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Tuesday, July 29, 2025

DOU­BLE ROOKS

Awake to the benefits of chess

by

20110907

One of the "bur­dens" that has con­sis­tent­ly in­flu­enced the con­tri­bu­tions of Dou­ble Rooks over the years is the need to have more of our young peo­ple play­ing and en­joy­ing the Roy­al Game. The man­i­fold ben­e­fits that could be de­rived from such a "move­ment" are now a mat­ter of wide­spread in­ter­na­tion­al ex­pe­ri­ence, sup­port­ed and en­cour­aged by ex­perts not on­ly at the high­er lev­els of the game but al­so by an in­creas­ing num­ber of recog­nised ed­u­ca­tion­ists. As the world's most men­tal­ly ab­sorb­ing sport, chess, even at its most ba­sic lev­el, pro­vides an are­na for both in­tense com­pe­ti­tion and im­mense en­ter­tain­ment. That alone, of course, should be enough to pro­mote its pop­u­lar­i­ty. But be­yond that lev­el, the game is al­so ben­e­fi­cial­ly unique for the men­tal dis­ci­pline and pos­i­tive modes of think­ing it en­cour­ages among its devo­tees, par­tic­u­lar­ly the young.

A num­ber of stud­ies per­formed in dif­fer­ent parts of the world over sev­er­al years have con­firmed this. One ex­per­i­ment con­duct­ed among fifth graders in Bel­gium demon­strat­ed that the group of chess-play­ing stu­dents ex­pe­ri­enced "a sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant gain in cog­ni­tive de­vel­op­ment" over a con­trol group. "Per­haps more note­wor­thy, they al­so did sig­nif­i­cant­ly bet­ter in their reg­u­lar school test­ing, as well as in stan­dard­ized test­ing ad­min­is­tered by an out­side agency which did not know the iden­ti­ty of the two groups," the re­port ob­served. Sim­i­lar re­sults were gained from an­oth­er study con­duct­ed by Dr Al­bert Frank among stu­dents of Zaire, aged 16-18. The re­searcher found that the chess-play­ing group "showed a sig­nif­i­cant ad­vance­ment in spa­tial, nu­mer­i­cal and ad­min­is­tra­tive-di­rec­tion­al abil­i­ties, com­pared to the con­trol group."

Per­sua­sive en­dorse­ment for this view has al­so come from GM Su­san Pol­gar, four-time world fe­male chess cham­pi­on and a well-known chess ed­u­ca­tor. In a me­dia in­ter­view, she point­ed out that some 30 coun­tries across the globe, in­clud­ing Brazil, Chi­na, Venezuela, Italy, Is­rael, Rus­sia and Greece, have in­cor­po­rat­ed chess in­to their schools' cur­ricu­lum. "Chess," she says, "has long been re­gard­ed as a game that can have ben­e­fi­cial ef­fects on learn­ing and de­vel­op­ment, es­pe­cial­ly when it is played from a young age." The game, she adds, helps to strength­en a child's men­tal clar­i­ty, for­ti­tude, sta­bil­i­ty and over­all health. "Many schools are now find­ing chess as an in­ex­pen­sive but es­sen­tial way of help­ing kids grow men­tal­ly," she con­cludes. "In this tech­no­log­i­cal­ly dri­ven world, chess helps in the syn­the­sis and growth of cer­tain ar­eas of the brain and mind where many chil­dren can ben­e­fit as they grow old­er."

In­deed, ev­i­dence of the en­hanc­ing im­pact of chess on young minds can be found right here in T&T among the 126 mem­bers of Grant Memo­r­i­al Pres­by­ter­ian School Chess Club, ac­tu­al­ly the largest chess club in the coun­try. Since it was formed three years ago, the club's mem­bers con­sis­tent­ly score high­er than 70 per­cent in their term ex­ams while 60 per­cent achieve above 90 per­cent. "There is no doubt about it," says a proud David Mar­tin, founder and pres­i­dent of the GMP­SCC.

In the con­text of all this, it seems some­what un­for­tu­nate that Trinidad and To­ba­go as a whole is yet to wake up ful­ly to the con­tri­bu­tion that chess could play in the cre­ation of a think­ing so­ci­ety. Spon­sor­ship for ma­jor chess events, par­tic­u­lar­ly among ju­niors who will help to shape the next T&T gen­er­a­tion, is not as forth­com­ing as it should be. Al­so, for a va­ri­ety of rea­sons, a com­pre­hen­sive pro­gramme for tak­ing the sport in­to the na­tion's schools is yet to be im­ple­ment­ed. Still, in all of this, Dou­ble Rooks would be fool­ish­ly pre­sump­tu­ous to claim that chess is the an­swer to many of the coun­try's so­cial ills, in­clud­ing the prob­lems of crime and vi­o­lence. We would cer­tain­ly ad­vance, how­ev­er, that in the ef­fort to build a san­er, more in­tel­li­gent, more pro­gres­sive, more co­he­sive so­ci­ety, the sport of chess and the men­tal ben­e­fits it con­fers par­tic­u­lar­ly on the young can play a sig­nif­i­cant part. More ad­vanced coun­tries have recog­nised this; why can't we?

NEXT WEEK: T&TCA plans for chess-in-schools.


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