Waltham’s new chess club opens 

Waltham chess fans have a new local destination: a weekly chess club at the Waltham Public Library.

The club was founded by an offshoot of a group of regular Harvard Square players. Waltham resident Paul Yin, a founder and organizer of the Waltham Chess Club, explains that it originally split off to accommodate members in Waltham and the surrounding area who want to play closer to home. 

The club held its first meeting in June at the Cafe on the Common but soon moved to the library. The group currently meets weekly on Thursdays at 4:30 p.m. in one of the library’s study rooms. 

Eight players showed up this week, but a few more stopped by to check out what was going on as the attendees cycled through matches. Yin spent much of the afternoon going back and forth, checking in with players in the study room and at an additional game out on the library floor. 

The study room doesn’t accommodate all of the players who show up, Yin said. As the group grows, he hopes to work with the library to expand into its lecture hall.

One of the reasons they moved to the library, Yin said, was to create a space for community members of all ages. He added the group welcomes anyone who enjoys chess or wants to learn.

Yin praised the universality of chess as an activity that you can bond over without even needing to know the same language: “Who cares where you are in your life. If you just know how to play chess, it’s all fun and games.”

Emerick Alvarado, another regular, has been playing chess for a decade, but only moved to Waltham last fall. For him, the club is a way to meet friends and escape the stresses of work. “[These chess games] help me forget about my problems when I am focused on playing,” he said. 

The group’s preferred format — blitz games that allot a total of five minutes for each player to make their moves — are faster than Alvarado prefers, but Yin lauded the challenge of the format. “It keeps you sharp. Once you’ve mastered chess, you’re thinking four or five steps ahead. And if you’ve learned it while playing blitz, you’re thinking very fast.”

Still, he said, five-minute games are only a suggestion. Members of the group are willing to slow down and adapt for new players, or speed up for those who want even more of a challenge.

Yin hopes at some point the club will be able to host quarterly tournaments. One of Yin’s goals for the Waltham group is to bring good players back to join games and tournaments back at Harvard Square, which he described as the “mecca of chess.”

He pointed to the Harvard Square group’s sense of community as one of its strengths. “Everybody knows everybody at Harvard Square. There’s homeless people, there’s grandmasters, and there’s all the working people, and then there’s everybody who just likes to go there.”

It’s something he hopes to build up in Waltham as well as, and in the greater chess community around Boston. “I kind of want to link up all the groups here. With Roxbury, with Harvard, with [Jamaica Plains], with Waltham… so we just have a good group in Greater Boston, and everybody knows everybody.”