The first Filipino World Chess Champion: Coming Soon?

Fourteen-year-old GM Wesley So, the highest-rated Filipino chess player and the world’s youngest grandmaster today, has not fared very well in two international chess tournaments held in the Philippines recently. But he performed exceedingly well in tournaments he participated in months earlier, namely the World Junior Championships and Under-16 World Championship, both held in Turkey. He placed 9th in the Juniors and led the Philippine team that placed 3rd in the Under-16 championship. If Wesley continues to improve in his game, he can be a World Junior Chess Champion before he reaches the age of 20 and, like World Champions Vishy Anand, Kramnik and Kasparov, eventually position himself to take the world chess crown in the future.

A good number of Filipino chess players are also pushing brilliant moves lately. The Philippines has produced three grandmasters in the last couple of years—namely So, Jason Gonzales and Darwin Laylo. It is such a bountiful harvest in the cerebral sport, and one that is unprecedented in local chess history. Several others—such as John Paul Gomez, Andrew Sanchez and Catalino Sadorra—have gained points leading to GM status. There is thus an apparent surge of renewed interest in the game of chess in the country, and much of the credit should go to the National Chess Federation of the Philippines under the leadership of Prospero “Butch” Pichay and the inspiring presence of former FIDE President Florencio Campomanes.

Chess has such an appeal that it continues to maintain a following despite a seemingly lack of institutional support for the sport. In contrast, the government and some sectors in private business offer monetary and all sorts of incentives to athletes who do well in the Olympics. Boxing (at least as shown by Filipino boxing icon Manny Pacquiao) and billiards offer compelling material rewards. Little of this kind can be said about chess. Nevertheless, the sport does flourish even without external support. It seems chess has a life of its own.

Being a “brain” sport, people used to think that ethnic groups known (at least by some sectors in the science community) to have superior brain bytes (like the Jews, for example and, if Adolf Hitler is to be believed, Aryans), have an edge over other races in the game of chess. This is like saying that long distance running belongs to Africans while basketball belongs to Americans and Europeans. But the emerging presence of strong chess players from India and China is gradually creating a myth out of what may be called superiority based on ethnicity, or racial genes.

What is more widely known is that Asians have more developed right brains than other ethnic or racial groups. The left brain is source of artistic and creative energy among humans. The right brain, on the other hand, is what makes people cope with scientific, mathematical and all sorts of objective analysis.

Garry Kasparov once said that (before he lost to Deep Blue, the chess playing computer), human beings have an edge over machines because humans can use intuition to plan ahead or map strategies in a chess game. This can mean that, all other things being equal, the one who intuits—or one who applies art or creativity—in addition to the mathematical analysis that needs to be perfected on the board, is likely to stand over and above the chess playing crowd.

The current World Junior champion is an Indian. Chinese players are inching up in the rankings among the elite group of super grandmasters. The youngest grandmaster in the world today is Wesley So, a Filipino. He has the makings of a World Chess Champion and he could be one in the future.