“I Survived Every Move”: Inalegwu Samuel Oche’s Chess Story

Player story · Player Stories · 9 min read

Inalegwu Samuel Oche was 20 when he finally sat down to learn chess properly. He is 22 now, a final-year law student at Elizade University in Nigeria, and the game has spent two years rearranging how he thinks about defeat, intelligence and choice. This is his account, edited for clarity and length.

He is from Benue State, and before chess took hold he was already looking for ways to test his mind: Sudoku, and a reading habit that moved between philosophy and fiction — Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. What drew him to all of it, he says, was a single quest: to challenge his intelligence.

He had heard of chess as far back as 2022. Ovie Francis was the first person to tell him about the game and ask him to play. He was not interested. He did not know that two years later he would find it hard to separate the game from himself.

The short version: Yacim Joel taught him how the pieces move and showed him the e4 e5 opening in June 2024. He lost his first serious game to a course mate’s Scholar’s Mate, and the laughter that followed taught him more than any lesson. By 2026 he had passed 1,900 in rapid, 1,800 in blitz and 1,600 in bullet on Chess.com — and there is still one opponent he badly wants to beat.

Before the board

“I am from Benue State, Nigeria, and I am a final-year law student at Elizade University,” he writes. “Before chess became a significant part of my life, I was already looking for ways to challenge my mind.”

In June 2024, in his second year of law, a friend changed the direction of his spare time. Yacim Joel introduced him to the game, taught him how the pieces moved, and showed him the e4 e5 opening. Inalegwu was hooked immediately. “It felt as though I had always been meant to play.”

The Scholar’s Mate

What pushed him to actually study the game was not a victory. It was a humiliation. He played his course mate Afuye Morgan, who beat him with Scholar’s Mate — the four-move mate every beginner is warned about.

People laughed. He felt dull and embarrassed, and then he felt angry. That anger sent him to the board, and what kept him there afterwards was the feeling the game gave him.

He practised against bots, watched videos, and played as often as he could. Gotham Chess became one of the channels he watched most. By his fourth day he was already playing against Yacim. He tried to put in at least an hour a day, but improvement was not smooth: he would reach winning positions and fail to convert them, and make mistakes he could not explain. “Sometimes I felt stupid almost every day. Reaching 500 Elo seemed difficult enough, but I kept going.”

The first breakthroughs

In 2024 he reached 1,000 Elo on Chess.com, and the milestone landed harder than the number suggests.

“It felt glorious. I felt like I was on the moon and Neil Armstrong had cleaned my boots.”

Inalegwu Samuel Oche

More important than the rating was what had changed in his head. Losing still hurt, but he began to treat defeat as information: a mistake to examine, an inaccuracy to correct, a blunder to learn from. He did not want to quit. He wanted to understand what he had missed.

In January 2025 he finally beat Ovie Francis, the player regarded as the best at Elizade University — the same person who had first asked him to play in 2022. The room buzzed and people cheered, laughing at Ovie, who calls himself “Magnus Carlson” and likes to say, “I am who I think I am.” Beating him, Inalegwu says, felt as though his mind had expanded.

That win also brought him into contact with something he had experienced before chess and had never named: a state of unusual clarity he calls the void, where he can think cleanly and see detail. It is not something he can summon at will. It tends to arrive when he is deeply concentrated.

What the board taught him about thinking

The ratings mark progress, but Inalegwu says they do not tell the whole story. Chess changed what he means by intelligence. He used to connect it mainly with passing examinations and memorising information. The board showed him that it involves more: seeing possibilities, anticipating what might happen, and thinking beyond the move in front of you.

He describes the habit as prophylactic reasoning — constantly asking what could happen next, and what the opponent might be preparing.

The game beyond the game

At the height of his obsession he could play between twenty and forty games in a day, watch six or seven chess videos, and solve puzzles. He lost track of time badly enough that he started setting alarms. He played whenever he could, sometimes minutes before an examination, sometimes from the back of a classroom.

It did not take him away from law. He kept up his studies and his other interests, and noticed his grades sometimes shifting from the As he wanted to more Bs. He has always been able to memorise quickly, including cases and legal principles, and his mind has never sat in one place: law, science, philosophy, coding.

What the board did change was his sense of consequence. “If I choose well, I smile and make merry. If I choose poorly, I cry and feel stupid. The board makes consequences visible.” A move can be brilliant, careless or merely inaccurate, and the player has to live with what follows.

The opponents he remembers

There is one game he still wants. He wants a rematch with Afuye Morgan — the Scholar’s Mate game that embarrassed him at the beginning and was never properly settled. He last challenged him during Law Week. Morgan’s answer has not changed: “The master doesn’t play with children.”

He has also deliberately tested himself against stronger players. On 5 September 2026, at Chess Heights in Lagos, he played an opponent rated 2119 FIDE. He lost — but for a while he had a good position, and losing did not erase the value of the experience. Playing stronger opponents, he says, excites him. He wants to see what he can do against them, and he wants to prove himself.

Chase of Genius

In 2025, after being selected to represent his university at a tournament that was ultimately cancelled, Inalegwu began thinking about building a chess community of his own. He called it Chase of Genius — a name drawn from his pursuit of knowledge and the extraordinary, and from his belief in the idea associated with László Polgár that geniuses are made, not born.

He sent invitations and people joined, but he could not sustain the drive needed to keep the community alive, and it has been dormant since. He was disappointed, and he blamed himself. He still wants to revive it. His original vision was larger than a chess club at one university: he wanted to develop a chess culture, eventually spread it across Nigeria, and build something that could become a school.

The obstacle, he says, was simple. People were not interested enough. But Chase of Genius still represents something he refuses to drop — his drive, and his appetite for knowledge and innovation.

The dream ahead

His ambition is to become a Grandmaster and win the World Championship. He knows how long the road is between where he stands and that, and he knows how much theory he still has to learn. But chess has never been only about rating for him. It is a place where he tests his choices, confronts his mistakes, and discovers what he has not yet learned.

When he thinks about the whole journey, he comes back to two things. One is the power of choice: choose well and you may smile, choose poorly and you must face the consequences. The other is what he wants to be remembered for, whatever he eventually achieves.

“That I survived every move.”

Inalegwu Samuel Oche

He began with a Scholar’s Mate, embarrassment and a determination to understand the game. He is still learning, still losing, still improving, and still chasing a future he has not reached. “Perhaps that is the point. Every move asks something of me, and every game gives me another chance to answer.”

About the contributor

• Name: Inalegwu Samuel Oche
• Age: 22
• From: Benue State, Nigeria
• Studying: Law, final year, Elizade University
• Chess.com: chess.com/member/Samqlin
• Lichess: lichess.org/@/Samqlin
• TikTok: @s.anakai
• Instagram: @a.n.a.k.a.i
• Founder of: Chase of Genius, a university chess community

His games are public on Chess.com and Lichess, and he posts about chess as @s.anakai on TikTok and @a.n.a.k.a.i on Instagram.

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Further reading: Inalegwu Samuel Oche

More on the Inalegwu Samuel Oche: How to Start a Chess Club in Your Neighbourhood, The 1998 Elista Olympiad: the day Nigeria won chess gold, Nigeria at the Chess Olympiad: Teams, results and the record. For the official wording, see Inalegwu Samuel Oche — Chess.com profile. For more on Inalegwu Samuel Oche, see our full guides on the Afro Rook blog. If you enjoyed Inalegwu Samuel Oche’s account, the Player Stories series collects more of them — and we would like to read yours.