Chess grandmaster visits Cleveland school
Chess expert a hit at Bryant School
Friday, February 01, 2008
Grant Segall
Plain Dealer Reporter

The international grandmaster stood over the chessboard Thursday and blinked. Two Cleveland public school students had trapped his queen.

Only they didn’t know it, and the grandmaster wriggled free.

“You should have taken my queen!” Maurice Ashley told a sixth-grader and an eighth-grader afterward at William Cullen Bryant School. “I would still have had more stuff, but you would have had a real chance.”

Ashley played 31 si multaneous games at Bryant and won them all. Then he leaned against a wall and said, “Whew! A couple good players.”

A top player and promoter of the game, Ashley was starting two days of matches and pep talks in Cleveland and Shaker Heights. The only black chess player to achieve the top rank — international grandmaster — particularly likes to encourage other black players like Trey Modlin, 14, a rising star from Shaker Heights.

Here is the full story.

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