These kids are board crazy!
Chess enthusiasts of all ages made moves at the Brooklyn Chess Festival on Saturday, filling Dr. Ronald McNair Park on the corner of Prospect Park with rows of boards as strategy-builders locked horns in friendly competition.
One attendee says the festival was an uplifting reminder of what makes the game so special.
“It’s been a wonderful thing,” said Dawn Babbush, whose 8-year-old son Zane is on the chess team at the Academy of Arts and Letters in Fort Greene. “It’s a wonderful opportunity for self-esteem, and it’s so scholarly and community-building.”
Babbush says Zane took the park by storm, taking first place in the festival’s “blitz” tournament, which turns up the heat by making players race against the clock on each turn.
“It’s really exciting and a more aggressive kind of thing,” said Babbush. “Every time they make a move they have to slap the clock.”
The festival also offered a school-based tournament for kids in grades one through eight, a learn-to-play clinic for newbies, and an opportunity to play Georgian international grandmaster Giorgi Kacheishvili, who Babbush says left her whiz-kid star-struck.
“These are their rock stars for sure,” she said of Kacheishvili and other renowned masters of the game who attended the fest.
Babbush is passionate about the growing chess program at Zane’s school, which took the students to the National Elementary Chess Tournament in May, where the team came in ninth place and Zane individually placed ninth.
The team’s instructor Stephanie Ballom and parents have been working to recruit new members and increase diversity in the intellectual sport they think is important for kids’ development, Babbush said, but there were not enough girls at the boards at Saturday’s festival, and she wants to change that.
“We want it to be diverse, not just ethnically and racially, but in gender,” she said.
