Knight School
Jim Eade ’78 gets people around the world playing chess
In 1972, some 50 million people around the world tuned in to watch the “Match of the Century,” when chess prodigy Bobby Fischer defeated Russian grandmaster Boris Spassky in the World Championship Match. That duel was as much about the Cold War as it was about chess, but it spurred a revival of interest in the 1,500-year-old game. These days, chess is again experiencing a resurgence. The Queen’s Gambit became Netflix’s most-watched scripted limited series at the time of its release in October 2020. The show, which came out at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, coincided with renewed interest in the game itself: the number of monthly active users on Chess.com soared from about 8 million in 2020 to 17 million in 2022, chess influencers like Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura have amassed millions of followers, and Gen Z and millennials are turning to chess clubs for connection.
Learning chess at 15 years old, Jim Eade ’78 became one of the top 10 players in New England while at UMass Amherst. Since then, Eade has become an acclaimed chess master, writing the bestselling Chess for Dummies (IDG Books, 1996) and serving as a member of the United States Chess Federation Policy Board and president of the U.S. Chess Trust. In 2019, he founded the Eade Foundation to improve chess literacy and supply chess sets and boards to organizations around the world, including in Nicaragua, Zambia, and South Africa. UMass Magazine spoke to Eade about his love of chess, his foundation, and what makes this 1,500-year-old game so popular.
What first got you interested in chess?
Jim Eade
Bobby Fischer was on the cover of Life magazine and front page of The New York Times, so chess was all of a sudden in the public spotlight. [I had an] interest in games in general, and I was very competitive, so my dad and I would play a game of chess after dinner, and then my younger brother started to play with us. I got so [good] that I could beat my dad. He was a professor at North Adams State College (now the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts), and he had a colleague there who was a rated chess player. He would come by every week, pick me up, and take me to the North Adams State College Chess Club. I got to meet people who were rated and had official standing in the chess world, and I started to play with them, and I got better than they were. Of course, at that age, I thought I would be the next Bobby Fischer.
When I got to college, I was the highest-rated high school player in all of New England. There was a guy [Danny Kopec] who was an international master—he was the strongest player I’d ever met. We used to play a lot of blitz games, and I got so much better playing him. I went from a chess player to an expert and started beating experts, and I was in the top 10 in New England overall. And once you start to get better at something, it’s self-reinforcing—I just wanted to do more of it.
How did you come to start the Eade Foundation?
Chess is a young person’s game—it requires a great deal of stamina. I realized that I was about as good as I was going to get as a player, so I started to become an organizer. I organized a lot of international master and grandmaster competitions. I had some contact with the United States Chess Federation (USCF), and I decided to get involved in the government aspect of it. I got elected [to the USCF Policy Board] in 1996.
After my term of service was over, [I joined] a national charity called the U.S. Chess Trust, and we gave sets and boards to schools that couldn’t buy them on their own. During that time, my dad passed away, and I wanted to do something because he taught me how to play chess, and it had been a gift he had given me that had lasted a lifetime. And so, I said, “You know, the charity that I’m working with now is national, and we have to say no to international requests.” And I always felt bad saying no. So I said, “Why don’t I create an international [charity], doing the same thing as the Trust does nationally, and I’ll call it the Eade Foundation?”
One of the things that I did was give an annual $1,000 grant to a young player and called it the Arthur Award. My dad’s name was Arthur, so it was a way of recognizing him.
What projects are the foundation working on right now?
Eade as a senior in high school. Photo courtesy of the North Adams Transcript.
We’ve started a chess academy in Uganda. [This has been a four-year project] that required a great deal of fundraising. Now they have a place where they can teach chess to the students there. The guy who does the instruction told me that when the kids start playing chess, they stop crying. You know, it kind of makes it all worthwhile.
We also did another project that is wrapping up in Cape Town. The guy that I’m working with there has been given a certification by the mayor for the work that he’s done, and they’ve been running an [annual] scholastic tournament the last three years.
What I always say, though, is that I can get you started. I can give you the equipment, I can give you instructional materials, but they do the work.
Why do you think chess is becoming so popular right now?
Chess is a killer app for the Internet. You used to have to wait for a tournament to be able to play, or you could play with friends, but your sphere of influence wasn’t very large. Now, on the Internet, the whole world is realistic. You can play anyone, anywhere, anytime.
How can chess serve as a social good?
A House of Staunton Imperial Set and Board
Chess teaches children the ability to sit still and think. You go to a national event, and there are kids running around everywhere—but when the round starts, there’s silence. Three thousand children quiet.
The other thing that we see is that [children] think if they can play chess, they must be smart. Now, I know that that isn’t true, but I don’t tell them that. I let them think that because their confidence grows, and this leads to better performance in whatever endeavor they take up. Suddenly, math tables don’t seem so complicated.
My expectations are never to make a grandmaster out of a child, but to give them the confidence to do what it is they want to do. This makes, I think, people into better citizens.
What do you think is so unendingly intriguing about the game?
A billboard honoring Eade in Times Square
I can only speak for myself, but I’ve heard this so often from other people: It’s a combination of science and art. Marcel Duchamp, who was an artist but also a strong chess player, said that not all artists are chess players, but all chess players are artists. It is a game of logic; however, you have to be able to look at a position and create a new idea. That’s a magical feeling. You have created something that may have been done before, but you didn’t know it, and you feel like you created it. That feeling—that combination of discipline and artistic—is really not available in any other sphere, [except] higher mathematics and music. And it turns out that a lot of my musician friends like to play chess.
Do you have a favorite move or piece?
My favorite piece is the knight. The knight moves like no other piece. It’s not a particularly powerful piece, but it is very good in an attack, and it’s also a very good defender. Everyone talks about [how] having two bishops is more valuable than having two knights, so my opening choices were always to trade a bishop for a knight, if I could, and prove them wrong.
Visit the Eade Foundation website to learn more about the organization or get involved.
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