Benefield: Student-founded chess club connects generations in Sebastopol

Ananda Doel-Agarwal had Doug Jordan pinned.

Jordan had built what he felt was a strong position, only to see Doel-Agarwal pick it apart and put him on the defensive.

“You can go here, here or here,” Doel-Agarwal, 14, said as he pointed to spaces on Jordan’s side of the chessboard. “So I force you to the back line.”

Jordan kept his eyes on the board in front of him.

“So this is very bad,” Jordan said.

But also, Jordan would later admit, very good.

The back and forth, the learning, the strategy development — it’s all part of the master plan behind the Intergenerational Chess Club, a student-led group launched in April with a couple of chessboards and a lot of enthusiasm.

They meet at 3:30 p.m. Thursdays at the Sebastopol Regional Library.

“I envisioned it as a club, but I didn’t know how it would turn out,” said Dagan Prusky, 13, one of the middle school students behind the creation of the club. “I thought it would be so you’d have someone to play.”

While Prusky and some friends from Willowside Middle School regularly play, the intergenerational piece has been slowly building.

Jordan, a retired Sonoma State University business professor, said he was studying chess strategy at a coffee shop months ago when someone approached him and asked if he knew anything about the fledgling group at the library.

He didn’t, but he soon would.

A self-described chess enthusiast, Jordan was already the adviser for the chess club at Analy High School, where his twin sons are sophomores.

He showed up at the library to find Prusky and his buddies paired off and playing.

Jordan was a fan immediately.

He loves the game and he loves to teach it. Or at least play it with other enthusiasts.

“A lot of studies show that kids learn problem-solving, they learn to concentrate, they learn to plan future things, reading comprehension,” he said. “I think there is a lot of benefits.”

So to bolster the group, Jordan bought and donated a number of regulation boards and clocks to the club.

Attendance has grown and those boards and clocks are now in regular use.

Prusky for one, just loves to play and get better.

“It’s such a balanced game,” he said. “It’s so different from other games. It’s 100% strategy. I really loved that. You divert the power of the pieces and are trying to use strategy.”

And the intergenerational piece is an added bonus, players said.

Santiago Melendez, another Willowside eighth grader and arguably one of the stronger players in the mix, said it’s fun to challenge adults and win.

On a recent Thursday, there were about 15 chess players sitting at various boards. More kids than adults, but a pretty good mix.

Dixon Wragg, who belongs to the adult set, said he showed up at Jordan’s behest expecting do some strategy mentoring with the younger players.

It doesn’t always turn out like that, he said with a grin.

“The idea may have been that there would be a little mentoring going on between the older and the younger ones, but some of these young guys can mentor me,” he said.

So, he changed the idea of what he models for the younger players.

“I’m prepared to lose gracefully,” he said. “And anybody who engages in a game of competition needs to be prepared to lose gracefully, without whining or anything.”

Prusky, who loves the game and practices regularly on the computer, said the long-standing chess club at Willowside and the newer club gatherings at the library, give him not only a chance to play but to be a student of the game.

And Jordan has been a great resource for that.

“Sometimes he brings in these big chess boards,” Prusky said. “We will look at famous games and he would teach us why people do moves.”

“Last week he taught me ‘the queen’s gambit,’” he said. “It’s basically an opening that uses the queen’s pawn and the pawn next to it you push both of those so you can develop the knights.”

Jordan just loves the game. And the more people he sees playing, the better.

His take on learning to be a better chess player sounds a lot like a decent take on life.

“If you want to improve, it’s not just about moving pieces randomly. Just because you can move a piece doesn’t mean you should move a piece,” he said. “If you want to become a better player you can’t be constantly making weak moves that don’t advance your cause.”

You can reach Staff Columnist Kerry Benefield at 707-526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @benefield.