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Press Reports

Progress With Chess has received many excellent press reports. Some are included below.

Police officer’s gambit accepted Cleveland
students take a chance on chess
Grant Segall
Plain Dealer Reporter

A tough game can turn foes into friends.

 

“I don’t know how to get out of check,” Martha Wilkerson of Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School complained yesterday at Chess Challenge, a new tournament at the Cleveland Main Library for city students.

 

“You got to take my piece,” offered her opponent, Ronald Hibbitt of Charles W. Eliot Middle School.

 

A few seats away, Central Middle School’s Deonte Pegues urged schoolmate Tyrone Butts to develop his knight.

 

“Anywhere I move him, I lose him,” Tyrone replied.

 

“I don’t want that knight right now,” said Deonte. “I’m going for checkmate.”

 

The players are working together to learn this ancient, complex game in a pilot program called Chess for Success, part of a recent drive to boost the Cleveland schools’ long-starved electives and extracurricular activities.

Studies have shown that chess improves classroom skills. Program director Michael Joelson said the game teaches youngsters to think before they move, to make plans, to carry them out, and to anticipate rival efforts.

It’s also fun. Said Central’s Clairese Hammock, “You don’t have to actually get mad about it. It’s just a game.”

Cleveland Public Library Director Andrew Venable said he hopes the players become patrons. The library features the world’s leading collection of chess materials, including a piece found in King Tut’s tomb.

About 200 middle-schoolers squared off at the library yesterday, and some 250 elementary schoolers are expected today. Most of the pupils are beginners, and it often showed yesterday.

Three Central players won in four moves apiece, virtually the minimum. And tournament organizers had to dispel a few delusions.

“That’s not checkmate,” Joelson told a prematurely triumphant Brian Jewell of Central. “That’s only check.”

The chess program was conceived by Carl Bowers, now a Cleveland police detective.

Bowers was a national scholastic champion in his division at John Adams High School, which has produced several chess champions over the years.

He recruited several fellow officers and players to help at the tournament. He also got financial backing from RPM Inc., whose president, Frank Sullivan, is a casual player and the father of four budding players.

The chess stars simultaneously beat and taught several pupils at once. Bowers urged them to make their pieces work together.

“It’s just like police radio,” he said. “You got to have backup.”

Calvin Blocker, the state’s top-rated player, simultaneously beat a few students and Patrolman Dave Oxley. This despite Oxley slapping handcuffs on him in mid-game and warning, “If you win, you go to jail, you know that?”

A couple of youngsters managed to beat or draw the officers. “She whipped my butt in three moves,” sighed Patrolman Tim Brown after losing to Central’s Alecia Jeffrey.

Most of the grownups won, but few of the students were cowed.

“I’ll be back,” vowed Deonte Pegues after losing to David Allen Jr., a former Ohio scholastic champion. “One day, I’ll be able to beat him.”

The Plain Dealer
Cleveland, Ohio
Feb 21, 2002