Chess can be a stressful game.<\/p>\n
But when Nico Silva gets into it, he is ready to go.<\/p>\n
“I feel like my happy place, being here on board, getting to play,” he said.<\/p>\n
Silva is the organizer of the Astoria Chess Club. The club, which has a couple dozen regulars, meets every week at local businesses to play.<\/p>\n
“It’s people from different, different avenues of life, different walks of life just come together and like, bonding over anything, in this case, you know, chess,” he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Silva learned to play chess as a boy in Rego Park.<\/p>\n
“The amount of, like, different combinations, say, you could create on the board, it feels like you could, you could kind of like show a part of yourself on the board,” he said.<\/p>\n
A couple of decades later, Silva joined the new Astoria Chess Club.<\/p>\n
“I remember, you know, feeling kind of nervous,” Silva said. “Like a different environment, a whole different group of people, you know, am I going to be good enough to play with these guys?”<\/p>\n
The Astoria resident took over the administrative tasks a couple of years later. He books space with local businesses, like Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden, for weekly meet-ups. While it is free to participate, members are encouraged to buy food and drinks during game nights.<\/p>\n
“Astoria is built on like, you know, these mom and pop shops, and like that’s what we want to have in the community, that’s what makes Astoria great,” Silva said.<\/p>\n
He also organizes pop-ups on 31st Avenue Open Street and got the Astoria Chess Club involved in tournaments across the city with other chess clubs.<\/p>\n
“For the guys, it means a lot to them,” Silva said. “Being able to do all this stuff and, like, you know, represent, like, Astoria.”<\/p>\n
But between the bouts on the board, participants say something more meaningful has developed.<\/p>\n
“You can have conversations, have a beer, have some food. Meet people who also like chess, and then that’s sort of an icebreaker,” said Sam Shapiro, an Astoria Chess Club participant. “And then from there, you make friends.”<\/p>\n
“Just getting the opportunity to play chess, be here with the guys, be here with the group,” Silva said. “It means the world to me.”<\/p>\n
For building camaraderie out of competition in Astoria, Nico Silva is our New Yorker of the Week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Chess can be a stressful game. But when Nico Silva gets into it, he is ready to go.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":328241,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[7914,25,7913,9,24,55,54,7911,12,56,7912,27,200],"class_list":["post-328240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-app-new-yorker-of-the-week","tag-app-top-stories","tag-chelsea-katz","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-new-yorker-of-the-week","tag-news","tag-ny","tag-pat-kiernan","tag-top-stories","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=328240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328240\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/328241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=328240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=328240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=328240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}