HOLDEN, Mass. - The country’s top chess players are set to compete in the 2024 U.S. Chess Championship in St. Louis this week and among the chess grandmasters is Samuel Sevian.

At only 23 years old, the American chess grandmaster out of Holden has been playing chess professionally for about a decade and he said he’s looking forward to the competition at the U.S. Chess Championship.

“Very excited to play the U.S. Championship," Sevian said. "I love playing strong tournaments like this one.”

Sevian said he’s no stranger to playing chess against the best players in the U.S.

“I’ve played all of these guys so many times. It's like my seventh or eighth time, maybe even more, playing in this tournament," Sevian said. "For example, Fabiano Caruana is the world number two who's participating. And a lot of the players are in the top 10 and pretty much everyone's in the top 50 in the world. So, it's a very good, you know, practice event for international events.”

Currently the eighth ranked male U.S. chess player, Sevian became a chess grandmaster at the age of 13, making him the youngest ever American grandmaster at the time.

As he prepares for another U.S. championship, he said it’s all about practice.

“A regular chess game takes about four to five hours to play. We both start with 90 minutes on the clock and there is increment. So, every time you make a move you get 30 seconds," Sevian said. "So, if you're playing four or five hours every day for 11 days or so, it can be a lot of pressure situations.”

Practice for the chess grandmaster means solving chess puzzles either out of a book or from a computer for three to six hours a day.

“Solving puzzles, I’d say, is like free-throw shooting or three-point shooting," Sevian said. "You know how to do something, but you're trying to do it over and over again to improve it. And basically, that’s physical exercise, well, this is like a mental exercise.”

And just as any craft can get repetitive when you’re fine tuning your skills every day, Sevian said he loves just how different every chess match can be.

“There's so many possibilities in chess, so many different positions that basically no two games are ever the same," Sevian said. "So, you can play somebody 10 times, 100 times, even 1,000 times online, let's say, and you get a new, fresh position every time. So that's the beauty of chess in general.”

Sevian said in his young career, he’s noticed a boom of interest in chess. He gives some credit to the popular show "The Queen’s Gambit," but he said the chess club in St. Louis and its founder, Rex Sinquefield, who’s hosting the U.S. Chess Championship this year, has done a lot of work to grow the game.

The championship matches begin on Friday, Oct. 11.