‘Rare talent, pandemic kid’ wins NYS chess tournament at 11-years-old

WILLIAMSVILLE, N.Y. (WIVB) — While the world was shut down, 11-year-old Bryan Lin would play chess for hours, sometimes up to six hours at a time.

And now, he’s the elementary champion of the New York State Scholastic Championship. Aka, he’s the top elementary-aged chess player in the entire state.

“Bryan definitely is a very rare talent,” said John Hanni, the operations manager at Buffalo Chess Association.

Hanni started working with Bryan when he was in the second grade. The Buffalo Chess Association brings instructors into local schools after the last bell rings to teach students the basics of chess, and grow in their game. Hanni said after just a couple of months working with Bryan, the elementary student was beating him. For background on Hanni, he’s played the game since kindergarten and went onto play in high school and college, becoming the president of his college team at UB, before he started teaching the game.

Bryan then started playing with the association’s president, Mark Johnson. He has a similar chess background as Hanni, starting at 4-years-old, but Hanni will admit, Johnson played at a higher level.

“Chess is apart of me,” Johnson said.

And Johnson will admit, Bryan is special.

“I don’t know if exceptional really defines it,” he said.

Not long after Bryan began playing, the pandemic hit. So, he took his game online.

“That’s when it took off,” his mom, Ning Lin said.

He played on the free online chess website called Lichess. His mom said he’d go on there for hours at a time. Ning joked, it was almost like the online site acted as a babysitter for the then eight-year-old.

“It can get pretty addictive,” she said.

And apparently Bryan isn’t the only one who did this. Ning tells News 4, in the chess world, there’s a term for these kids who got really good in 2020: ‘pandemic kids.’ She said his case, of getting good at that time, is not unique.

Johnson agrees, a lot of kids did improve during the pandemic because there wasn’t anything else to do. Bryan is indeed a ‘pandemic kid,’ as Ning said, but Johnson said Bryan goes one step further than many of those other kids.

“You can only reach the potential that you have.”

After some time in the pandemic, the Buffalo Chess Association started doing Friday night games online. Johnson said kids would get online and be paired randomly… but no one wanted to play Bryan. He was too good. So, Johnson would get online with Bryan on Sundays instead. And once it was safe to do so, the two would meet at Tim Hortons to play.

Bryan now goes to chess tournaments online weekly, and about 5-10 tournaments in-person every year. Recently, at the 55th Annual New York State Scholastic Championship, he beat out 1,500 other students, including last year’s champion, taking home the win. Both Hanni and Johnson said about 90% of the players were from New York City, where schools have more chess programs and support. It’s almost a chess mecca.

“NYC is known as one of the places to go for chess,” Hanni said.

So where does the 5th grader go from here?

Johnson and Hanni said he’ll go to play in the national competition in Grand Rapids, Missouri.

And not to jinx Bryan, but the co-winner of nationals last year was a person Bryan beat in this state competition.