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Chess In the Media

Weekly chess games bridge age gap (Detroit News)

Helen Holley looks forward to each Wednesday when the Shrine Catholic High School Chess Club stops by for a game.

The former piano teacher, who lives in a retirement home near the high school, played chess when she was younger. She got away from the game as she got older but now plays every Wednesday against the Shrine students.

"It makes you think a little bit," Holley said. "It makes your brain work a little bit, which is good for us. Even when you get older, you need to think a little bit."

Games resume for MHS chess team (Marshalltown Times Republican, Iowa)

The stereotypical nerd persona associated with the game of chess has been eliminated at Marshalltown High School as the mind battling competition attracts more than book worms.

While chess has never been thought of as a game known to attract those with elite physical ability, MHS chess coach Scott Johnson said the team is beginning to challenge athletes to enhance their mental strength.

"We have cross country runners, wrestlers, you name it," Johnson said. "We like to think of chess as a work out for their mind, it's like a mental gymnasium."

Mill Valley in quandary over chess board (Marin Independent Journal, CA)

The proposed giant chess board for Mill Valley's downtown Lytton Square is in trouble. Talk of checkmating the idea, unthinkable and unmentioned until yesterday, has surfaced.

Members of the city's 100-year-old Outdoor Art Club launched a campaign yesterday to get the Mill Valley Arts and Recreation Commission - which approved the huge chess board a year ago - to reopen the issue because they believe the board and giant chess pieces are antithetical to the artistic aura of the picturesque square.

"We question the appropriateness of having that much space turned over to a giant chess set," said Caroline Robinson, a member of the Civics and Conservation Committee of the arts club. The club, she said, has 400 members, most of them residents of Mill Valley.

Do you know of an interesting, humorous, or unique chess story published online? E-mail us at newsletter@uschess.org.