Knights preparing to joust

BROWNSVILLE, Texas—Struggling cities find different ways to change their reputation. Liberals tend to chase “the creative class,” which includes people in the arts, media, and technology. Conservatives tend to emphasize small business. Brownsville, Texas, a city of 183,000 at the bottom tip of Texas where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf of Mexico, is following a different and surprising strategy: chess.

In Brownsville, which is 93 percent Hispanic, kids play chess—as many as 2,000 from kindergarten through high school compete on Saturdays in Brownsville school district tournaments—and so do grand masters. The chess team of The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV), which has its main campus in Brownsville, has just made the Final Four of collegiate chess: It will compete in New York City on April 2 and 3 (one day before the NCAA men’s basketball final) against Columbia University, Webster University, and Texas Tech. In 2014 the U.S. Chess Federation named Brownsville its Chess City of the Year. Not bad for the poorest city in the United States.

ON FRIDAY NIGHTS chess coach Ray Martinez takes up one side of a table in the food court of Brownsville’s Sunrise Mall. He stakes out this space for kids and parents who pay him to train them “in the art of thinking.” Music from a merry-go-round plays in the background, and odors from the nearby Chick-fil-A, Charley’s Philly Steaks, Italia Express, Chinese Gourmet Express, and other outlets waft through the air. Marcus Aguillera, 10, stares at the chessboard as Martinez instructs: “Develop the vision … Boom … Chase him away … Attack here …

Create the wall. No protection for this guy. Two pieces is not a strong attack. Three or more pieces, attack.”

Martinez uses strong, aggressive verbs and nouns to inspire his disciples, mainly boys: “Attack. Pin him. Battle stations. Boom. Capture. Trap the queen. Boom. He’s threatening you. Destroy him.” He mixes those words with homely descriptions of sandwiches: “Get the king. That’s your peanut butter and jelly.” Jessica Aguillera, a single mom who works long hours, sees chess teaching her son Marcus to focus and analyze. Martinez tells Marcus, facing a difficult position on the chessboard, “Don’t just react, slow down. Just because you’re in trouble doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world.”

It’s 3 miles from the mall to UTRGV, but only 300 yards from the university to the Mexican border—and the Latin American connection is part of why the university’s chess team is heading to the Final Four. The five or so other schools trying to build reputations by giving chess scholarships emphasize Eastern Europe in their recruiting, but UTRGV depends on players who learned to play in Argentina, Cuba, and Paraguay.

Guillermo Vazquez, 19, is the fourth-best player on the team. He’s the tall one in the photo below: A 6-foot-10 freshman from Paraguay, he fell in love with chess at age 10 and never aspired to basketball. His father introduced him to the chessboard, showed him how the pieces moved, and let his son’s brain take over. When his small town offered little competition, Vazquez developed his skills through internet games, then national and international competition. He is double-majoring in physics and computer science. (Team members average a 3.8 GPA.)

‘MANY Latin American players … are able to find instantly amazing moves that wouldn’t be obvious even to world champions, while at the same time they may lose an ending that a Russian kid would defend easily.’ —UTRGV Coach Bartek Macieja

Holden Hernandez, 31, is the third-best player. He grew up in Cuba and started playing 20 years ago: Since his school had classes only in the morning he played chess for four to six hours every afternoon and became Cuba’s under-16 champion. He then became a chess professional, playing around the world but particularly in Spain and Mexico. His father sold the family car so Hernandez could travel: The son eventually earned enough, tournament by tournament, to buy a house for his family.

But touring all the time is a hard life and not often a lucrative one: A chess world champion can bring home $1.5 million, but the drop-off is fast. Five years ago Hernandez “saw everyone of my generation graduating from university,” stopped playing professional chess, and came to UTRGV to major in computer science. One appeal: Brownsville is close to the beach, and “I thought I could go every weekend”—but as a computer science major and chess team member he has gone to the beach only five or six times in the past three years. He’s in line to graduate this summer.

The team’s top player is Anton Kovalyov, 23: The name indicates his more-typical Eastern European connection. Fifteen years ago his parents hoped to emigrate from Ukraine to Canada, but that country’s embassy in Kiev turned them down: Despondently roaming the streets, they saw the embassy of Argentina, applied, and gained acceptance. Kovalyov at age 8 started playing in tournaments. He spent six to seven hours each day learning and playing, but took a circuitous route to Brownsville: When he was 15, he and his parents moved to Canada, where his father, a math professor in Ukraine, works at a metal refinery.

Kovalyov wanted to be a chess professional: “I was promised money and went to Spain. It didn’t work out, and I was really angry.” He opted for a full scholarship to a university in a warm place—“I prefer to sweat than to feel cold”—where Kovalyov’s knowledge of Spanish would help him fit in. Now a junior majoring in computer science, he plans three to 15 moves ahead and feels a team responsibility: If another UTRGV player is losing, “I’ll have to take more risks. Sometimes you get killed.”

TEAM MEMBERS sometimes give lessons in elementary and middle schools, but chess in the schools has its own heritage. In 1989 J.J. Guajardo, a teacher at Brownsville’s Russell Elementary, had a tough assignment: Find a way to calm down student “troublemakers” believed to have broken a gym teacher’s vinyl square dance records. Guajardo knew how to move chess pieces, so he explained the rules to kids who often had trouble sitting still. He showed them they could be winners. Soon they could beat him.

The next step was a trip to Austin in 1990 to play kids from affluent schools for the Texas championship. Russell didn’t win that year but became state champion in 1993 and won each year through 1999. The Brownsville Herald trumpeted the results, school public address systems boomed out players’ names, the Brownsville school district (BISD) in 2002 started funding chess instruction and competition, and soon other schools gained bragging rights as well. In 2007 Texas Monthly and CBS ran stories on surprising Brownsville, and last year a movie, Endgame, made an actor modeled on Guajardo the Texas version of California’s Jaime Escalante in Stand and Deliver.

Now, the Texas Chess Association divides the state into 10 regions, and Brownsville’s—Region 8—has the most participants. Children head to Saturday tournaments carrying cases filled with vinyl roll-up boards, white and black pieces—sometimes red and gray or blue and red—in separate compartments, and chess clocks. (Players have a limited number of minutes in which to move.) Some have chess piece ornaments hanging from case zippers.

BISD invests about $350,000 per year in student chess. Christopher Martinez, an eighth-grade science teacher wearing at a Saturday tournament a “Knightmare” T-shirt, points to studies showing that chess leads to higher scores on reading and math tests and improvement in concentration (including among kids diagnosed with ADHD). One doctoral dissertation found junior-high chess players scored higher on tests of critical and creative thinking than those who spent free time working with computers, attending a creative writing workshop, or playing Dungeons & Dragons.

Region 8 director Edward Guetzow sees another reason for Brownsville’s chess dominance: poverty. Chess is cheap: $10 will buy a standard tournament chess set, and chess clocks cost less than $30. Parents see chess as a safe way for boys especially to build discipline and exercise aggression by figuring out how to beat opponents—and if their academic scores improve, scholarships await. (About 20 percent of parents pay for extra tutoring at $15 to $20 per hour, with a chess master able to demand more.)

This year Brownsville’s Simon Rivera High School is hosting the 2016 Texas State Scholastic Chess Tournament on March 5 and 6. Chess players and parents from affluent schools in Dallas and Fort Worth, some with trepidation about going to a poor Hispanic-majority area by the border, will encounter brags like this one about an 8-year-old tournament winner: NUESTRO PEQUENO GIGANTE GANA TORNEO ABIERTO ORGANIZADO POR BISD EN LA ESCUELA RUSSEL (“Our little giant wins open tournament organized by Russell BISD school”).

Brownsville’s level of commitment is rare in America, but not so unusual worldwide. Armenia in 2011 became the first country to make chess compulsory in schools, which have two hours of chess instruction each week for students starting at age 6. Spain, India, Turkey, and Norway also have chess in schools. Chess promoters in England and other countries list the intellectual and psychological value of teaching chess in schools. (Correlation is not causality, but chess-happy Brownsville has the least crime per capita of any Texas metropolitan area.)

CRIME: Just across the border from the UTRGV Brownsville campus lies the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, home to “homicide, armed robbery, carjacking, kidnapping, extortion, and sexual assault,” according to a U.S. State Department advisory: “No highway routes through Tamaulipas are considered safe.” Many residents of northern and central Texas consider Brownsville guilty by association with Mexican problems. When Texas Tech and The University of Texas at Dallas invested in scholarships for chess players, that seemed nice but ho-hum. The ascension of a chip-on-the-shoulder Brownsville university was different.

Some among the Eastern European old boys network were not happy when strong Latin American players helped the upstart make it into the Final Four in 2009 and 2011 and come close to winning in 2010. This year, UTRGV coach Bartek Macieja says, “We are not the main favorites; but … we have the strongest team ever, and our key to success will be determination.” European players, he says, are superior in chess theory and endgame technique, but Latin American players often have more “creativity in the middle game.” That makes them unpredictable: “They are able to find instantly amazing moves that wouldn’t be obvious even to world champions, while at the same time they may lose an ending that a Russian kid would defend easily.”

The favorite in the tournament is Webster University, a little-known St. Louis school that has been national champion three years in a row. The story behind that: Texas Tech was the national champion in 2011 and 2012 with Susan Polgar, the former Women’s World Chess Champion, serving as coach. According to emails obtained under the Texas open records law by a college newspaper, the Webster Journal, Polgar asked Texas Tech for a tenfold increase in annual scholarship funding, along with a $250,000 salary for herself and a $150,000 salary for her husband. Texas Tech said no, and Polgar decamped to Webster, which had never made the Final Four before.

Webster announced, “Having the No. 1 ranked college chess team in the U.S. is a strategic initiative that brings exponential recognition to Webster in media outlets around the world.” But others are gunning for it: Texas Tech and Columbia University are also in the finals. And, although chess is a lot cheaper than football, which at a minimal collegiate level costs $3 million to $4 million per year, not counting the huge cost of a stadium, some grumbled after Webster President Elizabeth Stroble on Jan. 26 told faculty she expected a budget shortfall of about $7 million—and some academic programs face cuts.

UTRGV has good coaching and a good physics department that can attract students like Vazquez: Will the upstart school, with its Latin American starters plus backups named Ynojosa, Cortez, and Ruiz, upset the reigning power of collegiate chess? Win or lose, Macieja says chess has a place in UTRGV education. This semester chess team members are taking a new not-for-credit course, the Mathematics of Chess, and next year it will become a 3-credit course for students majoring in math. Macieja proudly states, “Only the Harvard University offers a comparable seminar.”

Listen to a report from Susan Olasky on Brownsville, Texas, on The World and Everything in It.