CARSON Graham grad Loren Laceste knows how one small blunder can completely turn a chess game, but when it came time to play the U-18 Canadian Youth Chess Championship final he didn't blink.
It was his opponent, an international master much higher ranked from him, who made a blunder more than four hours after they made their opening moves, and allowed Laceste to win his first Canadian championship.
His dad, Mel, remembers the call vividly.
"After he won he called us immediately and he was very happy, shouting on the phone, 'I am the champion! I am the champion!'" said Mel. "Usually we would communicate in Facebook every night, but after the last game he would call us immediately."
Laceste himself, after letting the win sink in at home, said it was an extremely close, tense match.
"There's a lot of pressure. I couldn't sleep before the game, the night before, because it's like the biggest game so far," he said. He had just one minute on his clock when he made checkmate, while his opponent had just a minute and a half, but a draw would have required a playoff to finish so Loren knew he needed the win.
"It went down to the final minute, really."
Laceste, now 18, first learned to play chess when he was seven years old after Mel, at that time a teacher in the Philippines, brought home a chess set from school and taught his three boys to play.
They started joining chess tournaments in the Philippines and placed reasonably well, and Mel said Loren and one of his brothers especially loved to play, getting better each year.
"There was a national tournament and we joined, and I was surprised that both my sons, they placed second and fifth place," said Mel. "That's the time I asked them, 'Seriously do you really want to play chess?' And they said yes, and said 'Papa you need to buy me books.'
"We kept on playing until I noticed that they started to beat me. After that I stopped playing with them but I kept guiding them."
When the family moved to North Vancouver from the Philippines in 2009, Laceste took a break from chess but in 2010 finished second in the Langley Labour Day Open and second again in the Canadian Chess Challenge in Montreal that year.
Laceste plays up to four hours a day leading into tournaments, usually online, where he can find players that challenge his ability. You have to always plan ahead, he said, as one mistake can be truly costly.
"Probably six to 10 moves ahead to make sure that you're on the right track," he said.
Having won the Canadian Youth Chess Championship this year, he will represent Canada in the world youth tournament in Brazil Nov. 17-27. It's here that, if he does well, Laceste has the chance to earn the title of international master.
As for his plans now, Laceste has a few more tournaments to practise for this year, and hopes to find a full-time job. He said he has plans to volunteer as a missionary through his church after he's back from Brazil, following in his older brother's footsteps, but after that he plans to attend university.
Always planning six moves ahead.
Mel, a janitor at Capilano University, is looking for sponsorship to help pay for some of the costs associated with sending his son to the tournaments. Anyone interested in sponsoring a potential chess master can contact him at melchorlaceste@rocketmail.
