Co-Champ in Chess Tournament : He Settles for Draw and Is Fit to Be Tied

Seventh-grader Richard Phillips of Santa Ana held eight competitors in check to tie for the National Junior High School Chess Championships this week, but he said he may never live down offering his final opponent a draw after beating the first seven.

“I could have won it,” Richard said. “My teacher (chess master Robert Snyder of Garden Grove) was mad at me for doing it.” But Richard said he made the offer in the championship match to his challenger, an eighth-grade student from New Mexico, because he feared that he could not make the required number of moves in the time allowed.

At 13, Richard is already a veteran of more than 50 tournaments after playing seriously only a year and a half and has also been named county champion for his age group. The 900-player match held last weekend in Spokane, Wash., was his second national tournament, and his showing helped the four-student MacArthur Fundamental Intermediate School team to place eighth nationally out of 180 teams.

Played at Lunch

Geography teacher Bob Edwards began advising students interested in chess two years ago, forming a club whose members played at lunch each day. “When we started out, I could beat any of them,” Edwards said, but he stopped playing against them recently when they improved so much that “I was lucky if I could win one game out of five.”

However, Edwards said he can’t improve his game by learning from his proteges because “when they win, they really gloat.”

The four players who went to the national tournament are students of Snyder, whose Chess for Juniors organization offers lessons for children and trips to local tournaments.

Richard’s ambition is to become a grand master and ultimately world champion. However, he first must climb to the rank of a chess expert by accumulating 2,000 points from winning at national tournaments. He now has about 1,800 points; he predicts he will be an expert within four months.

After that, Richard must earn points toward becoming a chess master before trying for the world championship. He said he hopes to achieve master status by the time he is 20.

Lots of Practice

Richard said that he studied chess moves “for two or three hours” in preparation for this tournament and added that he hopes to get more practice against tough competitors at the Memorial Day Classic tournament in Los Angeles.

Edwards said: “Teachers love chess because it teaches logical thinking. You can’t be good in chess without having a good head on your shoulders.”

He said his chess pupils--Richard, eighth-graders Albert Lai and Ray Vanpraag and seventh-grader Cary Igarashi--are all A students.

Lai said he thinks that the game is so strenuous that “the scores should be on the sports pages. It’s a mental sport.”