Chess is a highly intellectual and strategic game. It can be said that it's a challenging game to master. It is because of this that this sport/game is very popular and is played around the world. A little known fact about chess is that it can be life saving,
With the world of chess riding the wave of a huge popularity boom in recent years, the game is increasingly collaborating more with mainstream leagues.
One requires monk-like levels of silent concentration – particularly in classical chess – while the other demands physical dominance, peak athleticism and the ability to stay composed in a frenzied atmosphere.
Judit Polgár was one of the chess grandmasters. Polgár, who was a trailblazer for women in chess, was impressed with the level of the NBA players and agreed it could help their game.
"I think chess can be pretty good for empowering your concentration skills. It is also very good on how you adjust your brain with the different situations. Also to learn resilience, to never give up, because you fight on and anything can happen. Your opponent can also make a mistake, and then you’re bouncing back and catching the opportunity."
Marottichal is a sleepy village of nearly 6 000 residents located at the foot of the Western Ghats in the picturesque Thrissur district of India’s Kerala state.
In the early 2000s, Marottichal became known by the chess community in Kerala as the, "Chess Village of India" because at least one person in every household here is believed to be chess-proficient. Across the village, people regularly sit across chessboards, competing in the shade of bus stops, outside grocery shops and on the playground.
Four decades ago, the village was in the grip of an alcohol addiction and gambling crisis that was pushing many families to the verge of ruin.
In the 1970s, three Marottichal households were brewing nut-based alcohol for personal consumption. By the early 80s, the village had become a regional hub for illicit alcohol production.
The trade flowed between villages with Marottichal as the source of the alcohol. Farming families began to neglect their livestock and crops. With diminishing returns from the land, villagers soon turned to gambling through card games at the liquor production houses, from where bookies also operated.
A lack of regular income and the reliance on alcohol saw many families fall into poverty. Soon, people engrossed over a chess board became a common sight across the village.
Meanwhile, cases of alcohol addiction and gambling began to decline in the village. Families, once devastated by the bottle, instead huddled together around a chess board, competing against loved ones for the high of a checkmate.
In 2016, Marottichal was awarded a Universal Asian Record by the Universal Records Forum for the greatest number of amateur competitors (1 001) playing chess concurrently in Asia.
Unlike gambling, there is almost no element of chance in chess. The game is deterministic – the player who makes the best collection of moves wins; and the rules and format remove the opportunity to cite adverse conditions as excuses or blame bad luck for losses.
Across the world, chess has been instrumental in treating addiction and psychological and cognitive issues. In Spain, the sport was incorporated into rehabilitation programmes to treat drug, alcohol and gambling addiction. More recently, in the United Kingdom, psychologist, Rosie Meeks, argued that prison chess clubs helped to, "reduce violence and conflict, develop communication and other skills, and promote positive use of leisure time" among inmates.
Chess has sometimes been seen as a status symbol. For the children of Majidun, a slum suburb in Nigeria’s commercial capital, Lagos, the game of kings and queens is an escape from the difficulties of everyday life.
Babatunde Onakoya founded Chess in Slums Africa - an initiative to provide teaching and mentorship to underprivileged kids - by chance. Initially, his only intention was to teach the game to kids to keep them occupied but it was an instant hit.
"A lot of the kids weren't going to school. They were doing menial jobs to support their parents. I just got them together and started teaching them chess," Onakoya told Olympics.com ahead of World Mental Health Day - 10 October.
Since forming the initiative in 2018, he has transformed and inspired over 200 children, who are now pursuing better moves on the boards and in life.
The chess national master dedicated his life to teaching a game that he first came across in one of Nigeria’s harshest neighbourhoods.
"I was privileged, because chess gave me an escape and that was what saved my life. A lot of the young people I grew up with got into drugs, nothing happened or changed for them," he explained. "Chess took me off the streets because I represented my college, I didn't have to pay tuition, it gave me a lot of opportunities."
After falling on hard times recently, Onakoya went back to living in Majidun, the floating slum he’d called home for many years.
Even at the lowest point of his life, chess gave the computer science graduate a way out: he decided to introduce the game that saved him to the children in the slum.
Why chess? "Chess is sometimes perceived to be for the elite. But I wanted people to start seeing that even a child poor, hungry, and tattered from the slums could master the game of chess and master all its intricacies, a game that is prestigious and respected all over the world."
"So you would not look at the child as just a poor person from the slums, but as a person who has intellectual capacity but only lacks basic needs," Onakoya reasoned a point that accentuated the motto of chess "Gens una sumus," which is Latin for, "We are one people."
That day in 2018 marked the start of an exciting chess adventure for the kids of Majidun. "I was completely astounded by what we were able to do in one day. Master the basics, the rules of the game, the movements of the pieces," he recalled of the introduction classes.
"They had incredible potential, but one thing they didn’t have is opportunity. That is the sad story of Africa. I thought deeply about what I could really do to change that narrative. I didn't have money then, but I just knew that I had a couple of chess boards and it wasn't going to cost a lot just to keep going there to teach that."
With that, the 27-year-old began a life-changing new mission. "We were having so many children coming to our tournaments and just had maybe three or four chess boards. I got my friends, some of whom were masters and we taught the kids together. We did this consistently for about three months and started taking the kids out for tournaments because they were learning at such an incredible pace."
He was introducing a 'fun game' but faced strong opposition from the children’s parents, most of whom fished for a living. "It was an arduous task trying to convince the parents to even let the kids participate because they would rather have the kids doing menial jobs to support them," Onakoya explained.
"A child in the slums, first, the need for that child would be to survive the deal and have food to eat and all of that. So, we promised to give them food at the end of every training session, that was the first point of attraction" Onakoya explained.
It was a good move. Just like on the chess boards the 'chess slum master' accumulated the small advantages and converted them to permanent ones. The success of his programme meant support in terms of scholarships for about 30 children; who had never had formal education.
The success of the pilot programme has seen Chess in Slums Africa expand to three other informal settlements including in Makoko, the world’s largest floating slum on the coast of Lagos and in neighbouring Burkina Faso.
Onakoya hopes to spread chess even further and reach up to one million African children, proving to the world that it’s possible 'to do great things from a small place'.
"We aim to show that children from slum communities, who have been marginalized for so long, also have the potential to do great things given the right opportunities. We want to create this new narrative for the African child."
It's always exciting when I see a sport benefiting a community. A sense of competition can unite people together. This is the power of sport. Despite any news to the contrary, everyone is invited and encouraged to participate. Exclusions aren't allowed.