Chess on Long Island has risen in popularity, with fans of all ages playing the game

On a busy Saturday afternoon at a Starbucks in Garden City, as customers ordered pumpkin spice and strawberry acai drinks, Alexis Crisp’s black knight and rook chased Kat Hankinson’s white king into a corner — and finally to checkmate.

The Long Island Women’s Chess Club was in session.

Hankinson, 59, a writer from Huntington, and Crisp, 45, a church administrative coordinator from Roosevelt, played on a soft roll-out chessboard whose corners drooped over the edges of a round table.

On this day, the turnout was just these two, but since Hankinson launched the club in early spring at a Starbucks in Melville, she said, it has attracted as many as six women. Players meet on weekends at coffee shops in Nassau and Suffolk and periodically online. They say chess offers 64-square therapy that both challenges and relaxes their minds.

“We can slow it all down and analyze it,” Hankinson said.

The club’s members are among the many chess players caught up in a global fervor for the 1,500-year-old game not seen since Brooklyn’s Bobby Fischer became world champion in 1972.

The U.S. Chess Federation, which governs competitions, saw member numbers plunge from a high of 97,000 to 52,000 when the pandemic halted in-person tournaments, and then rebound to 112,800 today. Membership at chess.com, the biggest chess website, has multiplied fourfold from 35 million in June 2020 to 140 million today.

“Online chess, which was already becoming popular even without the pandemic, it started to really surge because, obviously, people were stuck at home,” said Neal Bellon, founder of the Long Island Chess Club. “Many thought, ‘We’re bored out of our minds. Let’s dust off the chess set,’ ” he said.

And on Long Island, Bellon and others involved in the local chess scene say they have seen an uptick in interest this year, with more people turning out to compete or signing up for lessons.

“The Queen’s Gambit” TV series, about the rise of a fictional female chess star, has helped fuel the fascination. So have plentiful instructional videos and popular internet streamers such as U.S. grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura, the world’s No. 3-ranked player, who engagingly discusses and plays chess for 2.13 million followers on YouTube.

Surge on Long Island

In Nassau and Suffolk counties, the surge has spawned new groups and energized an existing assortment of clubs and school and library programs.

At Tullulah’s Restaurant & Bar in Bay Shore, owner Steven Scalesse livens up Wednesday nights by setting up chess clocks and boards for games among all comers.

“Everyone’s welcome, all levels,” he said. “No one’s the best, no one’s the worst . . . I’m definitely seeing more people coming in.”

Hankinson, meanwhile, said “The Queen’s Gambit” inspired her to take chess lessons online. Early this year, she used social media to launch the Long Island Women’s Chess Club.

“We’re still a small group, but we’re always open and inviting more people,” she said. “It’s for women only because I think chess has been very male-dominated.”

Hankinson said the women feel comfortable socializing and discussing basics: “Develop your pieces, control the center, get the king to safety.”

The day at the Starbucks in Garden City, a few men stopped to watch. “Some men come up to us and are very nice,” Hankinson said. “Some start mansplaining.”

“They come up and tell us where we should move,” Crisp said. “I’m not kidding.”

Hankinson said every girl should be taught chess because of what many learn growing up — or at least in her generation. “You know,” she said, “look pretty, be nice, be pleasing. There was nothing in the list of priorities about sharpening your mind, being able to make good decisions, planning strategy, prioritizing. These are all intellectual mental skills that we practice and sharpen when we’re playing chess, and it’s very empowering.”

One girl learning those skills is Sophia Serigano, 13, a freshman at North Babylon High School. At a recent Thursday night meeting of the Long Island Chess Club, on the second floor of the United Methodist Church in East Meadow, Serigano was the only girl among more than two dozen men and boys peering over 13 boards.

This was serious chess, with clocks, score sheets and — shhh! — no talking. Game results can affect U.S. Chess Federation ratings of each player’s strength.

‘The Queen's Gambit’

“The Queen’s Gambit” also piqued Serigano’s interest, and after playing at home and in a school club, she joined the East Meadow club this summer. As for being the only girl in the room, she said, “Sometimes it is a bit intimidating, but it’s kind of nice at the same time. No one really knows me yet, so everything is like a surprise.”

She enjoys concentrating on the board. “It’s really calming to me,” she said. “It’s like living in a different place just in a couple hours and minutes.”

Club founder Bellon, 51, a music teacher at Berner Middle School in Massapequa who also hosts a weekly beginner-friendly podcast called “The Chess Angle,” said the group started with about a dozen players in 2007 and grew to about 20 regulars. He shut it down for six months during the pandemic but is delighted that participation this year has sometimes reached around 40 players.

“We got a surge of newer players, and it’s still going strong,” he said.

For young players

Another Long Island chess hive is the Bellport Chess Club, where kids ages 6 to 18 play at various sites on Saturdays. Jason Neal, 47, a management consultant from Brookhaven, started the club in 2014.

When they were students at Bellport High School, Neal said he and his twin, Brandon — now a retired Suffolk County police officer — played on magnetic chess sets during long rides to cross-country meets.

Jason Neal was also a member of the school chess team. He said the game helped him organize his thinking. “You have to prioritize your order of movement and consider what your next steps are going to be in anything, not just in chess, but in life,” he said.

Two members of the Bellport club are siblings Kevin and Chelsea Gonzalez of East Patchogue, both students at Bellport High School. Kevin Gonzalez, 16, echoed Neal’s feelings about chess. “It helps me think ahead about what I need to accomplish, what I need to do beforehand, so my end goal is easy to achieve,” he said.

Chelsea Gonzalez, 14, said her brother usually wins their games, but she proudly showed a cellphone photo of a chessboard from the one moment in a decade that she beat Kevin — 1:33 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 19, 2023. “If I beat him once,” she said, “I can definitely beat him more!”

Said her brother, “I was happy for her because it means she’s getting better.”

Both said they see classmates playing chess on their phones and computers at school.

The game appears to have shaken off its nerdy reputation: “You have people who might be a five-star athlete in high school and college or might be someone who doesn’t really like to play sports,” Kevin Gonzalez said. “Everyone can enjoy chess.”

The same observation was made by Weijie-Jay Li, 17, a senior at Jericho High School. He is an officer on Jericho’s chess team, which has a national reputation as a perennial powerhouse. And he is president of Chessanity, a nonprofit that organizes monthly U.S. Chess-rated tournaments at the George A. Jackson Elementary School in Jericho. Chessanity was formed in 2014 by Warren and Wesley Wang, then high-level players at Jericho.

“Every month we see a lot of new players join in, but this year it has been particularly eventful,” Li said. “We have seen a lot of new faces.”

Demand for classes

Grandmaster Gennady Sagalchik, who has coached many top scholastic players, including the Wang brothers, runs Long Island ChessMates. It is one of a few instructional organizations that conduct weekly afternoon and evening programs at local schools. Students typically pay about $35 per ChessMates class during a 10-week session.

Sagalchik said he has noticed “a very unusual” trend this fall in which students are enrolling at advanced ages.

“Dozens and dozens of middle school and high school students are signing up for the beginner classes, and we have not seen this in the past,” Sagalchik said. “I don’t know whether it’s an effect of the pandemic and they just missed those years when they could do it and it’s a delayed, sort of pent-up demand, so to speak, or whether this is just an online chess phenomenon where the young players are joining chess.com . . . and therefore they just want to catch up.”

The largest of the local instructional groups is Long Island Chess Nuts, launched in 1996 by Margarita Lanides of Garden City. She said Chess Nuts is teaching in 45 schools this year. Fees run about $15 a class. “All children should be exposed to chess,” Lanides said. “If they want to continue with it, great, but if they don’t, at least they know it’s out there.”

Back at the Starbucks in Garden City, Crisp had lost several pieces in the second game. In a last gasp, she checked Hankinson’s black king three times before her white king fell.

In a thoughtful moment afterward, Crisp said blunders at the board have helped her endure blunders in life. “You don’t have to be perfect,” she said.