Hub chess course has kids thinking two moves ahead

Jin-ah Kim

It’s a rainy Saturday afternoon, and 12-year-old South End resident Steven Tung is acting his age — horsing around with his friends, wrestling and having fun at the Wang YMCA in Chinatown.

Then, all of a sudden, he makes a beeline for a small classroom next to the center’s badminton court, enters and takes a seat. It is almost 2 p.m., and the moment Steven has been anxiously awaiting has finally come.

Chess class is about to start.

Steven has loved to play chess since his father first taught him the game at the age of four, and he’s always wanted to improve his skills.

“Good defense is good offense,” he says, relating the lessons he’s learned. “Learning chess at a young age is a great experience.”

Thanks to the YMCA, young chess lovers like Steven have the opportunity to add to their experience by taking free chess lessons from Harvard University students.

The YMCA recently joined forces with the Harvard Chess Club to establish the Boston Area Scholastic Initiative for Chess (BASIC), a league of after-school chess clubs at local YMCA sites that strives to develop a chess network for kids in Boston, something the city has lacked for years. Following its successful launch during the spring school semester, BASIC’s summer session begins tomorrow.

“It is the only such program in place in Boston,” said Arin Madenci, a junior at Harvard and president of the university’s Chess Club. “No widely available local chess league existed for kids, until now.”

The program aims to empower young individuals, foster community and encourage both healthy competition and an enthusiasm for intellectual pursuits. Madenci said chess is a perfect fit for those goals, because the game has long been shown to promote creativity, strategy, analytical skills, discipline and sportsmanship.

BASIC relies on volunteers from several universities, including Georgia Tech, MIT and Harvard. Each Friday and Saturday, the college students teach kids and teenagers who are part of the YMCA’s after-school program and Passport program — which enables local families without Y memberships to use facilities, play sports and take courses at branches on the weekends — at YMCAs in Egleston Square, Oak Square, Chinatown and the Y’s Central location on Huntington Avenue.

About 15 young chess enthusiasts meet with two instructors for weekly sessions that last one to two hours. To the kids, the instructors are influential not only as teachers, but as role models — making a thumb’s up sign, Steven calls his chess teachers “the best of the best.”

During one spring class, Harvard senior Albert Yeh attracted the Passport students’ attention with a story about a fictional Grandmaster, Professor Poof. The title of Grandmaster is the highest that a player can achieve, awarded only to world-class chess masters by the World Chess Federation, known globally by its French name of Fédération Internationale des Échecs, or FIDE.

By simulating the Grandmaster’s game, Yeh explained how to control the center of the chessboard, analyzing each move made by both Grandmaster and opponent and emphasizing the importance of making a plan and thinking several steps ahead.

“Opening is very crucial, because the opening often concludes the entire game,” Yeh said. “You can mess up your entire game with one move … you have to take it slowly and you should not rush things necessarily.”

That lesson — to be careful, thoughtful and persistent — is something that each of the young players can apply to their own lives outside the game, he said.

Madenci, the Harvard Chess Club’s president, then taught the class how to castle. Castling is a special defensive maneuver that serves two purposes — to create space for the rooks to move, and to protect the king from attack.

When castling, you simultaneously move your king and one of your rooks — pieces that look like small castles, giving the maneuver its name. The king moves two squares towards a rook, and that rook moves to the square on the other side of the king. It is the only time in the game when more than one piece may be moved during a turn.

Steven and the other eight students riveted their eyes on every single chess move Yeh and Madenci made during their 30-minute lecture, which brought them to the YMCA classroom that rainy Saturday afternoon.

After completing a series of castling examples, students practiced what they learned by applying them during real games after the lecture portion of the class. Some were silently concentrating on their contests, while others were whispering about chess tactics.

The instructors said the students seemed more engaged in their practicing than usual, attributing the focus to a team tournament held the previous week at the Constitution Inn YMCA in the Charlestown Navy Yard. Five teams — one each from the Central and Egleston branches, two from Chinatown and one from the Passport program — participated in the event, with four members of each team competing to bring the coveted first place plaque home to their local branch. Egleston won the tournament.

“We did not get first place this time, but I will practice hard,” said 10-year-old Alan Ng, who started playing chess when he joined the class through the Passport program several months ago. “And we will beat them next time.”

Angela Tang, a weekend supervisor at the YMCA’s Wang branch in Chinatown, said that students with the Passport program and their parents are very satisfied with the chess class and appreciate the work of the volunteers. She visited the class and took pictures of the young students to introduce the chess class to other Passport program participants.

Madenci’s goal is to expand BASIC to the YMCA’s Roxbury and East Boston branches in the fall, and to work within each branch to reach more age groups. Getting more young people involved is important, he says, because “chess is a great leveler.”

“By learning and playing chess, kids necessarily become more open-minded and begin to appreciate one another from different backgrounds,” he said.
Any parents interested in the BASIC program can contact Arin Madenci via e-mail at madenci@fas.harvard.edu.