Hussein Besso was barely four years old when he began to ask his father to teach him chess as he hovered around the board his father played on in the evenings in the Middle East, until his father responded.
After mastering the basic moves, Bisso quickly surprised everyone with his talent.
“He started correcting us and telling us what we should have done to win,” said his father, Mustafa Besso, 43.
Besso, who is now 11 years old, will play for the German national chess team in the Central European Cup known as the Mitropa Cup in Croatia later this month, making him the youngest German player in the history of the German Chess Association.
Bernd Volker, coach of the German national youth team, says Besso is an exceptional player.
“He’s very quick at grasping the positions of the chess pieces. This is really exceptional,” he elaborated.
When the Syrian Besso family settled in the western German town of Lippstadt in 2016 as refugees, the first thing Mustafa did was buy chess and find a youth chess club for his son to play in in the small town.
The club’s coaches quickly saw that Besso was far ahead of his peers, even though he had not yet learned enough German to be able to understand the coaching. They recommended that the six-year-old go to a statewide club.
Andreas Koehler, Besso’s chess teacher, said his interest in the game and desire to win was part of his talent. The coach talked about an exercise in which the players were asked to switch places in the middle of the game and adopt the opponent’s strategy.
“Hussein vehemently refused to turn the board and preferred to stop playing altogether,” Koehler said.
Besso began participating in tournaments, winning first place in the German U-12 competition in 2020, and then third place in the U-12 World Championship last year.
The game’s resemblance to mathematics is what makes it interesting in Besso’s eyes. Today, he speaks fluent German Besso and learned from the many tournaments he participated in. He said staying focused for several hours sometimes on a match was his biggest challenge.
His family has launched a crowdfunding campaign to help fund travel to tournaments and training, and they hope he will eventually find a sponsor.
“People see success as just magic, (but) it takes a lot of work and cost,” his father said.
But the father is also grateful for the support his son received in Germany and says his son’s talents would have been wasted if he had stayed in Syria.
And he went on to say, “If he had remained in Syria with this talent, he would have excelled only with the support of an influential person, and even if this happened, he would have stopped at a certain point.”
Despite not having obtained full German citizenship yet, Besso will play for the German team as the youngest player in its history.
And Volker, the German national youth coach who selected Besso, said all that was expected of him was to gain experience in Croatia, given that he would be playing with older opponents.
Besso himself acknowledges the challenge of being so young, but sees it as an opportunity to hone his skills.
“If I win, thank God for that, and if I lose, I will try to win next time,” Besso said.
