Wenatchee Chess

Wenatchee Scholastic Chess Club caters to young players

By Dee Riggs
World staff writer
Posted March 12, 2008

Maybe it was exhilaration left over from a big win at a state tournament the previous day, but Titus Berndt was offering no mercy to his chess partner on Feb. 24.

“There is so much to chess,” he said, drawing out the word “so” into a long vowel sound. “There is so much strategy, so many tactics — and you get to be brutal. Only after the game are you allowed to be nice.”

Berndt is a fifth-grader who took fifth- and sixth-grade division honors at the Eastern Washington Chess Championship in Richland. At a weekly Sunday game night of the Wenatchee Scholastic Chess Club, Titus was playing his 8-year-old brother, Cyril.

Cyril, a third-grader, noted that he only beats his older brother 10 percent of the time, which prompted some unsolicited advice from Titus: “That’s because you move too fast.”

At another table, where sibling rivalry was not a factor, Kasia Havlicek, 7, was playing another Berndt brother, Gregory, 7, who was quick to point out that “I’m way better” at chess than she is. Kasia smiled but kept her eyes on the chessboard, seemingly unfazed. When asked what she likes about chess, she replied: “Doing chess is a great way to get you thinking. And you can go to tournaments and get a trophy, even though I’ve never gotten one.”

Don Lester is the chess club’s coach.

“It’s just fun to work with kids because they are hilarious,” he said. “At first, when they’re playing, they don’t see something, then they do, and they get all excited and light up. They’re a lot more animated than adults, and they learn a lot faster, too. You’ve got to kind of envy it in a way.”

In the fall of 2006, Lester started up a new chess club for kids in kindergarten through 12th grade. It followed in the footsteps of a chess club that had stopped meeting a few months earlier when its leader moved from the area. Lester had been a volunteer with the first group, and wanted to get things going again so his son, Conner, a kindergartner, would have a place to play other kids.

Here is the full article.