Heady cocktail of game & fun at chess club with bar
MOSCOW: “Have you ever played chess while drunk?” asks Kenan Assab, sitting in a dimly lit, yet stylishly decorated room in the basement of the Kudrinskaya Square Building. It’s a 64-year-old, 22-floored skyscraper — one of the Stalinskie Vyostokie, the seven Stalin sisters — that the Soviet leader commissioned because he felt Moscow needed a few towering structures to compete with the glass and steel mountains of the capitalist world. Moscow reeks of chess.
It is hard to walk around and not wonder if every Soviet building had a role to play in the history of the game. Next to the Triumfalnaya Square, there is Tchaikovsky Concert Hall that hosted the famous 1985 World Chess Championship game where a 22-year-old Garry Kasparov beat Anatoly Karpov. A couple of metro stations away, you find the Central Chess House which houses a museum dedicated to bringing the past of the game back to life. But it isn’t just that. Moscow offers a glimpse of the future too. And taking shape in the basement of the aforementioned Stalinist skyscraper is what 28-year-old Kenan hopes will be the future.
World Chess Club is not the easiest to find, although it has been open for seven months. Once inside, it is hard not to be impressed by its sleek minimalism. The black wallpaper is occasionally interrupted by chess iconography and in the middle of the room, there are three tables with chess sets on them, pieces in position for a game. And in one corner, there is the part of the place that makes it unique — a bar. World Chess Club is the first chess club with its own bar. “Chess has this reputation of being very serious,” says Kenan, who manages the place.
“You go to tournaments and to clubs and it’s all very serious, with complete silence. But we want to integrate chess into the social life of youngsters. That is how you can make the game more popular — by showing that it can be fun. You can come here, have a couple of drinks or games, or both.” The club has hosted a couple of tournaments. But the more significant of their contribution to the game is the casual visitor who comes in for the drinks and ends up playing a game or two.
“We’ve had a couple of people who were introduced to chess here,” says Kenan. “We even have coaching programmes that people can sign up for should they feel that they want to learn more.” The place is owned by World Chess, which is FIDE’s official partner and commercial rights holder to the World Chess Championship cycle since 2012. That is one of the reasons why the club is still a work in progress. When World Chess organised the Candidates tournament in Berlin in April to determine Magnus Carlsen’s next challenger, they transplanted the club there.
Pretty soon, their signature cocktails were a hit among the chess community. The cocktails are perhaps the quirkiest aspect of the club — all of them are named after former world champions, although they have only reached up to Bobby Fischer. “Each cocktail has something to do with the story of the champion it is named after,” says Kenan. “For the one named after Wilhelm Steinitz (world champion from 1866 to 1892), we chose Czech plum distillate and Czech Fernet as a base because he was born in Bohemia, which is now in the Czech Republic. Jose Raul Capablanca was born in Cuba, so we went with Cuban rum. And for Fischer, he is American, so his cocktail has a Bourbon base.” Wonder what they’ll come up with when they get around to making a ‘Viswanathan Anand’!