Chess skills carry over

Chess skills carry over to the classroom

PORTSMOUTH – Hunched over a table in the Portsmouth Middle School cafeteria, Nick Krol has his head in his hands. His fingers slowly run through his thick, wavy brown hair as his eyelids droop. It’s near the end of a long school day and he looks spent.

His weary gaze has nothing to do with an overlong teacher’s lecture or an agonizing arithmetic problem, however. Nick has been trying to capture Alex Vasquez’s king for about an hour and now he’s hit a brick wall. With all the other games in this interscholastic competition completed, the other players and their parents are watching — from a safe distance — to see how this final match plays out.

“This is the best game I’ve seen all season. They’re so even; it’s been back and forth the entire game,” marvels Frank DelBonis, coach of the Calcutta Middle School team in Central Falls, for whom Alex competes. The Calcutta team has dominated at both the league and state level for the past seven years and hasn’t lost to Portsmouth in three years. Nick’s team is the clear underdog.

Here is the full article.