Bellevue chess champs are kid kings: They even play an astronaut

It's Wednesday afternoon at the Stevenson Elementary chess-club meeting in Bellevue, and 20 antsy students sharpen their pencils, wriggle in their seats and play around with their chess pieces as they set up matches between one another.

Then Coach Elliott Neff gives the signal to begin, and it's as if somebody has suddenly switched off the sound in the room.

All talk ceases. The students hunch over their boards in silent concentration, brows furrowed, eyes moving back and forth over the pieces, calculating possibilities. For almost half an hour, there is hardly any sound but the clink of chess pieces and the scratch of pencils recording each move.

Stevenson's club is no ordinary chess team: The kids are the reigning national champions of the elementary chess circuit — so good that they were selected last year to play a much-publicized, virtual game of chess with NASA astronaut Gregory Chamitoff, which began while he was in orbit on the international space station.

These kids have been checkmating their parents since kindergarten. They can play the first 15 moves of a chess match in their heads, no pieces on the board. To practice, they played Stevenson grad Michael Lee, a ninth-grader at Interlake High in Bellevue who also happens to be the highest-rated 15-year-old chess player in the country. (Lee is still in a class of his own, though — he played 25 simultaneous matches with the Stevenson students for practice, lost one, played to a draw in two and won the rest.)

And their idea of real fun? That was the U.S. Chess Federation's national chess tournament in Nashville, Tenn., earlier this month.

"The whole day was a chess tournament," said Alex Shang, 11, describing the event with a shy grin on his face. "We were playing, playing, resting, playing, sleeping."

Stevenson won its first K-5 (that's kindergarten through 5th grade) national chess title in 2005, led by chess star Lee. Last year, the school clinched the K-3 championship. This year, the kids again walked away with the national team title in the K-5 section. And they came away with a crate of trophies in numerous other categories, too.

How'd they do it?

"It doesn't matter how big you are or how small you are, it matters how long you can stay focused," said Amith Vanmane, 10, who is one of his school's top players.

The chess season wraps up today with the state championship in Spokane, where Neff thinks Stevenson will do pretty well. (By a quirk in the schedule, the national championship took place earlier — schools don't have to qualify, which is how Stevenson came to win the national championship before playing the state championship.)

The team is in an advantageous position to win its match with astronaut Chamitoff, as well. In fact, if it weren't for some poor choices by people on Earth, they might have won by now.

According to the rules of this match, the Stevenson kids have to come up with three possible moves, then let the world at large vote on the best one via the Web.

Unfortunately, Earth has not always chosen well.

"The obvious move was not the best move," Neff said, recalling one move voted on by online followers that turned out to be a bad idea.

The game with Chamitoff will continue until somebody wins, and the astronaut — who met the kids from Stevenson during the national competition in Nashville — may also make a visit to Stevenson next month.

Neff, a soft-spoken 31-year-old, was the state chess champion in 1993. As the owner of Chess4Life, a Bellevue business that offers after-school chess classes and summer chess camps, he has parlayed his talents for chess into a successful business.

Neff says he requires respect and discipline from his students. He helps them concentrate, focus, learn how to make good decisions, and understand that losing is not failure but part of the learning process.

The 80-member chess club is also coached by David Hendricks, who's currently the scholastic director of the Washington Chess Federation, and by Gregg Dillingham and John Graves. As with most chess teams in the area, parent volunteers coordinate the program, and the coaches are paid.

Stevenson, on busy Northeast Eighth Street near the Crossroads neighborhood, has a magnet program for gifted students, and its population is diverse: 64 percent of students speak a first language other than English, and about 33 percent qualify for free- and reduced-price lunch. The chess team has more than 80 members, and everyone is encouraged to participate.

Still, there is a downside to being so good at the game.

The school may need to build a new trophy case, Neff said, just to house all those chess trophies.

Katherine Long: 206-464-2219 or klong@seattletimes.com