Chess at Maria Carrillo
The puzzle club playing an intense game of chess in the late game (Heyman Luong, The Puma Prensa)
By Heyman Luong, staff writer
What is a game to you? Some might say football, soccer, basketball, or the plethora of other sports out there. Others would say their favorite video games: Minecraft, Overwatch, Roblox, or Fortnite. But recently, a different type of game—older than any video game and thought of as a game for old people or nerds—has gained popularity at Maria Carrillo High School: Chess.
As a game that has been around for over a millennium, humans have played chess in various forms worldwide, from chaturanga in 600 A.D. India to shogi in Japan and xiangqi in China. For such an old game, many would expect that it might lose popularity with time like many modern multiplayer games. Yet recently, the opposite has happened, with an uprising in popularity. Junior William Nguyen “can’t even count” the number of people he knows that play—“everyone’s been playing it”—and he knows a plethora of people that play often. For Nguyen, chess has recently become a new and exciting addition to his life. “I randomly stumbled upon the chess game in GamePigeon and started playing with my friends at break,” said Nguyen. Since then, he has played daily at school, enjoying it for its competitiveness, similar to a “PC game but you can play it anywhere,” also valuing that it’s fun when played with friends.
Dylan DeCastro, also a current junior at MCHS, thinks that a main reason why chess has gotten big at school is due to the initial influx of people who began by playing online bringing the game to Carillo, which in turn caused more people to want to try it too. “That’s what makes chess fun. It’s a battle of the mind…a fun way for friends to say they’re smarter in a lighthearted way” and to “kind of prove [it],” DeCastro said. She added that her “best guess is [that] chess has had a resurgence online. Chess.com and Lichess (two popular chess apps) have become bigger,” making ever the occasional chess joke trend online.
Whether it be break, lunch, or even during class, someone’s bound to be playing chess, and its popularity only continues to grow. Junior Samuel Pollack said that it’s been growing on a much larger scale than just MCHS. He said that worldwide“some of the marketing that’s been done through chess has helped popularize it.” Along with this, the COVID pandemic may have served to help chess’s popularity. As people were stuck inside, they turned to other sources of entertainment, including chess. A New York Times article reports that from Oct. 2020 to April 2022, Chess.com, the most popular online chess website, “saw their number of monthly active users double from roughly eight million to nearly 17 million.”
Furthermore, a massive chess tournament for streamers sponsored by Chess.com named PogChamps was streamed through Twitch from May to June 2020, garnering a peak live viewership of 166,150 people, according to escharts.com. And the game’s following continued to grow past quarantine. According to Google Trends, Feb 2023 has been at an all-time high in popularity for searching the term “chess” worldwide since the beginning of data collection in 2004.
Regardless of the causes, chess is loved by many, especially locally, as attested to by MCHS’s puzzle club. Meeting on Fridays in F-5, the club has enjoyed chess as one of their principal games. Member Gad Njumbi said as a young child, he “just found it interesting, and throughout [his] young child life” learned how to play. He finds the “versatile way of [playing] really interesting.” Njumbi plays “whenever he can,” but the most challenging part initially was initially people to play with. Now, he often plays in the puzzle club and with anyone else who challenges him, enjoying many matches against others in the group.
Ultimately, as its recent popularity would prove, chess is a complex and fun pastime filled with strategy and depth.
As Pollack would put it, chess is fun and popular because it’s about your ability to think ahead and “a game about outwitting your opponent.”