YAHOO! – “I am close to becoming the first African-American female chess master.” Law student Rochelle Ballantyne has a current chess rating of around 2000, which earns her the official title of chess expert. To become a chess master, players must reach the magic number of 2200. “It is obviously not easy to become a master. I’ve been trying to get it for, like the past 10 years. But if I do it, I’ll be the first.” As a teen her chess career was captured in a documentary. Ballantyne was the only female star of the 2012 film “Brooklyn Castle” about young chess players at a low-income New York school. “I started playing chess when I was eight or nine years old. My grandmother taught me because she thought I was a really rowdy kid, and she thought chess would be a good way to sort of calm me down.” A decade on, Ballantyne is still chasing the dream while going to law school at New York University, holding down three jobs and interning for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.