Why teens are suddenly obsessed with chess
Chess has always been a part of Henry Lien’s life. He’s played it since he was 5 years old or so, his tiny hands just big enough to hold the pieces. He grew up in a part of the Bay Area, Marin, which is known for producing a few excellent chess players, so his schools always had a good chess team and coaches. Lien even created a nonprofit around it, ChessPals, through which he teaches the game at local schools. No one would ever call chess a niche; it’s an old game with a ton of history, played by millions across the world. But in high school, it’s typically contained to its own circles, played in chess clubs. And that’s why Lien was shocked when he showed up at school one day in January and saw chess everywhere.
“I have no idea what happened in January, but since then I’ve seen probably 90% or 80% of our school playing chess,” Lien told Polygon. “It used to be probably 20%.”
And it’s not only Lien’s high school. Nationwide, people are playing a lot more chess — usually online or in apps. Both middle and high school kids are playing chess on their phones in the hallways between classes, sneaking moves in when their instruments are down during orchestra practice. Students at one school even turned the winter formal into a makeshift chess tournament.
“I heard some cheering down one of the hallways off the main dance area,” Hunter Nedland, a South Dakota-based biology teacher, told Polygon. “I figured some mischief was going on. I was surprised to find a group of freshmen sitting with their laptops and phones in the middle of some very heated chess games.” Nedland said upperclassmen have started calling chess the “weird freshman thing,” due to the ubiquity of the game with younger students — but noted that it’s spread
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