Why We Built Endgame Society

Two people in St. Louis, thirty chess boards in a wine bar, and a hundred-degree Sunday. The story of why Endgame Society exists and why it looks the way it does.

There's a building on Maryland Avenue where some of the best chess players alive come to work.

Thirty thousand square feet. A tournament hall, a library, a room where grandmasters stand in front of a screen and explain what just happened on the board upstairs. Congress put it on the record in 2014. Every October the U.S. Championship happens there. Every August the strongest tournament on this continent sets up in a city that, until about 2008, most of the chess world could not have found on a map.

I love that building. I want that on the record before the next part, because what follows sounds like a complaint and isn't.

Here's the thing about a cathedral. It is magnificent, and it is not casual. Nobody wanders into a cathedral in gym shorts to see what's going on. So there is a particular kind of St. Louis person who has driven past that building a hundred times — who likes chess, who played as a kid, who could still tell you what a fork is — and who has never once gone in. Not because they weren't welcome. They were. Anybody can walk in, and the first visit is free.

They didn't go in because somewhere between eleven years old and now, they absorbed the idea that chess belonged to other people. Serious people. People with a rating.

That idea is the most expensive thing in this game, and nobody sells it to you. It just settles, the way dust settles.

I want to be fair here too, because this is where most people writing something like this get cheap.

The big chess sites are extraordinary. Genuinely — they are enormous feats of engineering, they are largely free, and between them they have put more chess in front of more human beings than every club that has ever existed, combined. Anyone who sneers at that is telling on themselves.

The Endgame Journal collects our writing on openings, tactics, endgames, and the habits that separate players who improve from players who plateau. Every article is written by people who teach chess, not by a content farm.

Why We Built Endgame Society | A St. Louis Chess Story | Endgame Society