A Chess Club Craze Is Sweeping Downtown Manhattan

One Wednesday night in the dead of August, some 300 zillennials file into Manero’s in Little Italy to hit up the open bar for dirty martinis before heading to the chessboards out back. As Celtic music blares over the sound system, the players pair off and get down to business at the latest installment of a weekly gathering where chess aficionados play, drink, and occasionally dance. “This is what everyone fantasizes about in New York,” says Reggie James, 28, a regular. “You gotta find your little Seinfeld diner.”

Alexander Luke Bahta, a musician and self-professed dilettante, started throwing the party series six months ago, riding the wave of a chess fad that grew out of the pandemic. He set out to dismantle the game’s austerity, drawing inspiration from punk and the ’80s club scene. “I love, like, salon culture and Dada,” Bahta says. “Chess is tightly wound these days. I wanted it to be more fun — I didn’t expect it to be a big thing.” The concept blew up nonetheless, spurring piggyback events in London and San Francisco. “It started to become more of a party party,” says Bahta. “We’d turn on the disco ball, and there’d still be people playing by candlelight. Someone turned to me one day and said, ‘This isn’t a chess club. This is Club Chess.’”

Club Chess attracts regulars like the chess teacher who watches Yankees games while crushing opponents. Others come for the dark-academic aesthetics. “More than anything, I see a chess set as sculpture,” says Corrine Ciani, 26, a co-founder of Club Chess and an editorial producer at Zora Zine, whose parent company is funding this event. At the bar, a couple flirt over pisco sours. Two men pull up to a free board and fret abouta Trump prison presidency: “He’s gonna be on his Mandela shit, bro.” Outside, guests smoke beside classical-Greek-style statues, and players who have BYOB-ed (brought their own boards) sip espresso martinis. “The No. 1 question we get asked is ‘Are people actually playing chess, or is this just a party?’” Ciani says. “I can’t emphasize it enough: They really are playing chess.”

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