America's Foundation for Chess (AF4C) is a nonprofit
chess
Chess is a board game for two players, called White and Black, each controlling an army of chess pieces in their color, with the objective to checkmate the opponent's king. It is sometimes called international chess or Western chess to disti ...
foundation
Foundation may refer to:
* Foundation (nonprofit), a type of charitable organization
** Foundation (United States law), a type of charitable organization in the U.S.
** Private foundation, a charitable organization that, while serving a good cause ...
based in
Bellevue, Washington
Bellevue ( ) is a city in the Eastside region of King County, Washington, United States, located across Lake Washington from Seattle. It is the third-largest city in the Seattle metropolitan area and has variously been characterized as a s ...
, United States, a suburb of
Seattle
Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest regio ...
. It was founded in June 2000 by
Scott Oki
Scott D. Oki (born October 5, 1948, in Seattle, Washington) is a former senior vice-president of sales and marketing for Microsoft who conceived and built Microsoft's international operations. Oki also played a crucial role in Microsoft's rapid do ...
and Laurie Oki as the Seattle Chess Foundation. Entrepreneur Erik Anderson and
grandmaster Yasser Seirawan
Yasser Seirawan ( ar, ياسر سيروان; born March 24, 1960) is a Syrian-born American chess grandmaster and four-time United States champion. He won the World Junior Chess Championship in 1979. Seirawan is also a published chess author an ...
are also credited as founders of America's Foundation for Chess.
The foundation was originally based at Carillon Point, in suburban
Kirkland, Washington
Kirkland is a city in King County, Washington, United States. A suburb east of Seattle, its population was 92,175 in the 2020 U.S. census which made it the sixth largest city in the county and the twelfth largest in the state.
The city's downto ...
, and moved to Bellevue in 2013.
AF4C sponsored the
U.S. Chess Championship
The U.S. Chess Championship is an invitational tournament held to determine the United States chess champion. Begun as a challenge match in 1845, the U.S. Championship has been decided by tournament play for most of its long history. Since 1936, i ...
starting in 1999.
First Move
The foundation's First Move curriculum uses chess as a learning tool in second and third grade classrooms to teach critical and creative thinking skills and improve overall academic achievement. First Move is taught one hour per week, over the course of the school year. The Chess Lady teaches the curriculum via streaming video, classroom teachers facilitate the activities and can learn with their students. In 2014-15 the program will serve about 140,000 students across the United States and a few schools internationally.
See also
*
Chess as mental training
There are efforts to use the game of chess as a tool to aid the intellectual development of young people. Chess is significant in cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence ( AI) studies, because it represents the domain in which expert perf ...
Notes and references
Notes
References
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
External links
*{{Official website
Foundations based in the United States
2000 establishments in Washington (state)
Companies based in Bellevue, Washington
Chess organizations