Playing to Win. Hilary Levey Friedman
Let’s Dance Studio.
SCHOLASTIC CHESS : THE GAME OF KINGS
Chess is an inherently competitive event. It pits one player in a contest against another, and it almost always produces a winner and a loser. The world of children’s competitive chess, usually known as scholastic chess (though this does not mean that the chess is tied to the formal school system; it merely refers to the age of the participants), magnifies the intensity of this inherent rivalry and formalizes it into rankings and ratings at regional and national tournaments. The United States Chess Federation (USCF) plays a large part in creating and monitoring the competition in scholastic chess.
The USCF regulates scholastic tournaments.2 Parents discover these tournaments through chess teachers, other parents, online, or from the most important grapevine: their own children, who come home from school and excitedly report on an upcoming event they heard about from friends or teachers. The USCF itself hosts annual national scholastic tournaments and certifies individuals to run tournaments around the country. A certified tournament director must oversee a tournament in order for it to be recognized as a USCF event.
In many ways, “scholastics” are at the heart of the USCF. Roughly thirty thousand participants under the age of fifteen make up the largest component of USCF membership.3 In order to be rated in USCF tournaments, children must become USCF members and pay a small annual fee; during my fieldwork the charge for those twelve and under was $17. Enrollment brings a subscription to the bimonthly publication, Chess Life for Kids! This publication, which averages about twenty glossy pages, colorfully spotlights national tournaments, chess puzzles, and major winners (both kids and adults).4
Children who are not USCF members can play in some local tournaments, but they cannot earn a chess rating. These children are usually beginners, in kindergarten or first grade. Thus the total number of children playing tournament chess exceeds thirty thousand.
The USCF is more than a tournament planner and publisher. By issuing chess ratings, the USCF is the ultimate arbiter of quality in the world of scholastic chess. Ratings range from 100 to 2,800 and are calculated using a complicated mathematical rating formula that assigns each player a number based on past performance; the higher the number, the stronger the player.5 In his guide for parents, chess coach Dan Heisman succinctly describes ratings: “Suffice it to say that when one wins, his rating goes up, and when one loses, his rating goes down. The higher the rating of the opponent beaten, the more it goes up; the lower the rating of the opponent lost to, the more it goes down.”6
Tournament opponents are decided based upon a player’s rating.7 Pairings are announced before each round via wall charts, which are essentially pieces of paper taped to the wall or to poster boards. Children and parents crowd around these sheets of paper before preparing for the next round and quickly retreat to their own corners to discuss the implications of the match-ups. Wall charts announce each player’s name, rating, and school and who will play with the black and white pieces in the round. The wall charts are divided by section. Sections separate children by age and ability. For example, there may be a K–3 section, and then separate sections for those with ratings under 1,000 and those over 1,000. (There may even be a K–3 under 1,000 section and a K–3 over 1,000 section.)
In later rounds wall charts also reveal the tournament standings. The child with the highest point total at the end of the tournament wins. A win equals 1 point, a loss 0, and a draw or a bye is worth .5.8 Ties are decided using software programs that judge how hard opponents were based on participants’ relative ratings, and reward those who bested more difficult challengers.
The USCF publishes ratings every three months. But once tournament results are reported, children and their parents can log on to the organization’s website and see the updated rating, usually within a few days after a tournament. All tournament results are publicly available online. You can use the USCF’s website to search for a specific child’s name and to see the results from every USCF tournament he or she has ever played in.
Besides being public, the system is completely hierarchical; there is nowhere to hide for children falling down the rating scale. Yet the system is open to manipulation, and parents who are in the know are aware of the ways they can stack the deck to advantage their child. Ratings used to determine opponents at tournaments lag behind actual competitions. Only the quarterly published ratings are used to structure tournament pairings. If a player has earned many rating points in the past few months, he or she is still officially rated lower because of the time gap and hence can play in lower-rated sections against weaker players he or she can easily beat. Some parents deliberately avoid letting their kids play right before a new published rating so they can “save” or “protect” a lower rating for an upcoming event.
When ratings are published, the USCF releases its Top 100 lists of players by age, starting with those seven and under and then on to eight-year-olds, nine-year-olds, and so on. The USCF also awards chess titles, such as Master, to players based on their ratings. (Titles come into play once an individual goes over 2,000 rating points.)9 Children who routinely top these lists and earn titles can make the All-America Chess team and represent the United States in international scholastic events, but these are truly the exceptional children.
Separate lists and titles for the highest rated girls are also released by USCF. Chess is dominated by boys, starting at the youngest ages, with greater numbers of boys entering the game at the lowest levels.10 Special attention is paid to girls, especially those who are talented, to get them to stick with chess as they get older; hence the separate lists for top-performing females.
The cost to participate in tournaments in order to earn rating points and titles is fairly low, and some major cities have organizations that host free tournaments. Entry fees range from $30 to $50 for local tournaments and up to $80 for state and national tournaments. On average, children I met play in one tournament a month during the school year. These contests are usually in a school cafeteria or a gym, if they are local events, and in a hotel ballroom or a conference center, if they are regional or national.
Children do not need any special equipment to participate in a tournament. The tournament itself almost always supplies chessboards and pieces. Children often are expected to bring their own paper and pencil so that they can annotate their games,11 but some tournaments even provide these.
Most competitive children have a chess notebook in which they record their games sequentially so they can be dissected and studied after a tournament. Hardcover notebooks that hold annotations from one hundred games can be purchased for around $8, and spiral notebooks that hold fifty games cost around $3. Even though it is not necessary, children usually bring a chess set to tournaments so they can play and analyze between rounds. Supplies like these are often purchased at chess tournaments, where organizers set up a small store with other chess-related gear and books and software. Similar items are also available for purchase online. Kids often keep all of their chess supplies together in a chess bag, which can be bought for around $25.
A chess clock is an important additional piece of equipment because scholastic chess games are timed. In local tournaments the time control is usually “G30,” or thirty minutes for each player, for a maximum of sixty minutes per game. After each move a child hits a button on the chess clock, which reveals the time he or she has remaining, and then records the move in his or her chess notebook. There are a variety of chess clocks available, some digital and some analog. Digital clocks cost more, but a chess clock can be purchased for as little as $30 (though the more expensive ones, often endorsed by chess stars like Gary Kasparov, cost upward of $200). The player who has the black pieces in a tournament game gets to use his or her own clock. Players who do not have a clock can use their opponent’s.
There is some debate in the chess world about the “proper” length of time for children’s games. A G30 game is considered short,12 but it is preferred at one-day tournaments, mainly because parents do not want to spend twelve hours (or longer) indoors on a weekend. State and national tournaments, held over two to three days, have longer time controls, often G90. Some believe longer games promote deeper chess thinking and calculation, but other demands on family