With the amount of students at James Logan, oftentimes people’s achievements do not receive enough recognition on campus. For this student profile, The Courier is focusing on one remarkable junior, Nitish Nathan who has recently won the California State Championship in Chess. An incredibly intelligent, kind, knowledgeable, and humble person.
Nitish Nathan is a current junior at Logan, who started playing chess when he was two years old. He has amazing accomplishments from having over 200 trophies and has traveled to play chess in Brazil representing Team USA. In addition, Nathan has competed against grandmasters and has training by his grandmaster coach.
When asked about how he got into chess,
“I’ve been playing chess since I was two years old.” Nathan said, “I’m 17 now, and when I first learned chess, I was, like, extremely interested. My brother used to bring home trophies. And as a two year old, I was, like, really interested. I was like, oh, my God, that’s a shiny trophy. I went with myself. So, I started practicing chess, just at two years old with my parents and my brother, pretty casually. But then when I was five years old, I started to ramp up in scale level. So I started playing actual tournaments, not five years old. And from that…I actually won all the games in my first tournament. and that excitement…I just had to play more, and I knew, like, this was like what I wanted to do for, like, the majority of my life.”
As Nitish spoke about his threshold increasing for competitive chess, we asked what kinds of tournaments he competed in and Nathan said, “I’ve competed in all kinds of terms.” Nathan said, “I’ve competed in local tournaments, state tournaments, national tournaments, international tournaments, and online tournaments. Some of my most prestigious tournaments I’ve played in were. US World Cadets, which was I was playing the U under a section, and I was representing Team USA at Brazil. And I’ve also represented Team USA at Georgia. So those were my biggest tournaments. I also love playing online tournaments now ’cause since I’m at school, I don’t really have a lot of time to prepare, and I might need a weekend for studying for tests and stuff, so I love playing online chess tournaments as well.”
To get to this level of chess requires lots of training and practice, “My coach is like a grandmaster, top 100 in the world. Nathan said, “So I study with him, and what we usually do at the start of the lessons are opening preparations, ’cause openings arguably is one of the most important aspects of a chess game, because that decides where the game is going, who’s gonna have the advantage out of the opening. So we review that for a couple hours. Normally for preparation, I would take 20 hours at least before a tournament. Most of that goes into the opening. Some goes into the middle, some goes to endgame review. And most importantly, targeted preparation against certain opponents. If I’m like, okay, this guy is something I have to worry about, I would look at his openings and like, devise a plan on how …to get an advantage over them in the opening.”
Nathan’s recent accomplishment as the California Chess State Champion is not his first.
“…This tournament happens annually at the Santa Clara Convention Center.” Nathan said, “I don’t know if anyone actually knows about this, but this isn’t the first time I’ve won, and I’ve actually won the state championship every year. Since kindergarten. So first grade, second grade, third grade, accordingly, until now.”
Nathan elaborated and said,
“I’ve been very consistent playing these tournaments. Sometimes there’s, like, a really strong playing field. There’s, for example, last year, there was an FM, which is a title higher than mine. I’m a candidate Masters/national Master, and there’s a FE master who is better than me. There’s also another national master, and I had to play them, and I still ended up in first place, continuing my streak, and I was happy to continue my streak this year as well.”
What is the secret to Nathan’s success and his many victories in chess? We asked him to share some of his openings and strategies for both white and black, “As white, I play an opening called The London System.” Nathan said, “…So, it’s normally played by beginners, but I’ve actually enhanced it myself. Chess is a game of engineered preparation, memorization. So, rather than just the normal system, I try taking my opponents off guard. They’ll be like, okay, what is this professional playing the London system against me?” But then they’ll see is a lot more than just a typical London system, because I’ve prepared, like, sidelines, variations that are lethal if they don’t know what to play.”
“As black, I play something called the Sicilian, but a line in the Sicilian called the Kalashnikov. Nathan said, “It’s a very dynamic opening, and similar to my white opening, if they don’t know what to do, it could be lethal, but I just play it because I like fun and interesting positions.”
As discovering his many victories, we had to ask how many trophies Nathan had, “I would say, like, 200, actually. Nathan said, “Maybe more, maybe.” The interview concluded with some practical advice that Nathan recommends for 
beginning chess players such as myself. “For someone who’s just getting into chess, yeah, I would look at YouTube, really, because first of all, if you want to get into chess, you need to be inspired by something, right?” Nathan said, “There’s a recent Netflix documentary. It’s about someone who’s accused of cheating and the entire scandal. But you can see, like, you’re just gained some interest in chess in general. Like, the game generally, because if you can’t just start something that you don’t like doing, so you really do have to like, gain interest before starting. That’s the most important part. And then, once you’ve gained interest and you’re like, I want to learn how to do this, then you’re going to want to like, look it up online, go play, like, chess.com, practice some online games. chess.com is a great resource for beginners. It has lessons. It has openings preparation. You can train against the millions of users that play every day. It’s just an incredible resource.”One piece of wisdom that Nathan spoke about not only applies to his immensely impressive chess career but also life, Nathan said, “You should play against people. Preparation is very deep.”
