Rediscover: The Saint Louis Chess Club
The Saint Louis Chess Center welcomes the top 28 chess players in the country to compete in the 2022 U.S. Chess Championship and U.S. Women’s Chess Championship. It also welcomes people who know literally nothing about the sport to take beginner classes.
That huge range perfectly illustrates the enormous variability within the chess community in St. Louis—and you won’t find anyone more excited about the entire spectrum than Tony Rich, Executive Director of the Saint Louis Chess Club.
“The pandemic threw us for a loop, but we were able to transfer our scholastic programming and tournaments to all-digital online formats,” Rich says. “Those were great as stopgap measures, but truly it has been a blessing to come out of this on the other side, to have teachers back in classrooms engaging with kids again and to be able to welcome everybody back to town again for tournaments.”
Over the summer, the local chess footprint expanded when the U.S. Chess Federation moved its headquarters from Tennessee to St. Louis. The nonprofit is the official governing body for chess players and supporters in this country, representing 93,000 members and sanctioning more than 10,000 tournaments per year.
The icing on the cake is a monumental new exhibit at the Chess Center’s sister organization, the World Chess Hall of Fame, which is located just across Maryland Avenue in the Central West End on what has become known as the Chess Campus. “1972 Fischer/Spassky: The Match, Its Origin and Influence” is a look back at the most famous world championship of all time between players representing the U.S and U.S.S.R.
Rich has absolutely no poker face when it comes to any of this—except possibly when he’s sitting across the table from a competitor during a chess match. But even then, his experiences were shaped by a formative encounter after his very first adult match. Rich lost, but the victor offered to sit down with him and talk through what he did well and what he could improve upon.
Rich has never forgotten that lesson in sportsmanship, nor has he forgotten the warm communal welcome he received one random day when he saw people playing chess at a St. Louis Bread Co. in the Delmar Loop. At both the highest professional and very most amateur levels, the Chess Club has a square on the board for everyone.
At the championship level
From now through Oct. 20, spectators have an opportunity to cheer on the country’s best players during the U.S. Chess Championship and U.S. Women’s Chess Championship. “The experience is kind of like a golf tournament,” Rich explains. “You need to be quiet if you’re in or near the playing hall. We’ll take cell phones away so they don’t accidentally ring. And we have an excellent team of commentators who go through play by play, just like football commentators with Xs and Ox. They also interview players after the games to hear their thoughts.”
One of the commentators to listen for is Yasser Seirawan, aka “Uncle Yasser,” who is not only a consummate chess player but also a very colorful storyteller. For street-level color commentary,
Rich suggests hanging around the big screens in front of the club, where the outdoor scene is festive and opinionated. It’s the 13 th year in a row St. Louis has hosted the tournament, and a local cadre of hard-core fans is well established.
They’ll be talking about players like Christopher Yoo, the 2022 U.S. Junior Champion, who qualified to play in his first the U.S. Championship (and from whom Rich hopes to secure an autograph to add to his ever-growing collection).
They’ll also be talking about two St. Louisans. One is Jeffrey Xiong, who started playing at the Chess Club at age 12 and is now one of the top 100 players in the world. “It’s fun to see people go from playing kids’ events to being professionals who are now representing the U.S.,” Rich says.
The other is Levon Aronian, a grandmaster since 2000 and the only player to win the Chess World Cup twice. During the pandemic, Aronian relocated to St. Louis from Armenia, where he was a national superstar. His 2021 move was something of a bombshell in the chess world.
“People look at that and say, ‘Wow, there must be something really great about St. Louis if you’re willing to give up all that,’” Rich says.
Fans who can’t attend in person can follow the action live on the tournament’s website or on the Saint Louis Chess Club’s YouTube and Twitch.tv channels.
At the historic level
In conjunction with the U.S. Chess Championship and U.S. Women’s Chess Championship, new members will be inducted into the U.S. and World Chess Hall of Fame for 2021 and 2022.
They include pioneering Americans going back to the 1850s as well as international players like Eugene Torre, a trailblazer on the Asian continent who was its first grandmaster, and Judit Polgar, the strongest woman chess player of all time, who broke Bobby Fischer’s record as the world’s youngest grandmaster. (She will be inducted in person during a second ceremony at a later date.)
And speaking of Bobby Fischer, 2022 is the 50 th anniversary of his World Championship match against Boris Spassky, which ended 24 years of Soviet domination in the sport. Emily Allred,
Curator at the World Chess Hall of Fame, says the World Chess Hall of Fame’s exhibit “1972 Fischer/Spassky: The Match, Its Origin and Influence” covers the event and everything surrounding it in a way that’s never been done before.
“Bobby was treated like a sports star on TV. He really helped bring chess to a new prominence,” Allred says. “Scholastic chess had existed, but you saw a lot more kids starting to play after 1972.”
The exhibit fills all three galleries at the World Chess Hall of Fame with more than 500 artifacts showing the upbringing of both players—who had many similarities in spite of the political differences between their two countries, Allred explains. It also fulfills the Hall of Fame’s mission of showing the history of American chess through art and artifacts.
One of Allred’s favorites is a set of drawings by LeRoy Neiman, an artist famous for his depictions of sports, who attended the Fischer-Spassky match in Iceland.
To Allred’s surprise and joy, the LeRoy Neiman and Janet Byrne Neiman Foundation gifted the artwork after the Hall of Fame inquired about a loan for the exhibit. “It’s really special because they donated the works to us, but also because the works are so fun,” Allred said. “You get such a great sense of what the atmosphere was like.”
Complimentary curator-led exhibit tours are ongoing, and other upcoming events include an Oct. 18 lecture by Bobby Fischer expert and author John Donaldson as well as a musical performance series across genres ranging from folk to opera to Broadway.
Feedback on the exhibit since its Aug. 18 opening has been very positive, according to Allred. Some visitors remember the match. Some started to play because of it. And some who were born decades after it happened are now sitting down to stations with game notations and playing through—reliving Fischer and Spassky’s experience in a hands-on way.
At the scholastic level
That element of learning infuses nearly every offering on the Chess Campus, and the leadership is actively working to expand it throughout the St. Louis region. Rich says the Chess Center recently received a number of grants toward its scholastic programs in under-resourced schools. For example, the Chess Center is expanding its chess instruction within the East St. Louis School District. As part of that initiative, the Chess Cop partner program brings police officers in to play again students. The social experiment is designed to break down barriers and build relationships, Rich explains.
The Chess Center’s main location in the Central West End is expanding too. “We’re going from a 6,000-square-foot facility to a 20,000-square-foot facility,” Rich says. “It’s exciting and scary all at the same time. It reminds me of 15 years ago when the Chess Club first opened.”
Crews have finished all the demolition work in the building, which is adjacent to the current location, and they’ve started building up the interior from scratch, right down to the electrical and ventilation systems, Rich says. The project is scheduled to be complete by October 2023.
At the just-for-fun level
As we wait to see how the finished facility turns out, consider yourself personally invited by Rich to come to the Chess Campus when the weather is nice to visit the World Chess Hall of Fame,
get a photo in front of the World’s Largest Chess Piece, take a tour of the Chess Center and sit down and play a game.
Or look for the half-dozen chess “pocket parks” around the St. Louis area where permanent chess tables have been installed. Instructors go out to them to teach the moves for free to anyone who happens by—or to play with those who already know the game.
“It can sometimes be hard to meet new people and break into a community in St. Louis,” Rich acknowledges. “But in the chess community, that’s not the case. Everyone is welcoming—not just happy you stopped by. They truly want you to learn and belong in the community.”
Drawing courtesy of The Saint Louis Chess Center.