Features

Checking into Barrington

By Jeffrey Westhoff | Photography by Susan McConnell

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Whether learning tool or fierce sport, chess is one of the oldest and most universally known and played games, reaching across virtually all geographic boundaries. Barrington is home to one of the top chess players in the world, Yury Shulman, a grandmaster and the current U.S. chess champion. As an instructor, Yury teaches his students the game of chess, complete with hours of training and tournaments. His students also experience how this game can help others win, too, through Yury’s international outreach programs.

Elementary students will be restless during any activity that takes place right after school on a Friday afternoon, even something quiet like chess club. On such a day, students at Barrington’s Grove Avenue Elementary School hop about, giggle, and tease each other before their instructor, current U.S. Chess Champion Yury Shulman, calls them to order.

The nine students sit around a table in the school’s art room, quieter but still fidgety. Yury, an immigrant from the East European nation of Belarus, stands before an instructional chessboard that hangs like a small flag in front of the classroom’s whiteboard. He jokes that it’s a low-tech substitute for PowerPoint. Plastic sleeves on the board’s squares hold the cardboard chess pieces in place as Yury begins to recreate a tournament match.

The white player seems to take early control of the game, with his bishops and knights in action. The black player sticks to his pawns, not moving any of his major pieces except a knight, which he quickly loses. “Why would I blunder a knight?” Yury asks, his Russian accent recognizable but not thick. “Use your mind. Why did I make this move?”

A few moves later, and white is in retreat. In short order, the black player has dominated the game with three little pawns. Squirming only moments ago, the students are now still and silent, amazed by this plot twist. One boy murmurs, “Whoah!”

Yury, who is one of the top 100 ranked chess players in the world, became a grandmaster at age 20. Now 34, he shares many youthful qualities with his students. His blue eyes often sparkle and his smile is ever present. He bounces with excitement as he demonstrates an unexpected move. He cracks his students up when he reveals the tactic he just demonstrated is called the Fried Liver Variation, though he has no idea why.

Connecting with Children

“Yury has a great rapport with the children. They enjoy working with him,” says Grove Avenue School Principal Cindy Kalogeropoulos. “He relates to children, and not everyone can do that.”

Rishi Sethi, a student, friend, and collaborator, believes Yury is an accomplished player who has rare empathy for the chess beginner. “A lot of grandmasters — it’s like professors in college,” Rishi says. “They know so much it’s hard for them to explain what they know to people. [Yury] goes to the basics a lot, which is very, very helpful for a student. A lot of grandmasters don’t realize you don’t know all the basics.”

Yury prefers to entertain young students than to drill them. “I like to give kids enjoyment rather than a strict learning environment,” he says. “Through fun they learn to study on their own.”

As part of his Yury Shulman International Chess School, which he operates from his home in Barrington, Yury teaches weekly chess lessons at each of Barrington 220’s elementary schools and the two middle schools. Doing so, he takes over a program Rishi started in 1998 when he was a fourth-grader at Grove Avenue School. The program expanded to other schools as Rishi progressed to Barrington High School. Rishi and other members of the BHS chess team would volunteer to teach lessons and officiate tournaments at the elementary and middle schools.

Barrington Captures Yury’s Heart

Rishi, now a 20-year-old sophomore at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, was instrumental in persuading Yury to come to Barrington.

“Rishi relentlessly pursued Yury Shulman,” recalls Rishi’s mother, Kiran Frey.

Rishi met Yury in 2001 when Yury taught at a chess camp at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater. “I was really impressed with his ability to teach,” Rishi says. He stayed in touch with Yury and asked him to come to Barrington to teach players and to participate in tournaments. Yury, then living in New York City, began visiting Barrington in 2003 and would stay for several weeks. Frey says Yury was impressed with the program’s many devoted volunteers. “Yury saw the potential for expanding it,” Rishi says.

In 2005 Yury decided to make Barrington the full-time base of his chess school. “Now with Yury as a U.S. champion, the program has expanded even more,” says Kiran, who remains involved as volunteer coordinator for Yury’s organizations. Yury also leads chess clubs at schools in Cary, Palatine, and Elgin, and at St. Matthew Lutheran Church in Hawthorn Woods. He estimates more than 200 students are in the program.

Yury teaches group and private lessons at his home on Saturdays. One of his adult students is former Chicago Bull B.J. Armstrong. Yury also flies about the country to teach other students, including a 7-year-old in San Francisco who is one of the world’s top-ranked youth players.

As for the unexpected path that brought him to Barrington, Yury smiles and shrugs. “It is like life,” he says. “Half-expected, half of it happened unexpectedly. You meet friends, and you move there.” His parents, Mark and Nadia, moved to Barrington shortly after he did.

Background in the USSR

Yury grew up in Minsk, the capital of Belarus. A country of 10 million people, Belarus is a former Soviet republic on Russia’s western border. Yury was born in 1975, and was 10 when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. Yury was a teenager when the Iron Curtain fell, so he didn’t grasp the history as it occurred. “We were in the generation when everything changed,” he says. “And when you’re a teenager you think it’s always happening that way.”

Yury’s father was a champion checkers player in Minsk; in 1997 he was ranked No. 7 in the world in a type of checkers known as draughts. When Yury was about 5 years old he tried his father’s favorite game. “It was too boring for me,” Yury says. “Chess was much more fun.” So Mark began to teach his son chess. Lessons would last from one to two hours every day. Mark knew his son had an aptitude for chess when he could maintain his concentration on a game after playing for an hour. “In chess, you need concentration,” Mark says.

Yury began formal chess instruction at age 6 with coach Tamara Golovey, a three-time chess champion of Belarus. Tamara now lives in Buffalo Grove (she and her husband, Leonid Bondar, are instructors at the King and Queens Chess Club in Northbrook). Tamara’s English may be limited, but her enthusiasm for her former student is not. “I love Yury very, very much because he is a very kind person,” she says. “I am proud of him as a chess player [but] he is a beautiful person in all fields of life.”

Choosing Chess

At 17 Yury had to choose between going to a university to study engineering or to become a professional chess player, a career option in Eastern Europe. He chose chess and set about perfecting his game. In 1994 he became Belarus’ national champion. The next year he won the European Junior Championship. That year the International Chess Federation declared him a grandmaster. To earn the title, Yury needed to amass 2,500 points in federation’s rating system and compete against three grandmasters.

In 1995 it was unusual for a 20-year-old to become a grandmaster, but Yury says that is no longer true. “Right now there are 13-year-olds,” he says. That doesn’t mean Yury isn’t proud to be a grandmaster. In chess publications the initials GM always precede his name. “I think it’s nice to have a title because it’s a recognition,” he says.

Yury came to America in 1999 after accepting a chess scholarship from the University of Texas at Dallas. Yury was a student there when he taught at the chess camp in Wisconsin and met Rishi. He earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science then stayed at the university to earn an MBA in finance.

Attitudes about chess are much different in his homeland and his adopted country, Yury notes. In Eastern Europe “chess was treated like a sport,” he says. “There were chess fans like there are sports fans over here. … In the United States, chess is more like an education here.”

Champion at Last

Competing in the United States, Yury often was a co-winner in tournaments or would tie for one of the top spots. In the 2004 and 2007 U.S. Chess Championships, he tied for third place. He was the runner up in 2006, losing to his friend Alex Onischuk. Then in May 2008, Yury reversed the results and defeated Alex in the U.S. Chess Championship, which took place in Tulsa, Okla.

“When I became a U.S. champion,” Yury says, “I felt really good, but I didn’t feel like a mission had been accomplished. I didn’t feel I couldn’t go on.”

His former teacher is confident Yury will go on. “I think he will be one of the best in the world, not just in the United States,” Tamara says.

When he won the U.S. championship, Yury proved wrong the chess insiders who said his tournament play would suffer once he started teaching. “When I moved to Barrington, I started having some of the best results of my career.”

Rishi believes Barrington indeed has had a role in Yury’s success. “Yury is able to play better … because of the support he has in Barrington.” Mark agrees. “The people here are friendly. They help Yury.”

Yury’s U.S. Chess Championship victory qualified him for the U.S. team in the Chess Olympiad, which took place in November in Dresden, Germany. Although the United States is not considered a chess powerhouse like Russia, China, India, the Ukraine, and Armenia, the U.S. team placed third in the Olympiad. “I cannot believe the American team could take such a place in the world,” Tamara says. “This is a very, very good result.”

Chess and Charity

In May 1987 Yury founded the nonprofit organization Chess Without Borders as the philanthropic arm of his chess school. This formalized the charitable activity Rishi had folded into the program. “It’s easy to find funding, especially in Barrington,” Rishi says, “because people are willing to donate to a good cause.”

The organization, which raises funds through chess tournaments, has contributed more than $10,000 to many charities in the Chicago area and around the world; has donated more than 5,000 books to Chicago Public Schools; has donated chess sets to schools and institutions in Chicago, Elgin, and Carpentersville; and has established chess clubs in schools and orphanages in India, Mexico, Chile, Malaysia, Borneo, the Marshall Islands, Thailand, Cambodia, Nigeria, and Sudan.

“I got so much help in my life from other people,” Yury says. “I thought I finally could help others. Pay it forward. And you can help your students learn to help others.”

As Yury and Rishi were shaping new directions for the chess program, they collaborated on an instructional book, Chess! Lessons From a Grandmaster. Rishi got the idea when he looked through Yury’s lesson plans and the hundreds of puzzles he hands out to students and asked, “Why can’t we just make this into a book?” Rishi was then a student at BHS. “Yury was very nice about having a junior in high school write a book with him,” he says.

Teaching the Game

Even though thousands of chess books are on the market, Rishi says theirs fills a gap. “There’s really been no beginner chess book written by a grandmaster, much less a U.S. champion.” The book was published in 2007, and a second edition followed in January. The new edition adds 200 more chess puzzles. “It’s so very much needed for kids to do puzzles,” Yury says.

Chess often is touted for teaching math and analytical skills. Those are reasons Principal Cindy Kalogeropoulos welcomes a chess club at Grove Avenue School. “To me it’s giving them mental challenges and teaching them strategy and problem solving,” she says. “The more opportunity for complex thinking, the greater they can soar.”

Yury believes chess also builds language skills. “You have to keep on asking yourself questions, keep on answering yourself. You’re always talking to yourself in your mind.”

As he teaches the intricacies of chess, Yury continues to make plans for Barrington. The high school will host two chess camps this summer in June and July. Yury hopes one day to bring an international chess tournament to the Barrington area. He doesn’t know when it could happen, but notes chess tournaments sometimes fall into place quickly.

Yury’s supporters believe he already has added much to the community. “Yury has brought a very high level of excellence,” Kiran says. “I’m just very happy Yury came here,” Rishi says, “because it’s a great, great, great way to spread something new in Barrington.”

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Yury’s Winning Moves

Yury Shulman’s Chess Career Highlights:

1994  National Belarus champion, Top Sportsman Award, Republic of Belarus, and member of the Belarusian Chess Olympic team from 1994 to 1998

• 1995  European Junior Champion; named International Grandmaster
• 1998  National Belarus co-champion
• 2000  Co-winner of U.S. National Open, and Texas State Champion
• 2001  Ranked in top 100 chess players in the world, and co-winner of World Open
• 2002  Co-winner of American Open
• 2004  Tied for third place in the U.S. Chess Championship
• 2005  Illinois State Champion, co-winner of Millennium Chess Festival, and qualified to World Cup
• 2006  Winner of U.S. Open Chess Championship; U.S. Chess Championship runner-up; and U.S. Women Olympic team coach (fourth place) in Torino, Italy
• 2006  Co-winner of the University of Texas at Dallas GM Invitational Tournament
• 2007  Tied for third place in the U.S. Chess Championship and qualified for World Championship
• 2007  Tied for first place in the Chicago Open
• 2008  Won U.S. Chess Championship; and bronze medalist as part of U.S. team at Chess Olympiad in Dresden, Germany

For more information on Yury Shulman and his chess programs, visit www.shulmanchess.org.

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Chess and Service

Barrington chess players help children in Indian slum

Yury Shulman encourages members of his chess programs to volunteer and help people throughout the world through the nonprofit organization Chess Without Borders.

Kiran Frey helped Yury establish Chess Without Borders and serves as its volunteer coordinator. Her daughter, Nina Sethi, inspired one of the organization’s current projects. While volunteering as a teacher in New Delhi through a program called Project Why, Nina asked her mother if Chess Without Borders would help to establish a chess club in the city’s Govindpuri slum. Barrington chess players and volunteers responded by donating chess sets.

Then Nina met Meher, a young girl in the slum with severe burns across her body. Chess Without Borders’ mission changed to raise money to pay for the girl’s plastic surgery. So far the organization has raised $3,600, enough to pay for Meher’s first operation in March after a plastic surgeon in India donated his services. But fundraising will continue. “She’s going to need many more surgeries,” Kiran says.

Kiran and other members of Chess Without Borders visited New Delhi in February with filmmaker Brian Gruber, who is making a documentary titled Transforming Lives Through Chess and Service about the Govindpuri chess club.

Jeffrey Westhoff is a freelance writer who lives in Palatine.