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 underestimated me a little bit,” Zhang, 12, said after holding off Nakamura for 65 moves in a first-round match at the Maritime Open Chess Championship in Summerside, PEI.
Zhang, who lives in Halifax with his family and has been playing chess since he was 6, says he competes in the tournament almost every year.
But Nakamura, who lives in the United States, was an unlikely last-minute addition.
Nakamura, a popular online chess streamer who has more than three million subscribers on his YouTube channel, is an undeniable superstar in the sport.
He is so famous that when Zhang, a regular viewer of his broadcasts, walked past Nakamura during breakfast, she could hardly believe it.
“I thought, ‘Hey, is that Hikaru?'” he said in an interview Sunday. “There’s no way he’s coming here, right?”
Very soon, Zhang learned that Nakamura would be his opponent.
“I was half nervous, half excited,” she said.
Among Maritime Open chess players and fans, 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 PEI as an opportunity to “give back to the chess community.”
“It’s pretty nice, but it also reminds me of when I was a kid, traveling, playing tournaments and meeting great teachers,” Nakamura said.
On his YouTube channel, Nakamura explained to viewers that he had signed up for the Maritime Open because he needs to play 11 classical ranking 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 world’s highest-ranked players.
For Zhang, however, the stakes were not so high. But he still sees room for improvement.
“It’s obviously a great experience,” he said. “I would have liked to have had a better result. In the end, I had a low time and I just made a mistake.”
In his post-match recap on YouTube, which Zhang eagerly watched once it was posted, Nakamura praised his skills and offered a detailed breakdown of where he went wrong.
“I felt like I had set a lot of traps for her, and until the final moment, she was fighting back,” Nakamura said in the video. “I can really breathe a sigh of relief after winning this first round.”
(Delaney Kelly/CBC)
Zhang says watching the summary was a great educational opportunity. It also felt good for her to hear him admit that he was nervous during the match.
“I learned a lot and I was happy to see … that he said he was worried during the game,” he said.
At 37, Nakamura is about 25 years older than Zhang, giving him plenty of time to practice 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… keep getting better,” Zhang said.
