A new club has spawned from the minds of the student body at Collegedale Academy High School. The first meeting of the chess club happened on August 25. Leading this new extracurricular is Mr McQuistan and myself. The chess club’s main purpose is to teach beginners how to play with their own personal style. In chess, many people can seem like they are just looking for the best moves, but that leaves out a lot of what chess used to be. Bobby Fischer, one of the best chess players of all time, now despises chess because of the lack of personal flair and creativity. Our goal is to allow new or longtime chess players a way to add themselves into their chess games to make it their own.

Both chess players and the average person love to play games in some way. In fact the board game market made over 9 billion dollars in revenue last year. So for any person chess could be another way to enjoy their favorite hobby through expression. Back to Bobby Fischer he once said “ Chess is dead,” because he truly believed it had lost its way. It went so far that he made his own variation of chess called chess 960 which randomizes the pieces from the start so you can’t rely on pure memorisation. I want my players to feel like they can play the way they feel best, not just follow pre-memorized moves or rote methods. People may not think of Chess as a game where creativity comes into play, but in Chess club we’ll teach people how to expand their minds with this ancient game.