Excelsior students! Be sure to check out the new Chess and Board Game Club. We will meet every Wednesday in the room across from the lunch room. Games will include not only chess but also a variety of other board games to challenge your minds.

Chess itself has been proven to help develop your cognitive skills. Studies have shown that becoming skilled at chess enhances logical and critical thinking skills, concentration, memory, math skills, planning and foresight, understanding others’ perspectives, and even creativity.

-Logical and critical thinking skills: playing chess requires you to constantly think of the implications of moves you make and the moves of your opponent, with an eye toward understanding your opponent’s plan and the best plan for you to employ.

-Concentration: one must concentrate when playing chess to understand the various possibilities, both immediately and a few moves ahead, of moves by you or your opponent, especially to avoid costly mistakes when making hasty moves.

-Memory: You need to remember where pieces were moved previously to avoid new lines of attack.

-Math and reading skills: Math and reading skills require understanding terms and the logical relationships underlying them and the relationships between them, the same logical skills one uses to understand moves in chess and the relationships between them.

-Planning and foresight: In chess, victory favors those who can see the implications not only of their or their opponents immediate moves, but the possibilities several moves into the future so as to avoid future traps and plan one’s own traps for one’s opponent.

-Understanding others’ perspectives: successful players not only have to focus and understand their own possible moves and strategies, but the possible strategies and plans of their opponents.

-Creativity: there are virtually infinite scenarios one can find oneself in in a game of chess, and one has to always be creative in finding solutions to problems.