EASTHAM — Few onlookers were surprised when Joey Smith and Lucas Wilson-Bevington sat down across from each other at a table in Nauset Regional High School’s new cafeteria for the final round of the Miles Tibbetts Chess Tournament on Nov. 26. The two seniors have taken turns winning the annual competition since they were sophomores.
This time, knowing his rival well gave Wilson-Bevington the win.
In his freshman year, Smith, an up-and-coming “chess prodigy,” according to Coach Sean Mulholland, beat senior Tye Moore in the finals. In 2022, he seemed unstoppable as he checkmated Wilson-Bevington to win the title for the second year in a row.
But last year, when Wilson-Bevington found himself facing Smith again in the finals, he was ready. Methodical play gave him the edge. It was an exciting moment for the chess club, with many of the students wondering if Smith had finally met his match.
The rivals played a long and careful game this year: neither player captured any pieces until about seven minutes had passed. Although they played with fifteen minutes of turn time, Wilson-Bevington’s moves were much quicker than Smith’s, and there was over a minute of difference between the two for much of the match-up.
Smith felt the pressure. “I only had a minute left on my clock,” he said afterward. “I started making some irresponsible decisions.”
Mulholland said that Smith could be impulsive at times, so opponents understanding and exploiting that would be key to coming out on top.
Smith and Wilson-Bevington are by now familiar with each other’s style of play. They’re not just rivals: they’re also teammates. Wilson-Bevington is the number-one player on the NRHS chess team; Smith is number two. That means that they sit next to each other during matches, with Wilson-Bevington playing the highest-ranked player from the opposing school and Smith playing the second-highest. The two also play together on the school’s tennis team, and last year both played on the junior varsity soccer team as well.
In chess, both players favor protecting their pawns until they can be turned into queens or knights, so it was important for Wilson-Bevington to find a way to hurt Smith’s late game.
“During the last-minute pawn break to the finish, you really have to count your moves,” Mulholland said. It makes the game exciting, he said, but players need to be wary of making mistakes.
They haven’t made many. Last year, Smith and Wilson-Bevington represented Nauset with teammates Tim Nass and Ronan Iles at the National K-12 Chess Tournament in Orlando, Fla. Each played more than 21 hours of chess over three days. They came in 10th among 21 teams of 11th-graders from across the country.
The Miles Tibbetts Tournament has been a yearly event at NRHS since 2013, when it was held in honor of Tibbetts, a Nauset student, who died in a car accident in Wellfleet that summer.
“I didn’t know about it until after his death,” Mulholland said, “but he was a pretty good chess player, and he was teaching younger children to play chess at the Wellfleet library.”
When Tibbetts’s friends decided to honor him with a tournament, about 80 students turned out to play. It was so popular that Mulholland decided to start a chess club at the school.
This year, participation in the tourney was a little lower than in previous years — there were 20 entrants. Mulholland said he thinks that’s because students are afraid of short-changing their homework time to practice chess.
Still, the tournament was hard to resist. During the later rounds, some of the spectators who knew how to play chess took seats at the empty boards and, in the tradition modeled by Miles Tibbetts, began teaching their friends to play.
