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Chess In the Media

He Could Be the Next Bobby Fischer (Without the Quirks) (New York Times)

Hikaru Nakamura, 17, sat at a red leather banquette in a Greenwich Village brownstone that houses the Marshall Chess Club. It is a venerable membership-only club that has been visited by many of the world's chess greats, from José Raul Capablanca, the Cuban grandmaster and world champion in the 1920's, to Bobby Fischer, the American legend and former world champion.

Mr. Nakamura played a masters tournament there on a recent Tuesday night for what he described as lunch money, $300 to $400. He is now generating considerable chatter at the private club on West 10th Street as its most famous active member.

Mr. Nakamura believes that he is "the next big hope for American chess." It seems an audacious statement coming from a teenager. Yet Mr. Nakamura, who lives in White Plains, proclaims it with the utter confidence that perhaps can only come from youth and prodigious achievement.

UMBC chess team wins national championship (Baltimore Sun)

The University of Maryland, Baltimore County chess team successfully defended its championship title over the weekend at the President's Cup, known to chess aficionados as the Final Four of College Chess.

In December, UMBC competed in the Pan-American Intercollegiate Chess Championship to qualify for the President's Cup. Although favored to win Pan-Am, as it had six times since 1996, UMBC took second place.

Chess club: It's not what you think (Lynnwood Journal Newspapers)

On one side of the sound-reducing divider that split the cafeteria, parents talked, laughed, ate food - they were noisy. On the other side of that divider, all is quiet except for a thin blanket of tapping and scraping.

At that point, some parents of young children would have nearly fainted. This room, lit with yellowed, fluorescent bulbs that provided no competition to the bright sun outside, was full of kids. Some were barely out of preschool. All were in the sixth grade or younger.

They were sitting at uncomfortable cafeteria tables, and they were sitting still, staying quiet. And they had remained like this for nearly two hours.

Playing chess.

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