski.)
The son of Vladimir and Lena Naroditsky, Soviet Jews who immigrated to the United States from Ukraine and Azerbaijan, respectively, Daniel began playing chess with his father and older brother, Alan, when he was six.
“Usually, when people start to play chess games, they just move the pieces, but three or four months after he started playing, it was obvious he was thinking about the game,” said Vladimir.
Soon Daniel was facing off in chess tournaments against seasoned players. And losing to a kid wasn’t an experience some of them handled, shall we say, maturely.
“They saw I was young and figured they’d beat me easily. So they would play overconfidently and make mistakes. And they never really expected it when they lost — and they’d get really upset,” said Daniel, with the hint of a smile forming and instantly vanishing from his face.
“When they lost the games, they’d run out of the hall. And sometimes they’d leave their score sheets and the clocks they use when they’re playing.”
Daniel at age 10.
In a j. article two years ago, a 10-year-old Daniel recalled a match in Berkeley against a rabbi who flipped the board after a quick loss.
Daniel plays chess for about 90 minutes on weekdays and about three hours every Saturday and Sunday. He regularly locks horns at San Francisco’s Mechanics Institute Library — where, on Dec. 4, he lectured some four dozen chess aficionados.
And, yes, Daniel has interests other than chess. He graduated from the Ronald C. Wornick Jewish Day School and currently excels in sixth-grade math and African history at Crystal Springs Uplands School. His family attends Peninsula Temple Beth El in San Mateo, where he will become a bar mitzva sometime next year, depending on his tournament schedule.
His other activities, though, are a bit more exotic. He enjoys playing field hockey, studying the geography of undeveloped nations in Oceania, and listening to the works of medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque composers (his mother is a classically trained piano teacher — but the hockey and geography are still pretty unconventional).
Daniel’s plans for the future are also the typical 12-year-old’s fare: He wants to be a scientist or maybe a historian — and a chess grandmaster by age 16.
A fellow named Bobby Fischer also did that. But Daniel modestly rejects the comparison.
“Hey,” he says, “it was much harder back then.”.