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BOARDMAN -- Twenty-four chess playing hopefuls from around the region gathered at Southern Park Mall over the weekend for a nationally sanctioned chess tournament, the first of its kind in Boardman.
Players ranged in age from their 80s to their teens as hip-hop music bounced from the speakers of the Steel Valley Brew Works at the end of the mall's southern concourse.
"I'm used to total quiet," Senior Tournament Director David Bills said. "We practice in a church back home. Sometimes the choir is rehearsing upstairs but we wait until they are done and then we have the church all to ourselves."
When not playing chess, Bills is a salesman from Kent, who has been playing competitive chess for 61 years. Like everyone in the bar that afternoon, Bills works for the love of the game, but to become a tournament director means winning a lot of chess games and passing tests administered by the United States Chess Federation (USCF). He is also the president of the Ohio Scholastic Chess Association.
The USCF was founded in 1939, according to its website, and represents the United States to the World Chess Federation, sometimes known by its French acronym FIDE for Federation Internationale des Echecs.
These organizations use a rating system based upon numbers of wins against quality players. The better the player one beats, the higher one's rating, according to online sources. The USCGF claims 112,000 registered players in 2024.
Saturday's tournament was an unrated event, but it was the first chess tournament in the Youngstown area sanctioned by these organizations.
"I've been trying to get a tournament in here for seven years," Bills said. "It's very exciting anytime you have new chess people coming in, or anytime I can get in front of new players and introduce them to the scholastic world of chess is an outstanding thing."
"Scholastic chess" refers specifically to student players who are a growing demographic within the sport, according to the USCF, and several of the day's competitors were high school students.
Aden Mangrum one day hopes to be a cardiologist, but on Saturday, the 14-year-old Boardman High School student was excited to be matched up with other seasoned players.
"I want to beat everybody here," he said. "I've beaten some of the seasoned players. I've beaten a 2,400 (rated) player."
For others, this was their first tournament.
Ty Cousins, an auto store worker from Powell, Pennsylvania, hoped to use the Steel Valley Brew Works tournament as a launching point.
For Bobby Harris of Lisbon, this tournament marked his first "over-the-board" chess tournament, meaning that he has played in numerous online tournaments, but never sat across from a live player.
Title players are those who have won enough games to compete in national or even international tournaments.
Bills called all the players together and explained the USCF rules and basic competition decorum.
"Once you touch a piece you must move it," he intoned loudly over the music. "If you touch an opponent's piece you must take it. If you have a question, raise your hand," Bills said.
Players were grouped into "quads," or four players at a table, and each player played the other competitors at their table in turn, round-robin style. Clocks were provided so that players do not go over their time limits of approximately 30 minutes for the game, and some players fumbled a bit with their first chess-oriented time equipment.
The techno-beat didn't seem to bother the players hunched intently over their chessboards, what Bills called "a dance with 64 squares," referring to the checkered design that the chess pieces maneuver on.
Parents and spouses hovered over the tables, taking videos with their cellphones.
Celest Baronzzi from Salem was there to cheer on her son.
"I'm very impressed with the size of the tournament," she said, even though it was not as large as those in Cleveland and Pittsburgh, "and I guess there are some really great players here."
Her son, Evan Gamble, was one of the online chess players competing in his first in-person tournament.
The tournament was organized by Julio Williams, a civil engineer from Canfield.
"Chess and Steel Valley (Brew Pub) is a great place to meet up," he said. "What I love about chess is that it is a great unifier," Williams said. "People of different vocations, different backgrounds, young and seasoned, they can come together and have comradery and compete, and it's just a great time."
Derrick McKinney from New Middletown is a home improvement sales consultant who thinks of chess as both a hobby and a health practice.
"I started playing in high school and I picked up the game there and just kept playing," McKinney said. "I went to school for engineering with a lot of smart guys, and I started talking to older people in the field and I said, you know, what do you do?" They played chess, McKinney said.
So, it is no surprise that McKinney believes chess is good for the brain. "At my age I want to stay one step ahead of Alzheimer's," he said, although there was nothing wrong with McKinney's chess game. He won his first game after Williams "made a mistake that I capitalized on," McKinney said. Both men smiled at the joke.
Ali Alelaiw, a graduate student studying mechanical engineering at YSU, thinks of chess in the same way. Alelaiw is a veteran of a half-dozen chess tournaments. He won his first game of the day and played his second game to a draw. As an engineer, he also sees chess as a challenge for the brain.
"It's been a blast," Ed Mahoney, a retired computer technician from Struthers said. "I'm not that good but I thought that this would be fun to see how other players play.
As someone who tried in the past to organize events such as these, he hopes that this first tournament can be a stepping stone.
"I mean, chess is big in the world, just not right here for some reason. I hope we can get more," Mahoney said.