Players and Pawns: How Chess Builds Community and Culture

Whether your chess career culminated in grandmaster status, or ended (repeatedly) in your or your brother's hurling the board and pieces across the living room, nearly all of us learned to play the game at one point or another. And chess tournaments, like spelling bees, are strangely captivating phenomena, bringing hundreds--sometimes thousands--of people together to watch two men sit silently at opposite sides of a table, occasionally moving a game piece. Gary Fine examines the social forces that bring these people together, not just in tournaments but in chess clubs, elementary and high school programs, college teams, and more. He finds that the chess players create a "soft community," an open and welcoming space where those with a commitment to the game find a place, despite eccentricities that might make them outsiders elsewhere. Admission to the community isn't free, though; the flip side to soft community is "sticky culture," the stipulation that identification with this world is explicitly linked with the acquisition of shared knowledge. This knowledge starts with game tactics and strategy, but Fine doesn't elaborate on them: he brings us on a tour of all the other things a player learns: the psychology of chess, the history of the game, local and national heroes, how you conduct yourself when you're on the ticking clock of a timed match, what it means to know exactly where you're ranked among the millions of chess players in the world, the seminal matches of the Cold War. Though you may come out of reading this book just as much of a patzer--a bumbling amateur--on the board, you'll have a thorough understanding of what happens over the board.