A high school senior from Glastonbury picked up a new skill during the pandemic: chess.
Samantha Tischler taught herself how to play. Now, she is teaching others through a free program at the YMCA of Greater Hartford, which aims to get more girls involved in the game.
“Can you girls both tell me one thing that you love about yourself?” Tischler asked fourth graders Maya and Asia Brown to begin a chess lesson.
The same scene plays out every Saturday.
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“Now can you both give me a reason why you think it's important to recognize the things that we love and appreciate about ourselves?” Tischler asked.
Tischler is a volunteer at the YMCA of Greater Hartford, teaching young girls how to command confidence in life and on the chess board.
In the workshops, the girls are picking up good attitudes.
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“To be a good sport,” Maya Brown, of Windsor, said.
They’re also getting a bit of a competitive edge, especially if you ask their favorite part of the game.
“I'm going be honest, it's winning,” Asia Brown, Maya’s twin sister, said.
Tischler found her love of chess just a coupe years ago.
“During the pandemic, I watched ‘The Queen's Gambit,’ and I thought Beth Harmon was pretty cool,” she said.
During lockdown, Tischler taught herself how to play.
“I just became obsessed with the game. I loved it,” she said.
She challenged her parents, then joined her high school chess club. However, she started to notice a disparity.
“Out of all the chess grandmasters in the world, there are only 39 of them that are women. There is a large difference in the number of men and women that are playing chess,” Tischler said. “I just recognized that there was a gender disparity in the different tournaments or chess clubs at my school.”
She set out to change that.
Tischler launched local workshops, then contacted the YMCA of Greater Hartford to pitch the free chess program.
“She noticed that it was a very male dominated program. She said, ‘Okay, and let me change that trajectory,” Laura Floyd, YMCA of Greater Hartford executive director, said. “So I thought it was a wonderful idea, and we’ve been here ever since.”
All kids are welcome to join the free program, but it particularly aims to make chess accessible to girls, children of color and inner-city kids. Over the last year, about two dozen girls have been learning how to play.
“I learned how to make people get in checkmate,” Maya said.
The Brown twins take chess lessons every weekend, becoming masters of the game.
“She's taught me that like, how to be confident with myself,” Asia said.
Bolstering that confidence is another objective of the program.
“I think one of the most rewarding experiences for me has been when I show the girls how to play and then they start kind of taking it coming into their own as individual chess players, they just glow with confidence,” Tischler said.
It is a checkmate when it comes to building self-esteem.
“I always talk about confidence and playing chess, right?” Tischler told the twins at the beginning of their lesson. “Because you can make a lot of mistakes, and it's kind of tough when learning. It's frustrating. It's hard. It stretches our brains. But the more confidence we have, the better we can learn to play.”
