The clicking and clacking of plastic and wood could be heard in the Central Kitsap High School Library, with small banter between friends and the silent stares of many accompanying. All of such, filling the usually silent room with an ecosystem thriving on what is considered one of the most skill-based games in the world. Chess club.

The club itself had started during the earlier parts of February, but the preparations to make the actual club began earlier in the year. 

“[It] has been in the works since last December,” said Quintin Foutz, a very active junior of the chess club also being one of the two founding members. “The club meets up on Mondays and Fridays, usually ending up with everyone playing games against each other.” 

With some of the more experienced chess players occasionally holding chess seminars to help newer and current players with advice or bits of less known knowledge such as the en Passant “People tend to be confused by the move,” said Foutz.

The members currently going to the club are of varied amounts of skills allowing for anyone of any skill level to just walk into the library and find games to be had. As for the future, the club is looking into having chess tournaments with other schools and even possibly having a local professional chess player do seminars here at CKHS, only the future can tell. 

Still to this day there hasn’t been anyone who’s been crowned “king” or “queen” of the club. The members of its board are replaced with chess analogies, king for president, queen as vice president and so on. But with chess’s recent jump in popularity The Queen’s Gambit, the Chess Boom, and the Future of Chess – Michigan Journal of Economics (umich.edu) and it’s the surge of new members, the club is ready to continue growing into something bigger than what it is currently.