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David Mehler

Chess imparts lasting benefits and creates lasting friendships

In the decades I have been involved with chess, I have enjoyed my friendships with players more than playing the game itself. Some of those friendships have lasted more than fifty years.

Having been a chess teacher and coach for quite a while, another enjoyment that nearly equals those friendships has been to watch my students grow into adults. Seeing students become parents and bring their children to our classes is very gratifying. It suggests that those former students recognized the value of learning chess.

Recently, a group of recent college graduates who had kept in touch with each other since they had been students at Churchill Road Elementary School invited me to lunch. These brilliant students, mainly computer engineers but one who is becoming a materials engineer, wanted to catch up with me.

We discussed their careers as chess players (all but one still play competitively) and professionally. It seems likely that they would have had successful lives without learning chess, but the friendships they developed over the board and the competitive skills they learned have been wonderful.

Chess enhances people’s lives. It helps people from diverse backgrounds create relationships. It improves skills society values. It is an enjoyable way to become better people. I am grateful for the opportunities I have had to meet talented people because of their interest in chess and I hope that those opportunities continue for others as well as myself.

Book Review – The Queen of Chess

Judit Polgar is an inspiration to chess players throughout the world. The strongest female player ever, she is outspoken in encouraging girls, women, and children to learn to play chess.

The Queen of Chess was written by Laurie Wallmark and illustrated by Stevie Lewis.  Written and illustrated for children, this book avoids the problems many books about chess have faced. Polgar’s story needs no embellishment. She became an international chess sensation by the time she was nine years old, and during her career she defeated 11 World Chess Champions, including Garry Kasparov and Magnus Carlsen when each was ranked the best in the world.

The book takes its readers through her history, starting when she learned the rules of the game at age five. Children will be able to relate to her path and should find inspiration from the success that came from her dedication and hard work.

Appropriately, the book avoids all mention of controversies. There is no mention of the game she lost to Kasparov that was marred by his violation of the touch move rule. Later, Polgar beat him after he had suggested that she was a “circus puppet” and that women should stick to having children instead of playing competitive chess. Polgar faced discrimination both because she is a woman and because she is Jewish. That she overcame irrational prejudice in a game of logic and skill makes her journey more impressive, but it was good judgment to avoid those subjects in a book for children.

Polgar has written her own series of instructional chess books for children. Chess Playground, illustrated by her sister International Master Sofia Polgar, is in use in schools in her native Hungary and in China. https://www.juditpolgarmethod.com/

The Queen of Chess offers a few basics about the game and provides a puzzle that comes from a game Judit won at age nine. The book is not designed to teach chess but provides a wonderful introduction to one of the heroes of chess. Published by Little Bee Books, this book is a suitable gift for students in the primary grades (kindergarten through third grade).

Cover photograph courtesy of Simon & Schuster.

Spring is the Season for Tournaments

Spring is the season for major scholastic tournaments. In the District of Columbia, the K-5 Championships were held this past Saturday and the Grades 6-8, and 9-12 Championships will be held this weekend. In Virginia, all of the scholastic championships were held this past weekend.

We were very glad to see so many U.S. Chess Center students participating in both. Kids from Burroughs Elementary, our Capitol Hill Children’s Chess Club, and our group at Cleveland Park Public Library all came (with JoJo from the library group winning with a 4-0 score and earning the right to represent the District of Columbia at the Rockefeller Tournament of Champions).

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The Virginia State Championships were held in Roanoke this year – not an easy drive for our northern Virginia students. Dozens of students made the trek anyway and were rewarded with great competition.

The students renewed friendships and had a wonderful time, despite the cold and windy conditions outside. Playing chess is a wonderful way to make and keep friendships.

The U.S. Chess Center congratulates the students and thanks the parents from Churchill Road, Colvin Run, Greenbriar West, Kent Gardens, Poplar Tree, and Spring Hill for going. While we believe that playing is more important than winning, we should note that students from every school where we run the club brought home at least one trophy.

U.S. Chess Center students recently played in the World Amateur Team Chess Championship in New Jersey

Two teams associated with the U.S. Chess Center played in the World Amateur Team Chess Championship in New Jersey over the weekend, and both returned with impressive awards. The Spring Hill Elementary team was the top elementary school team, and our team from the Theophilus Thompson Club was the top team with an average rating of under 1900. Congratulations to our students!

The World Amateur Team Championship, which was the US Amateur Team Championship when I was competing, was one of my two favorite tournaments (along with the U.S. Open) each year. Instead of scoring wins and losses as individuals, scores are based on the team results. Each team is four players, and they line up against the four players of another team. If a team scores more than two points (one point per win, a half-point for a draw) they score a win. With two points, a team draws that match.

Teams often decide on clever names, and the tournament offers special prizes for creative names. My favorite came from a group of women from the DC area about forty years ago. They dressed in nuns’ habits and called themselves Our Lady of Perpetual Check.

The team format relieves a lot of the pressure ordinarily experienced in chess tournaments, making the event more relaxed and fun. As a player in a team competition, if I lost my game but the team won, I could be happy. If I won my game and the team lost, I could still be satisfied that I did the best I could for the team. If I won and the team won, that was best of all. When I lost and the team also lost, we could accept that our team was out-matched and we would move on to the next round. In short, the result of each game and match was tempered and every round was a fun experience.

Both the Spring Hill Elementary and the Theophilus Thompson teams consisted of players who had experience in big tournaments, so being in a ballroom with more than 1,000 players was not daunting. The teenagers went 4.5/6; the elementary team scored 3.5 points in the six rounds.

Across the Battlefield: A Pawn’s Journey, a review of a children’s book

A book that describes not just the rules of chess but also abstract concepts and basic strategy, while at the same time introducing a plot with about 10 named personalities in 48 pages, is asking a lot of a pre-adolescent reader.  In my opinion, it’s too much.

Jonathan Ferry’s Across the Battlefield, beautifully illustrated by Caroline Zina, is such a book. He takes an interesting game, gives pawns and pieces individual names and personalities, and creates a story about the development of Prunella the Pawn. That would be enough, but the book uses the story as a vehicle to describe the rules and strategy of chess. For many readers, especially early readers, the effort to remember characters and their traits will take precedence over the chess vocabulary and chess strategy the book describes.

A child could well be captivated by the pictures on each page. If read to second graders who had not been exposed to the game, the book could generate interest in learning to play. However, children are likely to be overwhelmed by the firehose of information about the rules, vocabulary, and strategy of the game.

In short, the excess ambition of Across the Battlefield works against its effectiveness in introducing chess concepts to its target audience of 6- to 10-year olds.

Across the Battlefield: A Pawn’s Journey, written by Jonathan Ferry and illustrated by Caroline Zina, is published by Chess Tales, LLC, of St. Louis, MO.

Postcards From The Bobby Fischer Center In Iceland

Fifty-one years ago this month, the chess match that changed the game forever began in Iceland, and since then that tiny island in the North Atlantic has been excited about the game. Iceland has had the most grandmasters per capita in the world since the 1970s and is unique in being the only country with more International Grandmasters (14) than International Masters (12).

In 2005, Iceland conferred citizenship on Bobby Fischer and sent a plane to retrieve him from Japan, where he was being held in custody at the demand of the United States. Fischer remained on the small island nation for the rest of his life.

After he passed away, a group of chess enthusiasts created the Bobby Fischer Center near his final resting place in Selfoss. The Center celebrates Fischer’s life and chess career with particular emphasis on his connection to Iceland.

Recently, I had the opportunity to visit. Its director, Aldís Sigfúsdóttir, is very knowledgeable and gave my wife and me a comprehensive tour. The museum emphasizes Fischer’s life in Iceland and has an excellent display of photos from the 1972 match. We also saw the Letters of Citizenship prepared by Iceland’s Parliament granting Fischer a method of exit from the Japanese jail where he had been held.

The 1972 match pitted the Soviet Empire, which had dominated high-level chess since the second world war, against a young American who eschewed assistance. Fischer knew the world champion, Boris Spassky, but had never beaten him over the board. He had lost three times while securing two draws in their previous matches. However, Fischer had gone on a record-setting run of victories leading up to the World Championship match, including winning 20 games in a row against players competing for the right to challenge for the world championship. Fischer’s international rating was 125 points higher than Spassky’s, a formidable difference.

The match attracted more attention than any previous chess match because of the international politics involved. Fischer made demands on the match organizers up until the games began, and for a while refused to travel to Iceland for the match. It took a series of efforts, including a call from the U.S. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger to implore Fischer to play the match and win for his country, to convince him to compete. By then, the match had been postponed for two days and the Soviet Union had to be persuaded to allow Spassky to compete after the insult of waiting for Fischer to arrive.

At last the match began, and the daily analysis of the games became the most-watched television in America. I had a personal stake in this, as it was in the run-up to the match that people asked me to teach them the game. It proved to be an avocation I would never relinquish.

The museum provides quite a bit of space to Boris Spassky, mainly about the 1972 match. It also covers their second match twenty years after the first, this time in the former Yugoslavia, which led to the indictment of Fischer for violating the U.S. embargo.

Despite their rivalry, the two World Champions became friends. The moving note of condolence that Spassky sent to be read at Fischer’s funeral in 2008 called Fischer his brother.

The Bobby Fischer Center also is used as a place to teach junior players. A substantial library of chess books is available for students to use, and there is space for about a dozen students at a time to play or receive lessons from volunteer grandmasters.

The Bobby Fischer Center is one of only three museums dedicated to World Chess Champions. (Emmanuel Lasker and Max Euwe are the other World Champions to have museums devoted to their memories.) Iceland is a fascinating and beautiful country, and chess players who travel there should make a point of visiting Selfoss, about 45 minutes outside Reykjavik on the Ring Road, and plan to spend an hour or two there.

Some thoughts on the recent tragedy during the Sinquefield Cup in St. Louis

If a chess player is caught cheating, every notable accomplishment that follows is viewed with suspicion. The recent controversy during Sinquefield Cup in St. Louis serves as a reminder to our students that nothing good comes from dishonesty. If Hans Niemann had never been caught cheating before, his win over Magnus Carlsen would have been seen as a magnificent performance, perhaps a once-in-a lifetime accomplishment. That he has admitted cheating repeatedly in his young life, however, has caused this result to be viewed more skeptically.

Many prominent figures in the chess world have weighed in on the likelihood or lack thereof that Niemann broke any rules during the game in question.  This much is certain: in the third round of the annual elite Sinquefield Cup round-robin event, Niemann, the lowest-rated player in the tournament, defeated Carlsen, the long-time World Champion and highest-rated player.  The day after the loss, Carlsen withdrew from the tournament, the first time in his career he has pulled out in the middle of an elite event.  Carlsen’s only public explanation for the withdrawal was an enigmatic Twitter post that was viewed by many as a possible allegation that Niemann had received some form of outside assistance in the game the day before.

At the present moment, any evidence of foul play during that game is subjective and inconclusive.  What has truly amplified the contention is Niemann’s self-confessed history of cheating in online games, some as recently as three years ago.

Our experience shows that most people enjoy playing with strong players but nobody likes playing without confidence that the game will be played fairly. If players don’t follow the same rules, the game is no fun. Trash-talking diminishes the competition, as distracting or annoying an opponent is not supposed to be part of chess. Trying to get away with a touch-move violation, taking a move back, moving an opponent’s piece, or using a computer during a game, all are things that might tempt a player, but players of character resist those thoughts.

There is no game, and there is no tournament, so important that it is worth damaging your reputation or honor. Once either is lost it can take a long and miserable time to get it back.

Meet the Chess Center Team: David Mehler, Founder/President/Teacher

David MehlerThe seeds of my love of teaching were planted in college — not because I had inspirational professors, but through my experiences as a founder of the Pail & Shovel Party. (Google it. I was gone by the time the flamingos landed and the Statue of Liberty arrived, but was involved with the conceptual stage.) Pail & Shovel taught me that anything can be turned into entertainment, entertainment holds people’s attention, and through that attention, education takes place.

During the lead-up to the 1972 Fischer-Spassky match I first became a chess teacher. I was a decent player devoid of teaching experience but after a while found ways to impart the rules and strategy of the game to kids who quickly passed me in skill.

After college, I became a high school classroom teacher with classes in social studies and math. I was the fun teacher in a conservative Catholic school, but always had the goal of getting students to think. When struggling students came to me for additional help, I taught them to play chess and watched as their intellectual self-confidence rose. Inner-city teens who had heard throughout their lifetimes that they would not be able to succeed academically learned that was a lie. If they could play chess, they could do math and understand literature.

During my practice of law, I brought chess to underserved schools, working to convince small children that there was magic in the pieces of plastic they moved around the square board. As they assimilated abstract concepts, their smiles of understanding were more satisfying than favorable verdicts in courtrooms.

When then-World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov asked me to teach chess for a couple of weeks to children who lived in public housing, that was the start of something quite wonderful. The Washington Post editorial noting the value of chess garnered the attention of people who helped create what has become the U.S. Chess Center. I stopped taking new legal clients and never looked back.