Match Ends in Surprise for Young Challenger : Chess: Twelve-year-old Yorba Linda boy beats young champion, also 12, from Los Angeles. Despite his prowess, he thinks he ‘just got lucky’ during the tournament play.

Matthew Lee, 12, was shocked.

The Yorba Linda youth had expected to lose as one of 18 chess challengers who played simultaneously against the National Elementary School chess champion Saturday.

But somehow, at the end of two hours and 40 minutes, Matthew found himself the only player to win against Harutyun Akopyan, 12, of Los Angeles, who goes by the name Harry.

“I’m in the lowest class of players and he resigned to me,” Matthew said with wide eyes and an equally wide grin. “I think I just got lucky.”

The tournament was held at the Chess for Juniors club on Westminster Avenue, where all the players are students of chess teacher Robert M. Snyder, 39.

Harry, who won the National Fifth Grade competition in Arizona in November and the National Elementary School contest in North Carolina in April, said Matthew was one of four challengers who made him work hard.

“Mainly they were easy to play but I wasn’t bored,” said Harry, who was born in Armenia and who started attending a chess school there at the age of 5. Two years later, in 1988, his family emigrated to California, where he did not play chess for a couple of years.

“I was winning all my other games so I thought I was winning over Matthew,” Harry said. “So I didn’t pay attention to my game with him and made some mistakes.”

The two are among Snyder’s 120 students from all over Southern California.

Chess for Juniors offers a free introductory class on Sundays. Paying students can choose among eight beginning courses, five intermediate classes and three advanced. The students’ ages vary from 7 to 15.

The challengers on Saturday were set up along two rows of tables, with Harry going from chessboard to chessboard making a move at a time.

As he won a game, he would reach over and shake the challenger’s hand.

“He’s a nice player,” Jared Matson, 9, of Yorba Linda said. “But he doesn’t talk while he plays.”

Jared learned to play chess two years ago but only became Snyder’s student three weeks ago.

Matthew learned chess five years ago and started at Chess for Juniors last year. Harry enrolled there three years ago.

“I only started training Harry for several months when I took him to the Southern California Primary Championship, and he beat everyone he played,” Snyder said.

Harry’s father, Ovik Akopyan, 53, said he and his two married daughters also play chess.

“Harry started beating me when he was 10,” Akopyan said.