10/11/2025
Happy National Chess Day! 2025 is FIDE's "Year of Social Chess." These are some updates on what I and others in the DC community, and DMV (DC, MD, VA) region more broadly, are doing to make an impact through the universal language of chess!
Big Chair Chess Club has really been making Big Moves. Think B4 U Move. So much great social impact work, like free classes at the Martha's Table in SE DC, and important work in prisons, including job training. Wendell Hankins and Cory Brown are behind the magic. They'll be hosting their second Poetic Checkmate event at Busboys and Poets in Anacostia next month, so don't miss it!
Malcolm Wooten, former Howard University Chess Club president, founded Live Chess and he partners with Capital Chess and Checkers to hold regular events at Potter House in the Adams Morgan Neighborhood.
I continue my goal of making chess accessible across DC by teaching at Francis Gregory Neighborhood Library in SE every Wednesday from 6:30 till closing at 8pm. I think that's been going on since 2018. Shoutout to Neil Bailey for maintaining lots of programming for the community. We're also planning another Battle of the Branches event at MLK Library, where players from across the District (and beyond) can engage in the ultimate battle of the minds – the Royal Game.
Chess Girls DC and DC Chess Association are hosting the Women and Girls Regionals on Oct. 18th at the Washington Hilton on Connective Ave, DC. They also continue our partnership with The Darcy, hosting regular happy hour events there (as with Femme Fatale) to encourage more women to join chess and to create a welcoming and supportive environment. I am so happy to see that Equity in Chess has become an increasingly important priority.
Another long term partnership of mine, going back nearly a decade, continues at Washington Yu Ying, the Chinese immersion DCPS charter school in the Brookland neighborhood of NE DC. The after school REEF team led by Kareem Nuri is amazing. We look forward to participating in Big Chair Chess Club's second Poetic Checkmate event (chess tourney and and slam poetry) in November at the Anacostia Busboys and Poets.
My international adult classes are Sundays at 9am ET. Free classes to make it accessible to anyone in the world with an Internet connection - just optional tips.
Pictures of some fun simuls recently: Westfield Montgomery in N. Bethesda, MD, with NM Bijan Tahmassebi, and at CHOP Chess Club in Clinton, MD, organized by the wonderful Larry Smaw with legacy Black Knights Chess Clubs members in attendance! Sunny on Board 1 defeated me in beautiful, instructive fashion — breaking down what he was doing along the way as I love to chat-and-play! In the Bethesda one, Bijan and I worked better as teammates than opponents over the years (it was a spontaneous tandem simul like with Timur Gareyev at Rockville Chess Club a couple years back) and we scored 34.5 out of 35 — a challenger from Erie, PA, offered a gentlemanly draw after trapping our queen!
Reached 1k today on my YouTube channel "Chess on the Brain with NM David Bennett" for National Chess Day, perfect timing! Thanks YouTube Chess Community for your support. 🙏🏼 I post a lot of Chess 960 aka Fischer Random Chess aka Freestyle Chess content there — I'm glad to see how big it has become, with even the Kasparov-Anand 30 year anniversary match (which was incredibly historic; they played atop the World Trade Center) featuring Fischer Random games. I don't care about the # so much, but may as well have fun with it, so as a token of my appreciation, I want to give out a free lesson to assess your game overall, come up with a tailored improvement plan for you, and spar a bit. I originally said that it would go to #1000 but it's not clear who that is (only public channel subscribers are shown), so I'll give it to one of the next 10 commenters of any video at random - using the static noise generator of random.org of course. Sensing a "random" theme? At any rate, you can just join my weekly Sunday class for a free group lesson as well as at Francis Gregory Neighborhood Library for in person. The channel is .
For those in the Dulles airport area, I teach the Kings Indian Chess group on Sundays from 2 to 4.
As for some shootouts, congrats to my student Jesse, former DC (I think K-8) Champion, who is in his senior year and getting ready for college! His family has been so supportive of him over the years. He attended a college transition program at Oxford over the summer and I am sure that he has some exciting things in store. (Now I'm seeing my students cycling through, so I know I'm getting older!)
My student Arjun came in second for his category in the Virginia State Championship, while Calvin and Ethan scored first in their K-3 and K-5 categories at a recent DC Scholastic Chess event.
Since getting Instagram recently, I've been using that the most. You can be in touch with me there at instagram.com/davidbennettchess
There's probably more, so I'll add those in comments or edits later! May your fall harvest (and chess playing) be bountiful!
