David R. Sands

St. Louis is proving quite the accommodating host this summer. Just days after staging the senior and junior U.S. open and women’s championships, the St. Louis Chess Club is again multitasking as the site for the Sinquefield Cup and Cairns Cup, annually among the stronger open and female invitational tournaments in the country.

Every generation, it seems, puts forward a chess star whose talent outpaces his ambition, whose grasp stops far short of his reach.

With our national 250th birthday party coming to a close, now seems a good time to check in on how the American chess community marked the country’s first 100 years way back in 1876.

Your humble columnist is about to embark on his first trip to Spain and thought that would be a good excuse for a quick dip into the legacy of one of Europe’s oldest and most storied chess nations.

With all the pieces visible to both players and all the rules much pretty set in concrete, it’s hard to think of a good April Fools’ Day joke to play over the board in tournament play that doesn’t run the risk of getting you forfeited.

Sacrificing a queen for a quick checkmate is always fun, but there’s a lot to be said for sacrificing a pawn in the opening that leads to a winning endgame dozens of moves down the road.

Many soldiers, sailors and airmen have been strong chess players, and chess has long been a popular way to pass the time in bivouacs, military hospitals and POW camps.

It might have been the biggest U.S. chess story in the mainstream press since Bobby Fischer’s world championship win two decades earlier. The Raging Rooks, a scrappy team of Black, Hispanic and Asian players from Harlem’s Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Junior High School, tied for first in the 1991 U.S. National Junior High School Championships in Dearborn, Michigan.

Twenty-five years ago, Maurice Ashley, who was born in Jamaica but moved to New York as a child, became the country’s first — and for a long time its only — Black American chess grandmaster. He’s about to get some company, this time from a proud son of the Bronx.

Boy, take just a little time off and you come home to an overflowing inbox.