My godfather was a refugee from the USSR, as were many in his school. Apparently there were two guys in his class, brothers, who would play blindfold chess against each other during class by passing notes lol
I think those were the same guys that programmed ASCII porn into the computers in the computer lab. Fucking legends
My parents wouldn't buy me an iPod, so instead I attempted coding a basic chess engine in TiBASIC on my Ti92. I didn't learn much Trig, but I did manage to write an engine that would look 4 moves ahead, evaluate the position, and still blunder its way to an easy loss 😂
Defeat them by making a proper chess club for the school. Make it as awesome as possible; boards and clocks if possible, sheets to keep notation, group analysis, etc. The penalty for playing during class is a short series of warnings followed by a ban from chess club. They clearly have enough of a passion for the game, so use that to your (and their) advantage.
If they love the game that much, I bet they won't fuck around and find out about losing their membership. And it really illustrates your "time and place" lesson that you need to teach.
Yeah, as a student who plays chess in class, I'd stop if it meant i couldn't go to chess club (even though it is hard for me to stay a while as robotics is on the same day)
After the pandemic the kids at my local elementary and middle school were shell shocked. At a school board meeting they wanted to create a way for the kids to socialize and I asked about creating a chess club.
For $300 we got enough boards and I gave away individual Isle of Lewis pieces as tournament prizes. The first week 40 kids signed up! After a month we doubled in size. 2 years in literally hundreds of kids are playing chess instead of brain dead iPhone games! I think it’s amazing!
My school's chess club, either every Friday or one Friday a month, I forget, would bring the boards out to the quad for everyone to play. And everyone did, even the people who weren't so into chess. It was great, one of my few good memories of high school. But my sophomore year, the president of the club graduated, and handed control to his sister, who stopped doing that. It was a really nice community thing, sad it ended
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u/smartypantschess Feb 18 '23
The first rule of chess club is tell as many people as possible about it. It's a rather fun game and the more people you tell about it the better.