Philadelphia chess players looking for in-person matchups during the pandemic find community through Rittenhouse Chess.
On Sunday, September 26th, twenty-three chess players met in Rittenhouse Square for casual over-the-board games to sharpen their skills and grow an in-person chess community, the lack of which resonated earlier in the pandemic.
Rittenhouse Chess is a local chess group that meets in the park every Wednesday and Sunday.
Roughly thirty people stop by throughout any given Rittenhouse Chess meeting when the weather is nice, with twenty or so playing chess games at once, according to Andrew Graham, the 26-year-old Philadelphia data scientist who started the group.
“There’s a lot of people who really want to play chess but feel like they don’t have a place to play it,” Graham said. “The vast majority of people who show up...say they play a lot online, but they don’t have many opportunities to play other people in person. And that’s what they’re excited to do when they come out.”
Graham stated that he thinks COVID-19 caused more people to show up to play chess in Rittenhouse than may have otherwise, citing the fact that the group meets outdoors.
While Graham guesses that most players in the group are in their late twenties or early thirties, he mentions that players of a wide range of ages have participated. The Rittenhouse Chess Facebook group has two hundred and seventy-eight members.
Members range in skill level. Pairings are typically not planned in advance, though group regulars sometimes suggest opponents for newcomers based on their skill level.
On the group’s competitiveness, Graham said, “Many people there are seriously interested in improving, but it’s more like everybody there was on the same team. There’s some friendly competition and some friendly trash-talking, but I would say nobody is truly competitive with other people there.”
Youngbin Yoon, a philosophy PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania, has been coming to Rittenhouse Chess’s meetings regularly since a few weeks after the group began. “I just enjoy playing the game of chess,” Yoon said on Sunday afternoon. “Also, it’s nice to meet people in this way that we all have a shared love of something.”
Sarah Court was also among the first to join the group. She is a student majoring in Theater, Design, and Technology with a focus on set design at the University of the Arts. “There’s really nowhere else to play chess over the board, and I’m not a big fan of playing online,” she said. “Also, the people here are all really nice. They’ll help you learn and get better, and they don’t turn people away for not being good at chess.”
In May, Graham was looking for a place to play chess in Center City. He played chess in Clark Park once, where there is a vibrant chess community, but he wanted to play somewhere closer to home. He created the Facebook group and sent links to other Philadelphia chess groups asking people to show up and play chess.
The first time Graham set up his chess board on a Sunday afternoon in Rittenhouse Square, no one from the Facebook group showed up. “I just sort of stood there with the chess board out on the wall,” Graham said. A passerby stopped and played one game with him.
No one from the Facebook group showed up the second or third time either. “The next time, if nobody showed up, I wasn’t going to do it,” Graham said. Several Facebook group members did show up to the fourth session, and the group meets twice a week to this day.
In July, a Reddit post in the chess subforum titled “Philadelphia Rittenhouse Chess” featuring a photo of group members playing chess in Rittenhouse Square racked up around one thousand and seven hundred upvotes.
Rittenhouse Chess meets Wednesdays at 5:30pm and Sundays at noon in Rittenhouse Square. Sunday’s sessions tend to last four to five hours, while Wednesday evening’s run two to three hours. When the weather grows cooler, the group plans to hold an indoor meeting nearby and continue to hold outdoor chess games once a week.
“I think that a lot of people are coming to Rittenhouse to hang out with people, and chess is the secondary thing,” Graham said. “I think if tomorrow we announced that we were no longer playing chess, we’re now playing Scrabble, even if none of the people like Scrabble, I still think half of the people would show up just because they want to come and hang out with people.”
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