For Love of the Game

     Dan Holmes stares at the chessboard.  The Olathe senior knows the move is there somewhere.  His eyes dart from square to square, searching for it.  He is ever mindful of the game clock, of time constantly dripping away.  Then, suddenly, he knocks over an opponent's piece with one of his own, retrieves it with his palm, and slams it down onto the nearby timer.

    "Chess is a social disease," Holmes would say later.

    In his third year as KU Chess Club's president, Holmes built the club up from a few to no members attending weekly meetings in 2006 to a more than 50 members with approximately eight people attending each week. To Holmes, chess is about passion.  He plays every day on the Internet and, in a throwback to yesteryear, he also takes part in correspondence games.  In the days before the telephone, chess players from different parts of the world would set up a board in their home and write to one another trading moves.  Games could take months or years to finish.  Now that players have access to e-mail, games finish up much faster.
Holmes is currently playing approximately 45 games by correspondence.  He'd start more, but the Web site he uses limits the number of games players can participate in at any given time.
     "I think people who come here tend to have addictive personalities," he said.
     But chess isn't just growing at KU.  Across the country more people are sitting down at boards.  Jerry Nash, Scholastic and FIDE director for the United States Chess Federation, said elementary school-aged children are flocking to the game at a steady rate.
     "We're seeing continued growth," he said.
     The UCSF is responsible for governing for every major chess tournament held in the United States, and serves as the US's envoy to the FIDE, the World Chess Federation.  The UCSF has over 80,000 registered members and over 20,000 registered groups across the country.  Nash is gearing up for the USCF's Super National Tournament, which will be held in April.  He is expecting about 5,000 youths, kindergartners through high school seniors, to participate.
     "The kids love the game," Nash said.  

     And though he said that interest in chess has steadily grown throughout the decades, he points to two central events that piqued the interest of the American public.  First came Bobby Fischer's defeat of Boris Spassky in 1972 to become the first American to win the World Chess Championship.  The second event, Nash said, was the release of "Searching for Bobby Fischer," a film based on the childhood of American chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin.  
"[The movie] helped to highlight and expose [the game] to a larger group," he said.
     After the inevitable fall in numbers in the wake of the Fischer world championship and the release of the film, however, American parents are again starting to encourage their children to take interest in the game.  Studies have shown, Camarda said, that playing chess enhances attention span, math aptitude, and critical thinking skills.  Camarda and Holmes even teach chess to kids as an after school program at Sunset Ridge Elementary.    
Now, the kids who saw "Searching for Bobby Fischer" in when it was released in 1993 are in college.  And Nash hopes an even greater number are playing chess.  The USCF has been working with at least a dozen schools to establish chess scholarships and start official university teams.  He cited Big 12 neighbors Texas Tech as an example of a club the UCSF helped to build.
     To Kyle Camarda, associate professor of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering and the KU Chess Club's faculty advisor, chess poses itself as an addicting intellectual exercise.
     "It's like a new puzzle every game," he said.  "The great thing is, once you've solved it or haven't solved it, you set up and go again."
     He said that this also contributed to players isolating themselves.
     "Chess players are not very good at social interaction," Camarda said.  "They live in their heads a little bit."
     After playing chess nearly all his life, Camarda has amassed some distinctive chess related experienced.  He's played against the speed-chess hustlers of New York City's Washington Square Park.  He's visited the sights of famous chess players of the French Quarter in New Orleans.  He's played overseas in Berlin.  With an overall rating of 1882, the USCF has ranked him 16th in the state of Kansas.
     Playing in tournaments throughout his youth and into college, Holmes achieved a rating of 1850.  To put that in perspective, according to the USCF, the 100th best player in the country has a rating of 2411.  The top player, Gata Kamsky of New York, is rated 2799.

     Back at the meeting, the room has loosened up a bit.  A few games have already come and gone, so players are discussing various problems professional chess players run into.  The topic turns from the debate surrounding the proposed practice of drug testing in chess to issues of gambling.  Each asserts that he doesn't have a problem, but admits he has heard of professional players who get into debt playing poker.
     "You win money faster [than playing chess]," one notes.  
     "You can also lose money faster," another retorts.
     Finishing another game, Camarda interjects.  He says that many players, including the late Bobby Fischer, have issues that people must look past to appreciate them for who and what they really are: brilliant minds of the game.
     "You have to judge the moves," he says, "not the player."