A line of students treks from Neal Dow Elementary School to the Chico Elks Lodge. The kids plead and gesture for passing cars to honk at them and shriek with delight when drivers comply. Most are wearing matching blue shirts that say “Neal Dow Chess Club.” They’re on their way to the first tournament of the season.
At the rear of the group, occasionally shouting for the students to pick up the pace, is Steven Oberlander — the kids call him Mr. Obe. He runs Neal Dow's chess club and is the director of the Sacramento Valley Scholastic Chess League. The league has grown massively since he became director a little over a decade ago.
"We had about 13 schools at one point, and now we've got 32," he says. "But it's been a double-edged sword because now we've got to figure out how we can accommodate all these kids. The spaces we've been using in the past can't hold that amount."
That's why this tournament is being held at the Elks Lodge, which donated the space to be used by the league. More than 200 students from across the Sacramento Valley are in attendance. It's the league's largest first tournament ever.
Neal Dow Chess Club members are excited and nervous to compete. Fifth grader Sydney Miller jokes that she plans on winning 10 out of the three matches she'll play.
Many others say they want to beat students from Franklin Elementary School in Yuba City, their unofficial rival.
"They're probably the second best team," says fifth grader Judah Smith. "Behind us."
The tournament
The Elks Lodge is packed with rows of tables, each with four chess boards and a corresponding timer.
Elementary through high school students are here to compete and their parents sit in crowded chairs lining the outside wall of the hall. Players are matched according to their Elo rating, a system used to track skill levels between players.
After the students take their seats, Oberlander takes a microphone and addresses the room. He goes over tournament rules, encourages good sportsmanship and lets the students know how to request a judge in the event of rules disputes. Then, the matches start.
Before the room was buzzing with conversation, but that simmers to a low hush. The air is punctuated with the constant light thunks of players hitting their clocks after they’ve made their move.
Each player has 10 minutes of game time on the clock. They play three rounds and their rankings are updated following the tournament.
You can’t win ‘em all
Neal Dow fifth grader Sydney Miller's first game was a loss.
"The opening I did wasn't that good," she says after. "And my endgame … I was just off."
She lost a key piece early — her rook. She says she undervalued it and learned her lesson.
Fifth grader Judah Smith also lost his first game.
"I kind of got smoked," he says. He lost his queen early, a crippling blunder that put him at a major disadvantage.
"I'm definitely going to take more time on my moves, be a lot more conservative, and just hope that goes well," Smith says.
Meanwhile fifth grader Tyler Kojibashian won his first match, saying it was an easy victory. He says he's trying to focus on sticking to a plan during his games.
"I have something in my mind. Like 'I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do this!' and then I do something else,” he says after the game. "And I'm like 'What the heck? Why did I just do that?'"
An unexpected victory
Fresh off of "getting smoked," Judah Smith has a chance to turn things around in the second game. It starts regularly enough as he and his opponent make their opening moves and begin capturing pieces. But quickly, the opponent takes one of Smith's key pieces. Then another. Then another. Soon he's left with just two pieces, his king and a rook.
But Smith noticed something, he had significantly more time left on his clock than his opponent, who had taken longer to consider her moves. His moves began to come faster and faster — he'd move a piece, then rapidly stop his timer.
"I just kept stalling and stalling until she finally ran out of clock," Smith says.
Once his opponent ran out of time, the game was over.
It was a learning opportunity for everyone, as Smith thought it would end in a draw. But, the opponent has to request a draw before their time runs out, otherwise it's a loss. Thus, Smith wins, though he thinks he probably should have lost.
Ultimately, nobody on the Neal Down chess team wins all three of their matches, but like Smith, there were some triumphs.
Sydney Miller lost her first two games, and wasn't feeling good at the beginning of game three.
"I thought I was gonna lose," Miller says. "Then [my opponent] made one wrong move, and I knew what to do."
Miller ended up winning her final match, and says she now has some strategies she’s going to test out with her friends during practice games.
Chess' popularity and the benefits
Oberlander says the tournament was a huge success — there were no problems the day of and he's happy to see the league continue to grow.
He says the Netflix show “The Queen's Gambit” and the popularity of online chess during COVID-19 lockdowns reinvigorated interest in the sport.
Oberlander says playing chess builds character and gives students an outlet for competition.
"The real [benefits are that] it teaches you patience. It teaches forward thinking. I think like any other sport it teaches sportsmanship,” he says. “These kids have to learn how to lose games and how to win them without being conceited about it … And for the young ones, that can be a challenge."
Oberlander’s own interest in the game was renewed after an event at a school carnival he was chaperoning. He had set up a booth where students could play a game of chess with him on an antique chess set he had been given.
"I could play chess, but I really knew nothing about tactics and strategies and things like that," he says. "So I'm standing there and this sixth grade girl comes up … and proceeds to wipe me clean on this game. She back-rank checkmated me in front of a group of people, and I swore in that moment I would never let that happen again."
Shortly after, Oberlander became involved with the scholastic league and formed the chess club at Neal Dow.
"Now, about 10% to 11% of our student population is on my chess team, competing monthly," he says.
He hopes to continue to grow the league, but first, he has an off-the-board problem to solve — finding a space big enough to regularly accommodate the hundreds of students in the Sacramento Valley who are already playing, and contending, in the game of chess.