Highlander Chess Club at NJIT: Competitive, Challenging and Victorious
Players on the Highlander Chess Club at NJIT offer different reasons for the game’s appeal — its competitiveness, the mental challenge, the feeling of control — but are united on the ultimate reason: the thrill of victory.
“It feels good when you deliver a checkmate,” explained Lucas Scalora ’22, the club’s vice president. Or, as club President Jeffrey Luk ’24, put it, more bluntly, “What’s fun about chess is beating other people.”
Coming off an academic year in which it earned second place in a Collegiate Chess League tournament, the club hopes to further improve its standing, expand its presence in social media and grow as it meets weekly during 2021-22 — either online via Lichess.org, or in person, COVID-19 permitting.
Luk also hopes to secure funding for the club to compete in more tournaments, like the CCL one in the spring, which included the likes of Drexel University, Temple University, the University of California Riverside and the University of Texas at Austin.
New life online
It’s an interesting time for chess, a 1,500-year-old game that has found new life online, particularly during the pandemic. Sites like Chess.com have experienced exponential growth in new accounts, grandmasters now regularly livestream on YouTube and Twitch and celebrities like The Office’s Rainn Wilson embrace online play. Also, The Queen’s Gambit, a fictional miniseries about a female prodigy who becomes a world-class competitor, became Netflix’s most-watched limited series ever during its seven-episode run last fall.
Highlanders cited all those factors in discussing the game they love. Most, like Scalora and past club President Joel Gonzalez ’21, first discovered it as youngsters. Luk, however, picked it up during high school and sharpened his skills quickly by playing thousands of games online. The biology major from Holmdel enjoys the variety and pace of web competition, where games of blitz chess can last less than 5 minutes. He’s also intrigued by the opportunity to develop a persona.
Scalora, Gonzalez and club advisor Perry Deess benefitted from the multi-generational appeal of chess, as each was first schooled by an elder. Gonzalez and Deess, the executive director of institutional effectiveness at NJIT, learned the basics from their fathers, while Scalora was mentored by his grandfather. He can still picture his wooden board with black and white squares and hollow pieces made of wood.
Outsmarting opponents
Gonzalez, who earned a bachelor’s in computer science in May, sees chess as a game of “infinite beauty,” adding, “It’s like mental warfare. You get to see someone’s personality but through the game itself. There’s also a display of intelligence.”
For Scalora, a mathematics major from West Orange, chess is simply a “pleasant experience” where you have “complete control,” even though “you really never know what is going to happen.” Like Deess, he prefers face-to-face play, in part because you don’t have to worry about your computer mouse slipping, particularly during blitz games. There’s a simpler reason, though.
“I see the board better when it’s in front of me,” Scalora explained. Just like when he sat across from grandpa at the age of 6.
