Eye on the title

One man’s quest for his grandmaster title.

I WAS rifling through my diary when suddenly it dawned on me that it has been over a year since I learnt that Mas Hafizulhelmi Rahman, international master and Malaysia’s top player, had embarked on his quest for his grandmaster title.

One year. Time has really passed by very quickly.

  Mas Hafizulhelmi Rahman is Malaysia’s top player and an international master.

In this one year, Mas Hafizulhelmi had been playing chess like he hadn’t played before. Trained like he had never done before. Went agonisingly close to a norm on several occasions.

Next month, he will be 28, which means that he would have been playing chess for close to 20 years.

I remember that the first time I saw him was at the old Chess Palace. It was a bungalow off Jalan Gurney in Kuala Lumpur that had been converted into a chess centre.

I had written before that he was only a young boy then but he caught the eye of Georgian grandmaster Eduard Gufeld who had come to play simultaneous chess against some 20 to 30 players. Mas Hafizulhelmi was one of them.

Gufeld. Now that’s another personality and another story. He was a generous man with a generous heart and a generous appetite. Anyone who had been in contact with him would have been touched by his exuberance for chess and come away with a favourite story.

He always claimed to be searching for his chess Mona Lisa. Chess, to him, was an art form. Above everything else, chess was art waiting to be created.

If you think that you have already played your finest game of chess, you have to continue searching for the next game to make it your new Mona Lisa. That was his underlying philosophy in chess. Needless to say, Gufeld could claim many games as his Mona Lisa.

Anyway, back to Mas Hafizul. Gufeld could recognise that this unassuming young boy before him would possibly become one of the top players in the country. Grandmaster potential, according to Gufeld.

So in the years that followed, Mas Hafizul played chess, carefully nurtured and encouraged by his father, Cikgu Rahman, who was his most ardent supporter. Rahman kept tabs on his son’s progress.

Whenever we happen to meet at chess tournaments – which wasn’t often, maybe one or twice a year – he would sometimes ask me about his son’s progress. How would I compare his son with the progress of other junior chess players from another country? And he would continue on an animated monologue and I would be too polite to interrupt. I could clearly see how proud Rahman was of his son.

In the meantime, Mas Hafizul grew up. He became a personable young man. He still showed a gift for the game and he continued playing chess. He became a national master at 12 and got his Fide Master title two years later.

Twice in his teens, he went to Budapest to play in the First Saturday tournaments and he became an international master at 17 years of age. The next stop for anyone in his shoes would be the grandmaster title.

But inevitably, chess had to take a back seat to his studies. For four years, he scaled down his competitive play while he completed his degree in England.

He came back, found employment with Petronas and tried to resume his chess activities.

It wasn’t easy, not when a player finds that he now has to juggle chess with everything else, especially work and finding his place in society. Nevertheless, Mas Hafizul still had his chess ambition.

Fortunately, with an employer like Petronas, he was able to take a sabbatical from his work to pursue his dreams. He still has some months to go before his quest ends but in the past year alone, he had gone searching for his grandmaster norm from tournaments in Asia, Australia and Europe.

Mas Hafizul won’t be the first to tell you that it is not an easy task. After all, other like-minded players are also searching for their norms. A few will be lucky enough to get theirs quickly but, for most players, there will be more misses than hits.

At the end of the day, it will all depend on Mas Hafizul himself to achieve his dream. As spectators, all we can do is to encourage. But whether or not Mas Hafizul becomes a grandmaster is beside the point.

In my opinion, more important is that he tries his best. And perhaps too, at the end of it all, we’ll see Mas Hafizul coming back a much better player for his experience and a readiness to give his worth back to the society that had encouraged and supported him in the pursuit of his chess ambitions.

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This article first appeared in The Star on 16 Jan 2009