Pieces that Move Mountains
Chess looks, at first, like pure logic. Perfect information. No luck, no dice, no excuses. You choose a move and you live with it. Yet when you look at where chess has quietly taken root in the past decade, in Lagos slums built on water, in prison rec rooms, in therapy groups for children with additional needs, it doesn't seem as fair and it starts to feel like something different, something more than just a game. A simple tool where people can practice seeing their own decisions clearly.
What follows is a story about four projects that all use the same simple object, a game, to change lives. In Lagos, a boy with cerebral palsy learns he can defeat people who have always written him off. In Oshodi, a homeless teenager finds a way out of life on the streets by winning a chess championship. A child in a FIDE Infinite Chess session using his mistakes to learn from them. In prisons, men in Borno Correctional Centre replay games where the pause before a move becomes a new habit. In my school, teaching students how to play and helping them, not only in the game but in life too. None of this comes easy to everyone. But if you sit with these stories for a while, the game stops looking like, well, just a game, and starts to feel more like a way to pull people together and give hope.
Search for Makoko, the Lagos waterfront slum sometimes called "Africa’s Venice", and you see houses on stilts, narrow wooden boats, kids wading through the crowded waterways beBack to Toptween houses. This is where Chess in Slums Africa set up boards, not in air-conditioned classrooms, but on makeshift benches in noisy open spaces.
The founder, Tunde Onakoya, grew up in a Lagos slum himself. He knows what happens when a child learns early that long-term thinking is dangerous, that you eat what is in front of you now, that you grab what you can, that tomorrow belongs to someone else. His bet was simple and almost reckless in its optimism, what if you bring a game built around the long term into a place that has trained kids to live thinking only one move ahead?
Onakoya wanted CISA sessions to allow each child an escape from their daily lives and learn new skills that would help them for the rest of their lives. For those moments, their world shrinks to the board and their next move.
One of the kids at those boards was Ferdinand Maumo, a boy from Makoko with cerebral palsy. Before chess, people mostly talked about what he couldn’t do, run with other kids, carry loads, move smoothly along the cramped wooden walkways between houses. In a place where physical labor keeps families afloat, disability shrinks your world to the room where you’re left behind.
Then someone put a board in front of him.
The first change chess gave Ferdinand was blunt and clear, it made his disability matter less. Hands that struggled with some daily tasks still managed to pick up a piece and place it on a square. On the board, the only thing that counted was whether the move made sense. For a boy used to being helped, protected, and pitied, this was a new kind of contact with the world, he could create problems in someone else’s position.
As people heard his story, help arrived, sponsors, doctors, donors. Money was raised for medical care and school. But the deeper shift had started earlier, in quiet afternoons when he learned to ask himself, "If I play this, what happens next?" That line of questioning doesn’t vanish when the board goes back in the box. It seeps into other choices, How do I get to school? What will I need tomorrow? Who can I ask for help?
CISA’s impact changed countless lives, hundreds of children in regular training, many scholarships won, school retention numbers better than the surrounding area. But those figures don’t show the friction of change. A scholarship sounds simple until you remember what it means for a child who has been selling in traffic since age six.
Another player, Fawaz Adeoye, once slept under a Lagos bridge and hustled for transport fare by day. He joined a CISA event at Oshodi with no plan beyond passing time. When he ended up winning the entire event, his life bent in a new direction. His win brought attention, shelter, and entry into vocational training.
The board became a new world for him, where he could forget how unfortunate he has been and use his strategy and survival instinct in a new way. For Fawaz, every move was a way to prove to himself that patience and thought could build a different kind of day. The volunteers and coaches of Chess in Slums Africa aren’t saints. They have to watch promising kids vanish because a landlord raised rent or a parent became ill. They share beautiful combinations with children who rarely have enough stability to attend regularly. Yet they return to those boards under bridges and in cramped halls because they’ve watched what a single "aha" moment does, the look on a kid’s face when they realize they set a trap three moves ago without fully grasping it, and now it lands.
In places where street logic says "act first, think later," that feeling, of quietly planning something ahead and seeing it pay off, is more than a game result. It is a small signal that reminds you that you are more than just a statistic or a label, more than the bridge you sleep under, more than the body that people once thought defined you.
Walk into an Infinite Chess session for autistic children, and you find a focused group ready to play. Boards wait on the tables. A coach speaks quietly. Children look at the positions with clear attention. Everyone settles into their own rhythm with the game and no one is treated differently.
The Infinite Chess Project began in Belarus in 2019. It started with four pilot groups, each with four children on the autism spectrum. Organizers used chess to help build social and thinking skills for these children. The early results showed promise, with children gaining confidence in and out of chess. FIDE took notice and decided to help expand the work.
By 2021, the project reached six countries, including Spain, Turkey, France, Gibraltar, Norway and South Africa. A FIDE seminar drew 130 participants from 50 countries. Trainers learned methods to adapt chess for autism, like dividing games into opening, middlegame, and endgame phases. Today, it runs in 28 countries for over 270 children. New sites in Nigeria, Tunisia, and Pakistan started in 2025. Each location builds on the same core: clear rules, predictable turns, and focus on small successes. One of the project’s quiet successes is how it reframes strengths. Many autistic children hear adults describe their traits as "obsession" or "hyperfocus." In chess, those same traits become assets, patience, strong calculation, sharp pattern recognition.
A child who locks onto a single opening line might look narrow in another setting, here they become "a specialist". That language shift reshapes not only self-esteem but how parents and teachers read behavior. In Taiwan, two children, Kai and Wen, joined an Infinite Chess group run by the Taiwan Youth Chess Association. At first, sessions were simple. Quiet rooms. Short games. Clear turns. Coaches stayed patient and watched how each child approached the board, trying to figure out how to tailor the sessions to help them in the best way. Over time, something steady began to build, not only in their play, but in how they shared pieces of their lives.
The program did not stop at chess. Volunteers invited Kai and Wen to take part in small projects tied to what they were learning. One year, they worked together on a calendar. Each page showed scenes from their own memories, like trips along Taiwan’s east coast, family gatherings, or days spent at the club. The children chose colors, shapes, and moments. Chess sat in the middle as a shared focus, and around it, drawings and stories took shape. The board gave them structure. The art gave them ways to show what mattered personally to them.
Parents and coaches noticed the difference in small details. Kai started to talk more about why he preferred some positions. Wen began to point out patterns in both pictures and games. They were not being pressed into some standard version of "social skills." Instead, they were treated as partners in a long project. Each move, each sketch, was a clear choice of their own.
On December 22, 2024, Kai and Wen, entered the Taipei National School Cup Team Chess Championship with their coaches by their sides. The event marked their first open tournament. The goal focused on participation and experience in a real competition setting, rather than winning. The coaches wanted to show the two students what a real chess tournament is like, without the overarching pressure of doing well.
The night before the event, anxiety surfaced. Kai repeated one concern. He feared breaking a rule and upsetting others. Wen stayed quiet but showed stress through his behavior. Coaches prepared them with mock tournament games and brought familiar items for comfort. Volunteers told the two, "Just try your best, like you always do. We’ll be right here with you." trying to calm them and not let them get too stressed over their tournament outcomes.
The tournament ran five rounds. Wen broke a rule in the first round by moving a piece and pressing the clock with two hands. The mistake was exactly what he predicted to happen, "What if I break the rules? Will people get mad at me?". The coaches tried to explain the rule again and encouraged him to return to the board, saying "Everyone makes mistakes, but what’s important is having the courage to get back up and finish what you started." Kai faced a different challenge. Early losses led him to think about quitting. Coaches and his grandmother pushed him to focus on one move at a time and complete every round.
Neither player won a game in the event. Both held a draw in the final round and finished with 0.5 points each. Their team placed last in the standings. The scoreboard showed losses. The day showed progress. Kai and Wen stayed at the board for all five rounds and finished their first open tournament, which was a massive step for the club and their development.
Not every child in this program cares for chess. Some feel trapped by the slow pace, others drift away. Infinite Chess sessions have to stay flexible and active, extra visual cues, frequent breaks and a safe environment. If a child is clearly unhappy at the board, they stop.
One father described the change from exhaustion to friendship. Before chess, days felt like repeating fights but now he and his son sit across a board each week. They argue about moves instead of meltdowns. For ninety minutes, they talk about positions, not problems. This was one of the main goals for the program from the very beginning, seeing this spread to over 28 countries shows the opportunity for growth in other communities and programs.
Prison life grinds people down with endless waits punctuated by raw tension. They stay wired, always primed to react fast and think later. Slow decisions invite trouble in a place where hesitation costs. Chess flips that script entirely. Players must halt, scan every line, choose a path, then own whatever follows from that single touch on a piece.
Mikhail Korenman landed in Cook County Jail in Chicago not as an inmate, but as the invited chess teacher in 2012. Sheriff Thomas Dart, whose own children had learned the game from him outside, saw enough in those lessons to bring boards past the walls. So, FIDE launched the Chess for Freedom initiative in 2021 to coordinate global prison chess efforts after years of scattered programs proved their worth. Cook County Jail became the first flagship for this program, with Mikhail Korenman's sessions drawing crowds from day one and prompting FIDE to formalize support through training materials and online resources for coaches worldwide. Local jail staff coordinated the rollout, pairing it with existing rehab tools to reach men who struggled to engage with traditional group therapy but showed up for boards, a push that snowballed as word spread through inmate networks and sheriff reports.
In the first year alone, 600 inmates signed up for lessons, crowding into sessions where they first grasped rules and basic structures. Sheriff Dart watched it unfold, noting how men who once lunged without pause now weighed each possibility, seeing how rash grabs wrecked positions on the board the same way they had wrecked lives outside. Monthly online matches through Chess.com gave cleared fathers a direct line to their children, sitting with guarded laptops to push pieces back and forth with sons and daughters who waited on the other side of the screen. A three-year review captured the shift: fewer fights broke out among players, and rebooking rates dropped after release, numbers that spoke to real change etched into records.
Over dozens of games, those men forged restraint square by square. A blunder dropped material, but they reset the pieces without a word and tried the line again, building muscle memory for holding back. Inmates started framing their days through the board: dodging a hallway beef became sidestepping check, ignoring smuggled goods meant passing the poisoned pawn. That language took root because it fit, turning abstract habits into tools they could name and use in real life.
Not every man bought in. Early losses laid bare the flaws in their play, and those same patterns echoed the kinds of decisions that had shaped their lives before prison. Prison staff tracked the dropouts, men who bailed after a string of defeats and picked cards or iron over boards, activities that burned time without forcing that hard look inward.
Players pored over their weak openings from the last round, adjusted for the next, absorbed the sting of a hung piece without a lockdown or raised voice, only the quiet pressure of their own analysis. The ones who stayed found their focus harden in ways that lingered. A Cook County player extended his hand after checkmate, asked to walk through the critical moves, his voice steady as he spotted his own error. Another penned letters home linking endgame grinds to the months left on his sentence, words that carried the weight of seeing time as something he could navigate, not just endure. Those moments built on each other, subtle but undeniable.
IndianOil launched Parivartan in 2021, and now it spans 83 prisons across India, drawing in 4,100 inmates who mix chess with badminton, basketball and other sports under weekly coach visits to bare yards. At Yerawada, players gather outdoors on concrete tables, drilling openings until one match stretches hours deep, ending with a resignation on move 50 and a simple nod across the board. The next week, that same man pinpointed his blunder on move 32, scribbled the fix on his score sheet, ready to test it fresh. Realising that his rash decisions caused consequences and without proper thought could harm him.
Pune's 2024 Chess for Freedom Conference brought outsiders into those yards, pairing visitors with inmates over active boards where hands moved with care and eyes traced lines without distraction. FIDE officials stood witness to the poise, heard players frame a single loss as the push to calculate two turns ahead, a habit that rippled into steadier yards overall. Program leads charted the discipline: outbursts faded after defeats, attendance climbed month by month, men who once wandered off now locked into the group rhythm.
Quatre Camins in Catalonia, Spain, runs lessons weekly all year, fielding the MABEPA inmate team in the Catalan League from January through March, sending them out to rapid tournaments in Mollet and Barcelona. They line up against club players from the public, deliver firm handshakes at the end regardless of the score, a break from the walls that holds real stakes. One inmate anchors his entire week to those club nights, arriving first to arrange the boards, dissecting losses with coaches afterward, tweaking his approach for the rounds ahead. Among Catalonia's four "chess prisons", Quatre Camins holds the standout team, these chess tournaments make news headlines and even made it onto Catalan and Spanish National TV!
Chess for Life in Canada clocks serious hours: 29 youth racked up to 278 in 2024, while 15 men went all the way to 271 at a local center, Fridays blending tactics lessons, mentorship, and casual rounds with sandwiches upfront to draw them in. Friends started showing up, numbers swelling as they ate, absorbed pawn structure breakdowns, played out three games apiece, confronted blunders head-on, then returned sharper. Jade Oldfield's tests confirmed executive function gains, cognitive flexibility up after 25 hours, working memory solid, inhibition climbing; separate studies pegged 14 hours for better decisions, junior high boys shedding school troubles after daily boards. Showing how much change a short amount of time at the board can cause in a person's life.
Fathers in Cook County signed off online draws with waves to grinning sons across screens, breaking months of dead air. Parivartan men hauled sets to the yard at dusk, tallied wins in shared notebooks. Quatre Camins rolled out excited inmates to outside chess tournaments, giving them hope for their futures.
Programs push up against hard limits every day. Plenty of men sign up, then fade after a few sessions, once the early novelty wears off and the self-scrutiny starts to sting. Release does not arrive as a clean new game either. Many walk out to no job, no stable place to sleep, and the same street warnings and invitations that framed their first bad decisions. For some, the habit of pausing that they built over a board becomes a thin but real line between walking back into old haunts and taking the long way home. For others, that pause never quite roots, and they drift back into the same loops that carried them through the gate the first time.
Chess keeps dragging attention back to the present move. You decide whether to push that pawn, cover your king, simplify into an endgame you understand, or keep pieces on for a fight you are not ready for. The past position sits there, fixed, no edits available. Your next choice is the only part that still moves. In prison terms, you cannot rewrite the charge sheet, but you can choose whether you answer a taunt, whether you hold your tongue, whether you walk toward or away. For men who have spent years told that nothing they do matters, the reminder that this small decision is theirs has weight.
Across different countries, the numbers and stories start to line up. Cook County reports drops in fights and lower returns among players. IndianOil’s Parivartan reaches thousands of inmates across 83 prisons, week after week, and they keep coming back instead of disappearing to past ways. Chess for Life logs hundreds of hours from youth and adults who keep showing up on Fridays. Behind those figures are men and women who describe one simple shift in their own words. Chess slows their hands. It gives them one extra breath before they act. They still own what follows.
Some moments cut through more than any chart. A father in Chicago who once had nothing to offer his child but excuses now has a monthly game where they meet as opponents. One hard-fought draw over a laptop screen can hold more connection than a stack of letters that never found the right tone. In Catalonia or Pune, four-hour games end in quiet resignations, hands extended, analysis ready for next week. Over time, those routines dig in. Players start spotting traps faster, on and off the board. They adjust lines before they collapse. The walls stay where they are, but for the ones who keep sitting down at the table, the habits they carry out with them are different from the ones they brought in, and we start to see a real change in people through what seems to many as just a game.
Chess boards sat unused in a school cupboard for years from an old club that stopped long before I joined the school. One lunchtime I hauled them out, arranged a few sets across the tables, and taped up a note on the door: "Chess Club. All Are Welcome." I skipped the big opening ceremony, posters, or set schedule. Students wandered past in the corridors or stared at their phones. Some pushed open the door.
The club kicked off small and rough around the edges like most lunch gatherings. Two Year 7 boys wandered in from simple curiosity. A Year 10 showed up with his mates, poking fun at first before they got drawn in. One Sixth Form lad popped by since he played ages ago and figured he would test what he recalled. I sketched out positions on the whiteboard, walked newcomers through the basics as needed, and let everyone pair off to play. Laughter erupted when someone blanked on how knights jump. Stalemate rulings sparked heated back-and-forth. Questions hung in the air nonstop: "Wait, you allow this?" The space lacked polish. Students returned anyway.
Lunch timing set the club apart from after-school setups. Parents signed nobody up. You picked those forty minutes or grabbed food elsewhere. Latecomers hustled through the door still munching sandwich ends and slid right into ongoing matches. Others waited right at the door when the bell rang, beating me to the room some days just to pick up games with friends from before. You began to spot how specific students unwound the instant they sat, shoulders loosening as their focus locked onto the board while lunch crowds milled outside oblivious.
A Year 8 boy claimed his spot among the first regulars despite trouble elsewhere. Teachers called his name constantly for the wrong reasons. He racked up warnings, detentions, calls home. The bell rang and he charged the room, bag thudding to the floor as he hollered for an opponent. Early games flew by reckless: pieces flung ahead, losses in ten moves, instant demands for another go. Weeks turned to months and a change crept in. One lunch he fixed his gaze on the board for a full minute without a single touch. I asked what ran through his head. He saw two clear paths ahead and chose the one where he avoided screwing up again. One quiet line revealed thought patterns lessons never drew out from him, space or patience lacking there.
A Year 11 girl showed with her friend aiming for a quick laugh but planted herself instead. She knew zero rules so we sped through basics and she bombed her opening game hard. Rather than bolt, she requested a full reset to test fresh moves. She turned up week after week, soaking up tactics bit by bit and piecing together basic plans. Beyond those walls, exams loomed alongside family pressures and the full load of turning sixteen with everyone expecting you to juggle it all. Lunch wrapped as she stowed the pieces and remarked how those forty minutes turned her into the checkmate chaser instead of the one forever patching everything else. She tossed the words out casual. They struck deep regardless. Her line fueled my resolve to keep that door unlocked from day one.
Because the club ran in the middle of the day, it also changed how different year groups mixed. Year 7s who felt tiny in the corridor found themselves sitting opposite tall Sixth Formers and taking their queens. Older students who were used to being the loudest voice in every room had to deal with losing to someone four years younger in front of a small crowd. I became a kind of unofficial coach in the club, with clusters of younger pupils watching my games (when I wasn't teaching others), asking about forks and pins between bites of lunch. I never saw myself as a leader anywhere else in school, but in that room each kid waited to hear what my thought process was and what I had to say about each position.
Running the club at lunchtime also changed my relationship with school days. There were mornings when I was tired and buried under work, and the idea of giving up my lunchtime to supervise a noisy room was not appealing. Yet those were often the days when the club meant the most. A student would hang back after everyone left and ask if I could go over a tricky position with him next time. Another would mention, almost in passing, that chess helped them calm down before afternoon lessons. The room stopped feeling like an extra duty and started feeling like a reset point in the middle of my day as well.
Not every student stayed. Some came for a week, enjoyed the rush of easy wins against beginners, and then disappeared as soon as they started facing tougher opponents. Others used chess as a phase, something to do while a friend was obsessed, then moved on when their interests shifted. I learned not to mark that as a failure. For that slice of time, they had chosen to spend their lunchtime on something that asked them to think, remember, and accept losses without hiding behind jokes or distraction. Sometimes that brief experience was enough.
There were many moments that stuck far more than any annoying loss or queen blunder. One student who had recently lost a parent walked in one lunchtime without a word, sat down, and played three games against me back to back. He barely spoke during them, nodded at the end, and left. He stayed away for a while after that. When he came back later in the term, he played as if nothing had happened, he was more talkative and thanked me for creating the club and giving him a space to go, that first lunchtime that he came. I will never know exactly what that lunchtime gave him, only that the door being open mattered that day.
The club also made me more aware of my own behaviour. Watching students throw away winning positions because they moved without thinking made me pay more attention to where I did the same in my own life: firing off an email too quickly, jumping into an argument, saying yes when I should pause. Lunchtime chess forced me to model the kind of calm I kept asking them for. When a rule dispute came up or someone got annoyed, I had to slow things down instead of snapping. It was not me above them teaching from a distance. I was learning, unlearning, and adjusting alongside them.
We occasionally used lunchtimes to create small chess tournaments in school. That changed the atmosphere again. Students who had treated the club as a casual drop-in suddenly had something concrete on the horizon. They would ask for specific openings, run through basic endgames, or replay games from previous days between bites of sandwiches. On the days of those events, I watched them queue up outside the doors, half nervous, half excited, the boards already set up earlier by me. Seeing them under the harsh hall lights, sitting up straight behind name cards with our school printed on them (to make it seem fancier to them and more serious), made all those busy lunchtimes worth it.
Over time, the club’s shape shifted as students left, new years arrived, and school routines changed, but the core stayed the same. For forty minutes in the middle of a school day, a mixed group of 11 to 18 year-olds chose to sit in a room, put their phones away, and wrestle with a position that did not care how popular they were, how they had done in a test, or what drama was unfolding on social media. The "naughty" student became the one everyone wanted to challenge because he saw tactics no one else did. The shy pupil became the person patiently explaining en passant for the fifth time. For me, it stopped being a small side project and became one of the most important parts of my school life.
What the club has given me and them is hard to summarise neatly. It has given me a series of small scenes that replay in my head when I think about why I keep unlocking that room at lunchtime: a kid muttering "good game" instead of storming off, two students from different year groups laughing over a shared blunder, someone who usually eats alone sitting in the middle of a group while they analyse a wild position. None of these moments fixes everything in their lives. They are not grand transformations. They are forty minute pockets each day where thinking one move ahead matters, and where they get to be judged on decisions they can still change.
Chess in my school at lunchtime is not about titles or producing the next prodigy. It is about giving students, and me, a regular chance to practise what it feels like to pause, think, and choose in a world that pushes you to react instantly. Once the pieces are set and the clock starts, no one in that room is stuck with the morning they have had. They sit down, take a breath, and decide what to do with the position in front of them. For those forty minutes, that feels like enough.
Leaving school meant leaving the club behind, and the over 40 people who ended up coming back to the chess club each week, and that has been harder to carry than any exam result or report. I walked out knowing that at the next lunchtime bell, those boards would sit in a cupboard or in someone else’s hands, and the room that had once been full of noise, arguments over stalemate, and quiet "good games" would go on without me. What stays with me are the small stories I picked up along the way: the boy who learned to sit still long enough to think through two futures for a position, the girl who said for forty minutes she got to be "the one trying to checkmate someone" instead of fixing everything at home, the student who came in after a loss in their own life and used three quick games to breathe.
I am not saying that I fixed anyone’s problems, but I gave them a space where their choices mattered and their mistakes did not define them. In return, they changed me. They made me more patient, more careful with my own decisions, more hopeful about what people do when you trust them with something difficult and honest. Walking away from that room hurts, but knowing those habits and memories are still moving through the school, in people who will never think of it as "my" club, feels like the best kind of legacy I could leave behind.
We read these stories and carry Ferdinand Maumo picking up a pawn with hands that shake, then beating players who once passed him over. We hold Kai and Wen clutching score sheets after five full rounds, proof they sat through every position. We see Fawaz Adeoye walk from a Lagos bridge to vocational training after his Oshodi win. We watch Cook County fathers sign off online draws with waves to their sons, months of quiet broken in thirty minutes. We hear the Year 8 boy admit he sees two outcomes and picks the one where he holds steady. We feel the Year 11 girl say those forty minutes let her chase checkmate instead of carrying everything alone.
Reports give hard counts. Chess in Slums Africa trains hundreds of children with school retention above local rates. Infinite Chess runs for 270 children across 28 countries. Parivartan brings 4100 inmates to boards in 83 prisons. Chess for Life tracks 549 hours from 44 youth and men in 2024. Cook County logs fewer fights and lower return rates over three years.
Volunteers record the gaps too. Children drop out when families move or rent climbs. Inmates step away when review turns sharp. Students fade after early losses. Programs cut session times and add supports.
Fathers sit across from sons and talk pawn structure over old fights. Inmates shake hands after move 50 resigns and plan next week's lines. School groups blend Year 7s with Sixth Form over shared blunders. You note four-hour games ending with nods. You mark Year 7s claiming queens from older players.
The more I researched for this blog, the more I realised how chess can change people's lives. How just a short amount of time sitting at a board or listening to a coach analyse a game can change the way you think or perceive more things than just the game. You learn to pause when everything pushes you to rush. You weigh one choice against another and feel its weight settle. You reset after errors without the world ending. Running my lunch club showed me this up close. I watched kids find steadiness in forty minutes and grew steadier with them. You leave space for others to decide. You trust them through their stumbles. That quiet shift stays with you. Lives move forward when you give people room to own their turn.
