Michelle Zhang isn’t even a teenager yet, but that didn’t stop her from putting up a strong fight against one of the best chess players on the planet on Saturday.
World No. 2 Hikaru Nakamura made a surprise appearance at a Prince Edward Island tournament over the weekend.
“Maybe he, like, underestimated me a little bit,” said Zhang, 12, after holding Nakamura at bay for 65 moves in a first-round match at the Maritime Open Chess Championship in Summerside, P.E.I.
Zhang, who lives in Halifax with her family and has been playing chess since age 6, says she competes in the tournament almost every year.
But Nakamura, who lives in the United States, was an unlikely last-minute addition.
A popular chess streamer online who boasts more than three million subscribers to his YouTube channel, Nakamura is an undeniable superstar in the sport.
He’s so famous that when Zhang, a regular viewer of his streams, walked by Nakamura at breakfast, she could hardly believe it.
“I was like, ‘Hey, is that Hikaru?'” she said in an interview on Sunday. “No way he’s coming here, right?”
Soon enough, Zhang learned Nakamura would be her opponent.
“I was like, half nervous, half excited,” she said.
Among chess players and fans at the Maritime Open, Nakamura might as well have been Taylor Swift.
“It’s been fun. It’s been pretty chaotic. It’s been short, a lot of people asking for autographs and signatures,” he told CBC News.
He said he saw his trip to P.E.I. as a chance to “give back to the chess community.”
“It’s quite nice but it also reminds me of when I was a kid once travelling around and playing tournaments and meeting grandmasters,” said Nakamura.
On his YouTube channel, Nakamura elaborated, telling viewers he’d enrolled in the Maritime Open because he needs to play 11 classical-rated chess games before the end of the year to qualify for the 2026 FIDE Candidates tournament, a major event that brings together some of the top-ranked players in the world.
For Zhang, however, the stakes weren’t quite as high. But she still sees room for improvement.
“It’s obviously a great experience,” she said. “I wished that, like, I maybe had, like, a better result. At the end, I did get under low time and I just kind of blundered.”
In his post-match recap on YouTube, which Zhang eagerly watched once it went live, Nakamura complimented her skills, and offered a detailed breakdown of where she went wrong.
“I felt like I laid a lot of traps, and until this final moment, she actually was holding her own,” Nakamura said in the video. “I really can breathe a sigh of relief after winning this first round.”
(Delaney Kelly/CBC)
Zhang says watching the recap was a great educational opportunity. It also felt good for her to hear him admit he was nervous during the match.
“I learned a lot and I was, like, happy to see … that he said, like, he was concerned during the game,” she said.
At 37, Nakamura has about 25 years on Zhang, which gives her plenty of time to practise in the perhaps unlikely event of a rematch.
“I don’t really have a dream. I just want to … get better at the game and … continue to improve,” said Zhang.
