The kids getting dropped off by their parents on a Saturday morning at Lake Forest’s Gorton Community Center look like they should be heading for the swing set. Instead, they’re headed to a basement room for an advanced chess class.
Lokhova nods her head. “If you make a queen,” she says, “you lose the game.”
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Lokhova, who lives in Wicker Park, has led Gorton’s Chess Wizards program since last July. The results are already apparent. In November, Gold won the kindergarten section at the Illinois All Grade State Championships in Bloomington. Jeff Nickels, 11, won the top unrated-player award in the fifth-grade section. Bob van Gelder, 7, took the same award in the first-grade section, Shannon in the second-grade section. In January, Gold and Sam Saalfeld, 9, won prizes at the Northwest Scholastic Open Chess Tournament in Hoffman Estates.
“She lets us debate our ideas, and she does not stop us until things get out of hand,” says eight-year-old Taylor Cathcart. “Other teachers don’t let us debate. They don’t give us a chance to think about it.”
Back then the government picked up expenses–training, equipment, travel–for promising players. “The government viewed it as strategic development of the country–it invested money in nuclear warheads and athletes. It sounds funny, but actually it’s pretty sad,” says Lokhova. “Chess in Russia is taken on a much more professional level than it is here. You have soccer moms in the United States who drive their kids to practice and pick them up every day. In Russia we have the same with chess. Parents would literally spend days driving their kids to state tournaments. The only thing I didn’t like about Russia and the way chess was played there is that when I played in tournaments I was not allowed to play against men. I only played against women.”
She earned bachelor’s degrees in economics and studio art last spring, and the college, which exhibited her watercolors on silk last year, named her the top senior in studio art. Peak6, an options-trading firm, soon recruited her for its trainee program, figuring a skilled chess player could perform well in the high-pressure environment. She started there last July, the same month she began teaching an eight-week course at Gorton.
Lokhova wants to resume playing in tournaments, become a master, and write a book about teaching kids chess. But Peak6 and coaching eat up her time. Her brother, a chess master, may come here this summer and help her at Gorton. “If you have the love for teaching, if you have the love for the game of chess or the love for anything you teach, you can succeed at it,” she says. “I don’t regard myself as a very good chess player. I’m pretty good at it, but I know there are a lot of people who are much better than me. Some of them are very well known throughout the world, and some of them are not. But I think I’m a very good coach.”
