Photograph by Dilip Vishwanat
School's out, and in the McKelvey Elementary School gymnasium, the kids are pumped and ready to play. On the walls, behind the basketball hoops, purple dragon mascots breathe fire. Shouts vibrate as the boys roughhouse, slinging book bags into a corner.
On the shiny floor wait meticulously straight rows of chessboards. A kid's throwing down Ziploc bags of chess pieces, and at a sign from Dr. John Wiedner, 99 kids sit cross-legged, still as Buddhist monks.
"A lot of these kids I'm going to guess have ADHD," Wiedner confides later, "but when I tell them to shake hands and start their game, it gets dead quiet."
A medical doc whose son's a chess whiz, Wiedner started volunteering with the McKelvey chess club in Maryland Heights three years ago. Back then, there were about 20 members; today it's one of the largest school clubs in St. Louis, with more than 100 kids on the roster. "I read up on tactics — I bet there's 20 new chess books published every month — and I gave the kids Airheads [taffy] just for attending," he recalls. They started winning interscholastic tournaments and bringing home trophies — "Kids love the hardware" — and the delighted principal slipped Wiedner some cash from his own wallet to buy extra chessboards. Hearing what was happening, parents started coming to the weekly chess club meetings to help with crowd control, and they bought the club's members eight wireless devices called MonRois, personal chess managers reminiscent of an iPhone. Some of these kids are so young their handwriting is still rickety, but with a MonRoi they can make notations of their chess moves, analyze blunders later and get coaching from Wiedner — who can't exactly yell from the bleachers.
His only concern now is the girls: "Getting them to come to tournaments is very hard. Chess is a very quiet, nonsocial game; you are silent the whole time. Girls like communication in games; the relationships are so much more important than the winning or losing." Maybe the girls don't want to show up the boys? He snorts. "Most of my girls, I can't imagine playing the damsel for any of these boys!" Still, there's a gender gap, so last fall he made a countermove: He hired Izzi Grossman, a freshman at Ladue High School, to teach the girls separately. Now about 20 girls have their own club-within-the-club.
First-grader Shrinithi Karthikeyan comes to the gym early and slides her feet along the row of boards, waiting for the other girls. Her eyes are soft and eager behind large spectacles, and she's wearing a velvet tunic over jeans, her pink backpack inches wider than her narrow frame. After club announcements (Wiedner brings his own P.A. system), the girls head downstairs to the art room, where Shrinithi immediately begins a game with one of the older girls.
Two kindergarteners play tug of war with their board, shrieking and giggling. But at a signal from Izzi, they raise their arms high above the board in an elaborate handshake and begin placing their pieces, moving swiftly and with startling precision. Their focus lasts a solid 10 minutes before Anna, a blonde pixie, piles her seized pieces into a pedestal, horsie on top, and blows with birthday-candle gusto to see if she can knock him down.
A word from Izzi brings another 10 minutes of rapt silence and orderly, although perhaps not yet analytical, play.
At the next table, one of the older girls has captured eight pieces by now; her opponent has taken only two pawns. The girl who's winning smacks her lips over her missing two front teeth, seizes a ninth piece and looks up expectantly.
"I want to move there," her opponent says tentatively, pointing.
"Really? I mean, really?" A tiny hand snakes out and grabs the tenth piece. The opponent sighs, slides a rook one square and mutters, "Your turn."
"Can a king move this way?" the one who's winning asks innocently. Her opponent recites the rules, knowledge of which is not helping her one bit.
The first girl persists: "But can the king kill?"
Chess began around A.D. 600 as a two-player Indian war game, Chatarung. Four centuries later, Persian traders taught the Europeans, who promptly transgendered the male counselor at the king's side, creating a queen. The overlay of chivalry made the game's intensity sexy. Young men and women desperate to steal unchaperoned time alone developed a passionate interest in chess, and in the mid-1700s, Ben Franklin flirted with many a beautiful woman over his chessboard (when he wasn't writing his prim treatise on "The Morals of Chess").
Two centuries later, chess edged back into a war game — Cold War, that is — as Brooklyn-born Bobby Fischer became the youngest U.S. champion in history, trouncing Boris Spassky — and by implication all of the USSR — in an inevitably politicized victory. A reclusive genius, Fischer nonetheless drew thousands of amateurs to the game in the 1970s — and after his death this January, a fresh wave of publicity has triggered a resurgence of interest.
Izzi learned in a blaze of determination, because her dad was teaching her older brother. But she soon felt the pull: "that internal wanting to be recognized, wanting to win, knowing you can do something not everybody else can do." In seventh grade, she played a 12-year-old boy with a rating twice as good as hers: "I'd never played him before, but I had definitely heard of him. Everybody told me if I lasted 20 moves, it'd be amazing — and I beat him so bad!"
Exultation still warms her voice. That's what gives chess competition its force, she says: the predictions. "You want to win a lot more to prove them wrong." Girlfriends tease her for being a chess nerd, and she shrugs off the truth: "It's kind of a brainy sport; you do see tube socks and shorts that come above the knee." She sometimes wonders if it's that kind of teasing that keeps girls out of the game.
"I don't know why girls don't play," she admits, exasperated. "I'd like to see more girls, because I don't see that many. There are one or two girls who have played in tournaments before, but some just don't want to spend the time. The boys will; they really want that win.
"The two girls that go to the tournaments have older brothers who play, which I definitely understand, because I definitely like to beat my brother," she adds.
Domestic battles might be cutthroat, but they're just warm-ups: Chess has become a school sport — even, in some ways, a team sport — with thousands of kids across the metro area competing in interscholastic tournaments. What puzzled Izzi at the last big tournament was the team that was caught cheating and disqualified. "They had this really complicated system of hand signals," she says, bemused. "Why not put all that energy into the chess?"
Across the hall in the darkened orchestra room, Wiedner is projecting game board diagrams onto the wall for a handful of the most skilled boys. "Now, your gut instinct tells you not to do this" — he uses the computer to trace a path — "but you have secured this pawn's advancement. This is now a pawn that can't be touched." They stare intently. A hand shoots up: "Can I show you a different way?" a boy asks eagerly. Wiedner nods and follows the boy's directions, landing himself in check. "OK," the boy says, regrouping, "then give the black bishop to 3C [each square on the board has a name]. It's defended by the king and ... Oh." Wiedner has made the move, which has proved disastrous. They all laugh.
"You see why that didn't work for you?" Wiedner asks mildly.
"Yeah," the boy answers abstractedly, thinking hard.
Few other pursuits draw kids into their heads — and keep them there — as powerfully as chess. It's a grown-up sport, and its power is legend. King James I of Scotland was playing chess when he was murdered; Ivan the Terrible died opening a game; in 1060 William the Conqueror broke a board over the head of the prince of France and nearly started a war. Many a leader has tried to ban the game: In 1005 the caliph al-Hakim ordered that all chessboards in Egypt be burned. In 1061 Cardinal Damiani forbade the game, sternly reminding his chess-obsessed priests they should be busy saving souls. In 1195 the rabbi Maimonides also pronounced chess a forbidden game because it was being played for money, and it was a distraction from proper study. In 1291 the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Peckman, warned his clergy they'd eat a prisoner's diet of bread and water if they refused to stop playing chess. And most recently, the Taliban banned chess in Afghanistan.
In the cafeteria of Fanning Middle School, Treavon Taylor leans to watch the chess game next to his. "Keep that king right there," he advises a young woman, whose index finger falters. "Can you mind your game?" she flashes back. With a shrug, Taylor returns to his match with Anthony Brown, whose cousin, Derek Brown, teaches for the En Passant Chess Club. At Fanning, the St. Louis nonprofit UrbanFUTURE commissioned En Passant as part of a wider mentoring and motivation program, but the organization also teaches in six other school districts.
"Check," Anthony says quietly, the hard "k" crisp with satisfaction.
"Wow," Taylor says with a gulp. "This is bad. Should I go ahead?" He muses aloud, "What should I do, what should I do ... ?" Suddenly he moves his king, setting it down with a bang.
It's a good move.
"Mmmm. Getting on my nerves," Anthony murmurs.
At the next table, Derek is saying, "... and that's how you play chess. Instead of just trying to use one to take all his pieces. Now you've got his queen."
"Oh man," an onlooker murmurs. "You let her take your queen? Man, you duped!"
In the silence, Anthony announces, "I got one move and checkmate." Taylor mutters, "I see it, I see it," and they shake hands. "Good game," they say.
Derek hears and grins. He's finished another quick lesson, and his pupil's eager to play her friend: "OK, let me do her like the man did me. I want to show her the trick the knight can do." He moves on to a game between eighth-graders Nona Nguyen and Farzana Abdulahad. Nona's already such a formidable player, Derek removes her rook, queen and knight at the start. "Aw, at least give her her rook," a watching boy says — so Derek takes her bishop instead. There's plenty of kibitzing: "Can she move her horse?" and, when the knight's in peril, an urgently hissed, "Move that thing!" Derek intervenes only when one of his pupils is being rushed: "You chill out. She was thinking." Otherwise, he does his own ongoing commentary: "What else? There's one other place you can move your queen. You are used to her attacking diagonally, but she attacks forward, too. A lot of people leave their big pieces at home, and then they get stuck there and can't fight."
Chess is all about not getting stuck.
"We see the game focus kids who were unfocusable," says Frank Van Bree, president of UrbanFUTURE, which instituted chess this fall at Fanning and its feeder, Mann Elementary School. "They control their destiny; the game's theirs to win or lose. If we can introduce civility into this kind of intellectual competition, isn't that just what we're looking for?"
Van Bree recently started mentoring a boy who'd just begun playing chess at the UrbanFUTURE Academy. Casting about for a point of connection, Van Bree said, "Really? I used to play chess."
"You any good?"
"Good enough to beat you."
"Oh no, no, no, no, no."
"So here we are," Van Bree says now, "talking smack to each other. The first time I played him, I smoked him. Now it is everything I can do to beat him. We are at parity."
Why would that matter any more than improvement in, say, a kid's batting average? "Kids who play chess learn to think deeply; they learn to think ahead," Van Bree says, adding that chess' reported cognitive benefits could fill a book. Self-esteem, self-discipline, confidence, endurance, spatial skills, math skills, reading, verbal aptitude, logic, memory, organization, foresight, focus, drive, clear and precise thinking, concentration, independence, imagination, mental flexibility and creativity. Rewards for problem solving come instantly — as do punishments, for failure to think ahead. The structures and strategies embedded in the game require intellectual maturity — consider the concept of a gambit, an opening that involves the planned sacrifice of one or more pieces in order to achieve a higher goal. Researchers speculate that playing chess develops new pathways in the brain, forging new connections. And at the other end of the spectrum, they're now suggesting chess to prevent the mental brittleness that can foreshadow Alzheimer's disease.
Mischievously, Gabriel Boyd named his En Passant Chess Club for a rare pawn move that throws most chess players. His work's serious, though: He and his staff train about 500 kids a week, more than a fourth of them considered at-risk. Boyd — who is also the vice-president of the Gateway Chess League — runs tournaments for kids all over the metro area. In April he took a group of kids to Atlanta for the U.S. Chess K–12 national championships, and in May he brought chess' first and only African-American grandmaster to a St. Louis Public Schools tournament.
"The beautiful thing about all this is we have different nationalities and backgrounds coming together," Boyd says. "Chess is not grade-, age- or sex-determined. Little kids can't compete with big kids in basketball, but they can in chess — and it's very hard on high school kids when they lose to 6-year-olds! Part of what we do is teach kids how to win gracefully."
He smiles, remembering a 4-year-old girl, already a violinist, who came for lessons and instantly started beating older kids in tournaments. "She would cry if her opponent would cry. I had to work with her to help her understand that it's OK to beat an older boy, and if he cries, that's OK too."
What's rough is when the middle-aged CEOs cry. "Chess has both scholastic — K–12 — and nonscholastic tournaments," Boyd explains. "Adults must play in nonscholastic, but children can play in anything. So you have prodigy 6-year-olds playing in out-of-town tournaments against adults."
Another of Boyd's prodigies is a self-effacing fourth-grader who's been studying with him since first grade. "I have to tell grown-ups, 'If you play this cute little girl, please play your best. She doesn't want to just run through you; she wants a good game.'"
Then there's the fifth-grader, Sam Stephens, who just neatly dispatched a high schooler with a ranking of fifth in the state and a rating well over 1800 (a rating of 1500 suggests that someone could beat half the U.S. chess tournament population; above 2000, that he could wipe out 90 percent or more). You just never know. For all its cool strategy, the chess world's wildly unpredictable.
Small, too. One of Boyd's pupils went on vacation in Mexico with his parents, found a chessboard in a remote village. A few minutes later, another member of the En Passant club showed up looking for a game.
Last month, what's being hailed as the most beautiful chess club in the country opened in the Central West End. Millionaire St. Louis businessman Rex Sinquefield, investment guru and chess fanatic, provided the cash to renovate the three-story building between Brennan's and Companion on Maryland, and the
St. Louis Chess Club and Scholastic Center opens this month.
The interior designers went through hell.
Chess players think of their pursuit as more sport than hobby: Not only is the mental work challenging, but you also sit for long periods — tournament games can run a good six hours — and posture and core strength become more than nagging rhetoric. Lighting, quiet, the size of the tables, the size of the chairs, the size of the boards — it all matters, the way climate matters to an opera singer. Planners visited an old chess club in Greenwich Village and other clubs around the country before deciding on a sleek, contemporary look, white and chocolate brown, with padded wood chairs — some with arms, some without — that have the club logo engraved on the back.
There's a retail store inside the club; also a resource center, a rich chocolate-brown hardwood floor on the main level, a fireplace upstairs. "No piped-in music," manager Tony Rich says hastily. "They don't like a lot of background noise. But we have LCD screens on the walls, and some of the boards connect to a computer." That way, people in other parts of the building can watch important games on flat-screen TVs as they're being played. "World-renowned players will be coming in," Rich promises. The club will also offer skittles (casual) chess and blitz (speed play). Much of the chess will be scholastic — such a spectacles-on-the-nose sort of
word, but in this case, rather exciting. The new chess center has asked Van Bree to help spread chess programs to more of the St. Louis Public School District's elementary and middle schools, and researchers from Saint Louis University and the University of Missouri will be studying the results over time. Kids will be able to play at the new chess center, too, if they're accompanied by an adult. "And for parents — they get so bored — we'll have wireless access in the waiting room," Rich says.
Individual memberships cost $80 a year, and the club will stay open until 10 or 11 p.m. six nights a week. Will there be any common space, like a lounge for socializing?
"Well, you know, chess players are there to play chess," Rich says.
There's something about the game — its infinite variations, its complexity, its one-on-one intensity and private quest — that summons every ounce of concentration the human mind can muster.
And that's as true for a 5-year-old prodigy as it was for Bobby Fischer.
