Game Over 
Check Mates
Following in the footsteps of sports greatest rivals, two world-class chess players from Brownsville have been battling each other since kindergarten. They’ve both won state and national championships. They’re both ranked in the top five in the country. And they’re both in the fourth grade.
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“My son was rusty,” Mendez Senior explained. “Grand Prix is my son’s main opening against Sicilian; he has destroyed Spada with that opening. But Spada got him right from the start. It’s difficult to emerge from a hole. You can’t climb back. And Spada made him pay.”
On the Friday afternoon before the state tournament, Spada darted into the UTB/TSC chess office for his lesson with Daniel Fernandez, a college student with a 2463 rating, a sleepy laugh, and a penchant for teasing. Spada’s hair was all over the place, and he was breathing hard. The room was so clean and spare it might have looked more like a small, new post office if not for the framed photos of the chess team on the wall and desktops with checkerboard mats. Spada laid down his backpack of chess gear and took a seat next to his tutor. “I won seventy-five dollars at an open tournament in San Antonio!” he said.
“Did you buy a car?” Fernandez asked, straight-faced.
Spada grew wide-eyed. “Can you buy a car for seventy-five dollars?” he asked.
“Maybe not a BMW,” Fernandez replied.
Spada scanned Fernandez’s face for a smirk and finally called the bluff, embarrassed but smiling. “Nah!” he said.
Spada swiveled in his chair and ran his hands through his hair nervously as Fernandez downloaded one of Spada’s games from the tournament in San Antonio the previous week and began his critique as the board appeared on the computer screen. “Hmm. Do you want to play two rooks to two rooks?” Fernandez asked. “It’s bad.”
“Look!” Spada said, clicking the mouse to rearrange the pieces. “What about this move?”
Fernandez countered and said, “You’re pinned.”
“Oh, gosh!” Spada said, leaning back in his chair and laughing. As Fernandez began shifting the pieces once again, Spada became impatient. “The first five moves I know by memory. I mean, come on!”
“I’m not screaming at you. Figure out your plan. What happens is, you play e5,” Fernandez said, “and they get rid of your knight and bishop. You’re losing here. This keeps happening. Do you see if you don’t change, you’re suffering the whole game in a bind? You block it sometimes and get lucky. But as you play better players, you won’t be so lucky. What are the three steps?”
Spada grimaced sheepishly.
“I’ll tell you,” Fernandez continued. “Number one: Find out what your opponent is thinking, what he wants. Number two: Ask yourself, ‘Are his wants dangerous?’ Number three: If they are, how do you stop him?”
“If someone wants to give me a million dollars, I say, ‘Okay!’” Spada said with a big laugh.
“Your position here is difficult,” Fernandez said, surveying the board. “You need to stop thinking tactics.”
“I’m not!” Spada said, rolling his eyes. “Tactics.” He had heard this criticism before. Fernandez had told him that if he were rated on tactics alone, he would be at 2200; what he needed to learn was something chess masters call positional play.
“You’re waiting for him to come to you, and that’s not your style,” Fernandez said. “The best counterplay, if he’s attacking you from the wings, is to attack in the center.”
Spada grew solemn. “My dad got mad because I played too fast,” he said.
“So we know what went wrong here,” Fernandez said, wrapping up the session as his next student walked into the office. “You played too fast. You made some opening positional mistakes and found yourself in a position you didn’t understand.” With a big sigh, Spada began packing up his gear, promising to do better during the weekend tournament.
A few hours later, across town, Mendez was sitting down with his father to practice one last time before the weekend. Since August, he had been training for football with his dad from five-thirty to eight in the evening, Monday through Thursday, but the past week and a half he had been back at the chess board for at least an hour and a half a day, anticipating the rematch. In non-scholastic tournaments, the Fernandos can play college students and adults who provide more challenge; during the upcoming weekend, however, they would be restricted to their grade level, and inevitably, the showdown between the rivals would take place on Sunday, in one of the final rounds between some of the top fourth-grade players in the state.
Practice got off to a bad start. Father and son sat across from each other at their six-chair dining room table as if facing off in a tournament. Mendez Senior wore a white undershirt and tapped on his laptop as he loaded chess software to assist with practice. Then he arranged the pieces on a board to re-create a trouble spot in a game his son had recently played on the Internet. Fernandito, buttressing his chin with his left hand, waited for instruction in his SpongeBob SquarePants pajama bottoms and a brown T-shirt, looking bored. The two stared at the board together, and Mendez Senior, who is a keen enough player to understand what had gone awry, began his critique.
“This is where you lost nationals,” he said. “Bishop c4. Everybody clobbers you here. What do you do?”
“Tempt the king,” Fernandito mumbled into his hand.
“How?” Mendez Senior said, slamming the pieces down as he rearranged them on the plastic board.
“Castle a5,” Fernandito replied.
“That takes too long!” Mendez Senior said, raising his voice. “This isn’t gonna cut it! What happens here?”
“It never works out,” Fernandito said.
“Why?” his father asked.
The son was silent, and his face began to turn red.
“If you’re going to do something,” Mendez Senior said, “do it one hundred percent or don’t do it. Sit up! Get your hands off your chin! Go wash your face!”
Fernandito ran into the bathroom and shut the door to compose himself. When he emerged a few minutes later, he sat down, expressionless. His mother, who was chafing at the loud volume of instruction, handed her son a Hi-C drink box, which he clasped close to his chest as he sipped its contents out of a straw. As practice recommenced, Fernandito became more confident in his answers and sat up straight, withstanding the test just like the tough kids from South America he had described from Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, though perhaps he would have preferred, at this moment, the legendary mitten of fire ants.
“When are you not okay?” Mendez Senior asked.
“When you’re not attacking,” his son replied.
“Once you start defending, you’re not in good shape,” Mendez Senior said. “Look at the pawns here: Nunca cruzando, because you’re attacking. Perfect. You can play this against any Grandmaster. A lot of players your age will crumble with any kind of pressure, but Spada isn’t going to do what you want him to do unless you force him.”
He stared at the board for a moment, clearly proud of the position.
“When do you take risks?” he asked.
“When you’re down,” his son replied.
“What’s the difference between this game and the sixth round at nationals?” he asked.
“I applied pressure,” his son replied.
“That was the most awful Sicilian I’ve ever seen, but this is good,” he said. He looked up at his son, before dismissing him to relax upstairs, his tone ringing more hollow to reveal a softie playing the part of a relentless coach. “Fernando. This is like a job or anything in life. If you want it, will they send you an invitation?”
His son shook his head.
“You need to go get it,” he said. “Will they call you and say, ‘Fernando, you want this job?’ You need to find out what you want and get it.”
ON SATURDAY MORNING, November 4, at the statewide tournament at Dr. Américo Paredes Elementary School, in Brownsville, panic might as well have been served as a spice in the foil-wrapped breakfast tacos. As parents browsed through items for sale in the corridors—king and queen key chains, USCF pins, T-shirts, pencils, notation books, roll-up boards, paperbacks with titles such as Play the Sveshnikov!—the children gulped as they stood on their tiptoes and stared at the pairings posted on the painted brick walls along with the players’ ratings.
Two teenagers pointed to the top of the fourth-grade chart, at the Fernandos’ names, and one said, “Look at that kid’s rating!”
“Nasty, dude,” the other teenager replied.
“He’s nine years old, and he’s better than me.”
“All these kids are better than me.”
Even if the tournament had allowed competition among a wider range of players beyond each grade level, the Fernandos would have been in good standing. Of the 714 participants from across the state, kindergarten through college, only 19 players were rated better than the Brownsville prodigies, and 13 of those were college students.
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