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Chess In the Media

Chess is becoming the game of choice for a growing number of students at Hillsboro High (Hillsboro Free Press, KS)

The library has become the place of choice for a growing number of students at Hillsboro High School, thanks to a recent explosion of interest in the game of chess.

On any given school day, you can find a broad mix of students gathering in the Wiebe Media Center to play the mentally challenging game before school, after school and during lunch breaks.

What started as one game among a few friends has evolved into a 32-person fall tournament-with every opening filled.

Howard Chess Club Reaches Out to D.C. Community (The Hilltop, Howard University)

Members of the Howard University Chess Club expanded their knowledge of chess with area children by hosting a casual tournament session for children of the Olympic Chess House.

Held in the West Ballroom of the Blackburn Center last Wednesday, the tournament offered students a rare opportunity to see children ranging from six to 14 become the intellectual equals of college students as they faced off over the chess board.

"We see this as another opportunity to reach out to the community. Each semester, the children from the Olympic Chess House come and play members from the Howard Chess Club," said Keron George junior engineering major and president of the Howard University Chess Club. "It allows them to see the campus and also inspires them to continue the game especially when they can brag that they've played university students and won."

Bringing beauty to chess sets to life (Washington Post)

For most people, chess is a game -- wonderfully complex and beautifully subtle, in the view of its aficionados, but a game nonetheless. For the artistically-minded it is something much more. The untalented among us collect chess sets, looking at the 32 pieces as miniature sculptures spanning the spectrum of designs and materials. A smaller number of people actually make sets worth collecting. Most are beautiful but not unusual. Only the most imaginative among us design new sets, transforming the mundane into the fascinating.

Sixty years ago the Julien Levy Gallery held an exhibition entitled "The Imagery of Chess." Organized by art dealer Julien Levy, the show featured a bevy of modernist sets, along with paintings, photographs and even musical scores. Long Island's Noguchi Museum decided to recreate the original show after curator Bonnie Rychlak purchased a rare table based on the one designed by Isamu Noguchi for the Levy Gallery. Once she found a table, Ms. Rychlak commissioned an artist to recreate Noguchi's chess set, which has disappeared. That naturally led to the idea of a retrospective exhibit and then a book.

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