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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.

U.S. Chess Center Founder David Mehler Profiled in Washington Jewish Week

Since forming the U.S. Chess Center over 30 years ago, David Mehler has been at the center of our efforts to teach the game to young people.  In a feature published earlier today by Washington Jewish Week, he touches on several topics related to the Center, including the philosophy that has helped us reach tens of thousands of students in the greater D.C. area with our instruction. 

From our beginning, we’ve always encouraged the idea of chess not as an exclusive vocation for some cadre of intellectual super-elites, but rather as a pastime that everyone can enjoy with their friends.  As Mr. Mehler explains, anyone can learn to play and anyone can profit from learning.  Children who may be used to thinking only about short-term consequences learn the value of strategizing and planning ahead toward a long term goal, and students in the habit of acting out in the classroom can find an outlet for their energies that is equal parts competitive and mentally demanding.  Our preference for in-school chess classes over after-school clubs exists for the simple reason that those students least likely to sign up to learn the game are the ones likely to benefit the most from doing so. 

Our perspective on teaching the game runs along those same egalitarian lines.  Aside from a required rudimentary understanding of the rules, strategy and etiquette of chess, there’s not necessarily a correlation between playing strength and the ability to effectively impart the fundamentals to children.  Beyond Mr. Mehler’s jest about how “I make terrible moves while I’m playing competitively, but I can teach kids not to follow my example,” there’s a great deal of truth to the idea that you don’t have to be a grandmaster to be a good teacher of the game; you just need patience and a basic knowledge of what makes chess so useful. 

 

You can read the entire article on Mr. Mehler and the beginnings of the U.S. Chess Center here.  And, if you agree that chess can be a valuable tool to sharpen the minds of children, please consider donating to support our charitable work.

Chess Center Founder David Mehler Receives USCF’s Outstanding Career Achievement Award

Earlier this summer David Mehler, U.S. Chess Center Founder and President, was presented with the Outstanding Career Achievement Award from the national U.S. Chess Federation, in honor of his many decades spent teaching and promoting the game of chess in the greater Washington area and throughout the country.

Mr. David Mehler
Founder, U.S. Chess Center

• Arranged for the U.S. Chess Hall of Fame and Museum to move from upstate New York to a facility five blocks from The White House
• Organized student trip to meet chess players in Cuba
• Organized Internet chess matches with students from countries in Africa, Asia, and Europe
• Staged chess exhibitions in many places, including the National Mall, the Smithsonian, and the Charles Sumner Museum
• Taught tens of thousands of students and trained dozens of instructors

Chess Teacher, including teaching students who won:

• U.S. Junior Invitational
• Denker Tournament of National Champions
• U.S. Cadet Championship
• U.S. High School Championship
• U.S. Junior High School Championship
• U.S. Elementary School Blitz Championship

Organized and directed:

• U.S. Armed Forces Championships
• U.S. Cadet Championships
• U.S. Junior Invitational Championship
• International invitationals at which IM norms were earned

Maryland Chess Association: Vice President and President

D.C. Chess League: Executive Director, Scholastic Coordinator, and Newsletter Editor

Region III Vice President

Member, US Chess Bylaws Committee

Member, US Chess Scholastic Committee

Chair, US Chess Development Committee

Chess club president: University of Massachusetts/Amherst

Chess club president: University of Wisconsin at Madison

Sacramento Chess Club Director

Arlington (VA) Chess Club Director

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.