Jim West On Chess: Suffern Chess Club

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Suffern Chess Club

According to its website, the Suffern Chess Club was formerly the Hillsdale-Montvale Chess Club in New Jersey before relocating across the state line in New York. The club meets on Wednesday nights for rated games.

It boasts as an "illustrious member" national master Arthur Feuerstein, who spoke highly of the club during a conversation with me at the ICA Early Winter 2007 tournament in Hackensack.

"My study of chess was accompanied by a strong attraction to music, and it was probably thanks to this that from childhood I became accustomed to thinking of chess as an art, and have never regarded it as anything else, for all the science and sport involved in it. And, moreover, an art which in some ways is closer to music than it is customary to think. Perhaps chess and music are drawn together by laws of harmony and beauty which are difficult to formulate and difficult to grasp, or perhaps by something else." - Vasily Smyslov