Good gambit

Chess coach Chris Lam participated in both editions of Hong Kong Chess Club. He found it via the community-centric website Meetup where Ng posts updates on meetings. Lam was looking to get more practice and improve his game. Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, he had been unable to find fellow chess players in Hong Kong. The club seemed like an answer to his prayers.

Lam says while in countries like the UK young people are introduced to chess at school, in Hong Kong only some schools encourage playing the game as an extracurricular activity. "I think the penetration is still pretty low," he says. "A lot of people in Hong Kong are not familiar with the game."

There was an uptick in interest and discussions about chess on social media near the end of 2020 when the Netflix limited series, The Queen's Gambit, found favor among many people, regardless of whether they actually played the game.
However, Ng believes the chess-playing community in Hong Kong is still rather small and hence has plenty of room to grow.

Getting the word out

According to Robin Lai, vice-president of Hong Kong Chess Federation, chess is more popular in the city than it has ever been.

"There are around 500 to 1,000 children learning to play chess right now. Our inter-schools chess events and junior chess championships are always the highlights of the year. And our federation has over 830 registered players under the Hong Kong flag," he says. Around 640 of those players fall between the ages of six to 30.

Among them are top players such as 15-year-old Michael Deng, the second-highest ranked active player in the city with a 2138 FIDE (World Chess Federation) rating and the title of candidate master, 17-year-old Crystal Deng, the highest-ranked active female player in the city with a 1914 FIDE rating and the title of woman candidate master, and Daniel Lam, the first Hong Kong male player to win the World Amateur Chess Championship in 2017.