In between the informal games that anyone can play anywhere and serious tournament competition, there is what used to be the backbone of chess, the chess club.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Café de la Régence in Paris was a famous meeting place for many of the day's intellectuals, and that included chess players. Other clubs, perhaps of similar type, sprang up around Europe and, later, the United States. Such clubs were gathering places for people of diverse background and interests. They helped provide a common culture for their habitués.

Men's clubs of all types grew out of old-style intellectual gatherings. Eventually, these clubs began to specialize, and clubs devoted entirely to chess gained currency. Even many of those clubs included checkers and/or bridge as activities for a long time.

Club Activities

At a typical chess club, members and guests can find a casual game, or get involved with whatever level of organized competition the club offers. Ladder play, where each member rises or falls in reference to other club members, was always a popular way to keep track of everyone's progress, at least until ratings came into vogue. Besides regular blitz tournaments and the club championship, there is often league play, where each club in an area plays the other clubs throughout the course of a season. (During a blitz tournament, each player gets five minutes to complete all the moves in blitz, so the maximum time a game can take is ten minutes. This way, a round-robin tournament with fifteen to twenty players can finish in one night.)

Some clubs have chess libraries available to members, some provide access to chess lessons or lectures by the club pro or a visiting master. Some sponsor simultaneous exhibitions or tournaments. The variety and amount of service to members provided by any particular club is only subject to the dedication and energy of the people who run it.

The Decline of Clubs

Late in the twentieth century the Swiss tournament took hold of the imagination of American chess players. A typical tournament usually took up an entire weekend and often involved some serious travel expenses.

Many players addicted to playing chess couldn't keep up all their club activities and play the tournament circuit. So these players would frequent weekend tournaments more and more, and their local club less and less.

A pervasive part of modern society, the Internet brings like-minded people together and estranges them at the same time. Anyone with Internet access can now play a game of chess with a faceless opponent from anywhere on earth at any given hour, day or night. Thus both opponents got a game and communicated, but there was no face-to-face human interaction.

This trend has continued with the advent of Internet chess play, where the club comes to the player rather than the other way around.