I personally think every child needs to play chess as a standard
part of his yearly curriculum. It
naturally encourages at home practice, researching games and methods available
in the literature and an immediate feedback on how good you are or are not for
that matter. It strongly induces brain
wiring as well and strengthening of brain power.
Often the only skill actually promoted in school is memory. That never was good enough and chess does
force even the bad actors to pay attention.
After all it immediately proves that you are deficient in effort at the
least. No one can lie their way out of a
lost game. Better yet by making it
mandatory, everyone is forced to do progressive work on their own brain and
understand that good results are possible.
This may even be an effective way to end bullying in our public
school system. It imposes a clear
hierarchy that is consistent with the school environment and shows a clear path
forward that is immediate.
Actual improvement also confirms self-worth as well.
Michael
Propper, Making Chess Fun for Children
Looking for the next Bobby Fischer
NEW YORK— Michael
Propper, the president of NYC Chess, Inc., is not particularly good at playing
chess.
Propper, 52, was once an
Amateur Athletic Union basketball coach in New Rochelle, the owner of a phone
company, and the president of the New York City school board, but never much of
a chess player.
Wearing jeans, a pink
dress shirt, and once-white Nikes, Propper explained that he did try to play
chess as a child. But the decorum, duration, and many rules of the game bored
him so deeply that he decided he would rather not play again. It was a decision
that he now regrets.
During an Amateur
Athletic Union basketball game in 2008, Propper met Russell Makofsky, a man
more than 20 years his junior. A mutual friend had introduced him as a
potential basketball coach; instead, the young man recruited Propper to join
his chess company.
Makofsky,
29, founded NYC
Chess Inc., which now offers tournaments, lessons, and
chess merchandise. His cheerful disposition and easy manner had him voted “best
smile” in his high school yearbook.
In the two years before
meeting Propper, Makofsky said their members played chess and made T-shirts,
and that was about it.
Propper saw great
potential in the endeavor. He liked what chess could do for children. Chess
is scientifically proven to improve mental skills, so, as a former school board
member, Propper thought they should get more children interested in learning to
play chess. “I wish someone would have taught me chess right,” he
said.
Six years later, he
still plays very little chess. Mornings are spent in front of a computer
screen, as he steals moments for his bowl of almond oatmeal that has long grown
cold. Propper focuses on the business side of Chess NYC, the management,
marketing, and a lot of the administrative work.
Building a Company
In 2010, Chess NYC took
over the Village Chess Shop, once owned by Russian chess grandmaster Nicolas
Rossolimo. Rossolimo is credited with introducing the famed Bishop B4 chess
move.
The location also
happens to be a few yards away from Chess Forum, which a former Chess Shop
partner opened in 1995. Although there were reports of a feud between the two
chess stores, years of rancor fade as both now focus on a common goal.
“We feel like nothing
happened now. It’s all in the past,” said Imad Khachan, owner of Chess Forum.
“It was an issue between the old owners.” Both stores agree they don’t want to
lose the next generation of potential chess players.
Chess NYC makes its
money on chess classes, summer camps, after-school programs, and tournaments
for all levels and age groups—as young as 4 years old.
Propper runs the Village
Chess Shop Academy at its headquarters inside the Zinc bar in Greenwich
Village. Yes, a bar. The burgundy walls of Zinc hear the sounds of jazz in the
evenings, but by day, the sound of chess pieces tap like raindrops throughout
the room.
The key part of making
chess fun is the energy of the room. A boy raises his hand for help. A chess
assistant walks over. In an expressive and lively voice, he recommends and
explains a chess move.
Among the company’s 30
coaches and assistants, you’ll find eight grandmasters, including a Sudanese
refugee chess master whom Propper had found working as a security guard at a
garage in Virginia.
Their team has a
mission, for Propper wants to
“Americanize chess.”
’Americanizing Chess’
Americans have played
chess since the horse and buggy era. U.S. aficionados introduced a national
chess competition in 1900. But in Propper’s view, this has not placed chess in
the American pantheon of popular games. And he wants to change that.
Propper would like to
see chess become as American as soccer. “In the 70s, soccer was the game the
kids who didn’t make the football team played,” Propper said. Today, nearly
every high school in the country offers soccer.
With the mainstream
Soccer Mom and the replacement of football with soccer in some communities,
Propper is looking to learn how Americans adopted soccer as a popular
sport.
Chess, on the other
hand, has not made similar inroads in American culture. Not physically active
and demanding intense focus, for many active Americans the game might be called
boring.
Propper said he is
bringing the “basketball mentality” to chess: adrenaline, excited voices, and
pizza.
Chess NYC coaches
emphasize teaching the game in an active and entertaining way. “We’re using a
cooler language to teach chess,” he said. For the all-girls’ chess lessons,
there’s bracelet-beading time in between games.
The company also holds
all-girl chess “parties,” an all-girls championship development program, and
all-girls national competitions and chess camps. “We really want to get little
girls to learn to love chess,” he said. “When you think of chess you simply
just don’t think of little girls. But it shouldn’t be that way.”
The Future of Chess
The coaches visit around
50 institutions, primarily schools in the NYC metro area. This year, they began
chess lessons at the Ella McQueen Reception Center for Boys and Girls in
Brooklyn, a detention center where children stay for 14 days.
“Kids are still kids,”
Propper said.
Chess NYC also visits a
homeless service center on 32nd Street. Propper thinks chess works well in
after-school programs. They are in the middle of starting a nonprofit division
in hopes of getting the funding to teach at schools, which cannot afford
after-school chess programs.
“We don’t want to turn
anyone down,” Propper said. “There are some [schools] that we go to anyway even
though they can’t pay for it.”
Khachan, the Chess Forum
owner, has a different take on what it means to play chess in America. It’s not
that it was never Americanized, but that it’s a part of the old America. “It
used to be that all night long there was nowhere to sit in a chess club,” he
said. Now, as video and bookstores fold, so do some older chess stores.
“Everything is done on
the computer,” Khachan said. “But that’s okay, because I believe one day there
will be another Bobby Fischer.”
Many chess lovers recall
when chess prodigy and grandmaster Bobby Fischer at 13 played the “Game of the
Century” in 1956. “He was the last American chess player to become a world
champion. He was a local hero for people to look up to, but that era ended in
the ’70s,” Khachan said.
Today, the world chess
champion title belongs to Magnus Carlsen, a 28-year-old Norwegian grandmaster.
Chess NYC invited Carlsen to play with their summer camp students in 2012. They
paid for his expenses. “The kids felt really inspired when they played him,”
Propper said. A 6-year-old that had played Carlsen went on to win the national
chess championship for his age group that year.
Propper sees his job as
connecting chess with the lives of American children. “We’re here to entertain,
to motivate, instill a culture.” he said. “The kids have to want to learn, so a
big part of our job is to entertain.”
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