Chess Posters From The Dayton Chess Club.

Here’s a short youtube montage of Chess related posters that was uploaded by DaytonChessClub.

Dayton Chess Club Website.

Twinkie, Deconstructed.

Well, here goes another one of my all time greatest tasting snacks from my list of, well, greatest tasting snacks. Years ago, I remember our school chess club kept us supplied with what seemed an endless supply of Twinkies. Blitz games? You bet. We were so jacked up on sugar back then. We had convinced ourselves that it was crucial to our chess strategy. Apparently we were consuming much more than just the sugar.

Author’s Website.

Pursue Your Passion – Maurice Ashley.

This “Americans in Focus” segment features IGM Maurice Ashley. Youtube video from Brogers03.

100 Chess Book Reviews by Blue Devil Knight – Part 1.

Blue Devil Knight has undertaken a huge project – a multi part youtube video review of 100 of his chess books. Here is his first installment. I’ll embed them here at Pawned! as he makes them available, and give a link out to his posts on his blog. I’m looking forward to seeing these – thanks, BDK !

BDK’s blog post.

The Love of the Game.

Chess player calculates how to share his love of the game.

By Vince Pierri, Chicago Daily Herald

There’s a section at Libertyville’s Cook Memorial Library called the “Quiet Area,” but it’s not completely silent.

The tapping of computer keys; a student ripping paper from a notebook; a middle-aged woman zipping her parka. Typical sounds.

But an odd noise, the clicking of plastic against plastic, comes from one of the tables. The delicate pounding of chess pieces as they conquer each other on a green-and-white board.

It’s a frigid night in February. As freezing rain pelts the windows, two men are locked in a silent, but intense, competition.

Their body language is aggressive. Leaning forward, arms pressed hard against the table, their eyes scan left then right, up then down, contemplating the next move.

Rob Krause comes here every Thursday night. The 33-year-old from Buffalo Grove sets up his board and waits for opponents.

He’s been coming weekly for the past five years, a member of the Renaissance Knights Chess organization; Krause spends the better part of his days promoting the ancient game.

He loves chess and wants others to love it too.

Krause gives lessons to kids in the Chicago Public Schools, adults with disabilities and home-school groups. He’s also a chess coach at Stevenson High School. They were state champs this year.

Slanomir Borkowski, a mechanical engineer from Mundelein, is the challenger tonight.

Plotting, planning, and second-guessing, Borkowski’s thumb is pressed against his temple. Death is in the air, and he knows it.

Krause’s moves are unexpectedly swift now. His black bishop streaks diagonally and flattens Borkowski’s white knight. Krause scoops it up placing it among his other captives.

“I like playing fast,” Krause says. “It’s like a choreographed dance.”

There’s no smug pleasure in vanquishing an opponent. Krause is way past that.

“Chess is a playhouse for philosophy,” he said. “You make judgment calls and learn the value of sacrifice. It’s a beautiful game.”

Read Story in it’s entirety here.

Teacher Uses Chess to Motivate.

From The Monterey County Herald

By CLAUDIA MELÉNDEZ SALINAS

When Alberto Murillo was 9 years old, soon after he and his family came to Salinas to escape the violent streets of Compton, he found his first love. “All I wanted was chess,” the 31-year-old says, the light of remembrance shining in his eyes as if he were going back in time and reliving those feelings. “All I could think of was chess.”He was in fourth grade at Sanborn Elementary School, now Jesse Sanchez Elementary. He concentrated on his homework and did everything he was asked as long as he could play chess at the end of the day.”Before that, nothing really mattered. I knew I had to go to school, but I didn’t feel there was a purpose,” he says. “But after learning chess, I started thinking about my purpose.”Now Murillo has re-encountered his childhood love.The former real estate agent and pre-med student has reconsidered his mission in life and returned to the Alisal Union School District to teach the game of royalty and strategy.And he’s not just thinking about chess as entertainment: He wants his students to become inspired and to learn that if they can conquer chess, they can conquer the world.”I’m not just teaching the kids chess,” Murillo says. “I’m motivating them. I’m inspiring them to go into higher education. We’re all pawns, but if you make it to the other side, the chess pawns become anything you want. Your dreams can become true.”Last month, the Alisal Union School District approved a $12,000 grant to teach chess to its
students, and so far about 200 children have enrolled in the program to learn from Murillo and his mentor, Gary Jones, who taught him in elementary school.

Judging by the reaction at Cesar Chavez Elementary, parents and students are falling in love, too. “You can move here or here,” second-grader Brian Gomez tells his chess partner, first-grader Jocelyn Reyes. “Did you move yet?”

“Not yet,” Jocelyn answers, as she tries to move her queen forward.

“You can’t move it here,” Brian says, gently instructing her in the intricacies of the game. “You can move it right here.”

Jocelyn decides the piece to move is her king, so she and Brian engage in a quick challenge of advancing monarchs. It’s hard to tell if they understand what they’re doing, but they are both so self-assured, neither correcting the other, that it’s easy to believe they’re competing for the crown.

Their game is interrupted by Murillo, who announces he’s going to play a game with the rest of the class.

“If you guys beat me, I’ll give each of you two dollars,” he says.

All students drop their games and turn their faces to the vertical chess board hanging from the blackboard. Soon they’re suggesting out loud what their next move should be against their teacher.

After Murillo moved from elementary to middle school, he stopped playing chess. When he started North Salinas High School, his parents noticed he was falling in with the wrong crowd, so they moved him to Alisal High. There, he re-connected with his elementary school friends, those who had piqued his desire to do better, and he began getting good grades again. He graduated with honors from Alisal, and began the pre-med program at the University of California-Davis.

Murillo confesses with candor that his social life got in the way of school, and he had to abandon his goal of becoming a doctor. But he graduated with a degree in psychology and a minor in economics.

He wanted to be a teacher, but the profession paid so little that he grew disenchanted. He jumped into the real estate frenzy earlier this decade, became a Realtor and bought a couple of properties.

With a lucrative career ahead of him, he felt he could dedicate some time to chess and called his old teacher, Gary Jones, to revive the program that had so inspired Murillo.

“He brought more enthusiasm, which got me ignited also,” says Jones, who has been teaching for 31 years and runs chess classes at three schools in the Alisal district. “He accelerated it by taking it to all the schools. He said ‘Let’s try it, let’s see what we can do.’”

Jones and Murillo have taught chess mostly to fourth-graders at 11 of the 12 schools in the Alisal Union School District. Because parents at Cesar Chavez Elementary have shown such support and enthusiasm for the classes, Murillo is allowing younger kids to participate.

Read Story in it’s Entirety here.

Chess Crazy.

St. Edward School has a variety of chessboards, including space chess.; Chess appeals to the highest levels of critical thinking, says St. Edward School principal Andy Cipro.; Grade 2 student Margo McLea moves her piece on a giant chessboard at St. Edward School in Jordan.; Christian Balanowski, left, and Jacob Tawil, right, square off in a game of chess at St. Edward School.; St. Edward School students and chess enthusiasts, clockwise, top left, Warren Lament, Adam Foster, Josh Zizek and Annika Urrego. The Jordan school is conducting a pilot program for a chess-centric curriculum. Staff photo by Denis Cahill

Chess crazy; All the pieces fall into place for students at St.Edward School

From the St. Catherines Standard

The dedication to an ancient game is evident even before walking through the front doors of St. Edward School in Jordan.”Chess tournament Thursday!” says a poster in the multi-coloured scrawl of a child. “Try your best!”

Inside, the halls are lined with chessboards. There’s space chess. Racing chess. San Francisco chess. Christmas chess.

In the library is an eight-by-eight-metre chessboard with oversized pieces. The children huddle around it when the recess bell rings.

“We get a big chuckle out of the students discussing strategy,” principal Andy Cipro said.

Kindergarten students are taught the difference between rooks and queens. Fourth graders learn in the classroom how many squares a knight can move. (“It can be an upright L, or an L on its belly, or an L on its back,” Cipro explains during classroom teaching sessions.) Because at St. Edward – a school that fares among the best in Niagara on standardized tests – math, literacy, playtime and work time all come back to chess.

The small-town school is conducting a pilot program for a chess-centric curriculum. Cipro, a veteran educator who has taken the chess craze board-wide, first thought of implementing one when he taught at St. Theresa School in St. Catharines. A pair of students told him one Monday, breathlessly, that they’d visited a weekend chess club. Cipro, an amateur chess enthusiast himself, started a chess club at the school.

“I thought it would be fun,” he said.

Twenty-eight years later, he said, it is much more than that.

The more students have played chess over the years, Cipro said, the more positive changes he has noticed in their personalities and learning skills.

Read Story in it’s entirety here.

Kirsan Ilyumzhinov – Chess Boxer?!

FIDE president Ilyumzhinov looks like a natural inside the ring… not.

Youtube video from inchesscom.

Johnny Bravo Plays Chess Against the Super Computer.

Youtube video from BamiHoofd.

Starsky and Hutch Play Chess.

Really. And Hutch almost loses his Joey. Youtube video from Elvisobsessor.