Although the Sedona Public Library’s youth chess club meets every Thursday afternoon at 4 p.m. in the quiet study, one of its players has recently been making some noise in the Northern Arizona chess scene.

“It’s more casual,” club coach Dr. David Beyer said. “We’ve been doing it every Thursday for a couple years now, each week — whatever kids come, they play. I try and get them some puzzles and chess challenges to try and get them thinking. Try and give them a little lesson in it … let them play and put that to good use. Obviously we took a break during COVID, it was a pretty awkward time for everybody, but other than that it’s been every Thursday for a number of years.”

Beyer, a radiation oncologist with Cancer Centers of Northern Arizona Healthcare, got involved with the club around 2018. He said that turnout for the club each week could be “from two to about 12, ranging in age from about 5 up to early teens.”

Among those players is 9-year-old Toma Tsai, who won his first two tournaments in Flagstaff in November and December of last year in the kindergarten-to-third-grade division. He faced five other players in each tournament.

“In the first one I felt really nervous, but I did my best and I won all my games, and I’m really happy about that,” Tsai said. “The second tournament I had more confidence because I won the first one. So I was excited, not as nervous, more excited.”

“During COVID, we were looking for hobbies to do together,” said his father, Nick Tsai, who played the game recreationally in his youth. “I teach Brazilian jiu-jitsu and I feel like it’s a little similar. All the information is completely available to both sides, so if you lose, it’s more like your own fault. But sometimes that’s tough to do.”

“It’s so good for them,” his mother Michiko Tsai agreed about the tournament experience. “They can make mistakes and have to calm themselves down … It’s a really good mental exercise for them.” She noted that schools in Flagstaff are also very serious about chess, with some even fielding uniformed teams.

“We went to a tournament in Tokyo last weekend, and the ones in Flagstaff are bigger,” Nick Tsai said.

“My opening is E5, usually,” Toma Tsai said of his style of play. “I’ve been learning notations, and I’ve been reviewing them with my dad.” He currently practices around 30 minutes per day.

“In the tournaments you have to write down all your moves in chess algebra,” Nick Tsai said. “Starting in fourth grade, you’re required to use it.”

“He’s a sharp kid,” Beyer said. “He’s got a good, solid game. I usually beat him, but he has beaten me. He’s enthusiastic, excited about it. I think when he plays — sometimes I’ll put a challenge up on a board. I’ll set up a board with a position, and I’ll say, OK, everyone take a look at this and tell me what you think. And you can see in his eyes when he sees what’s there. It’s like, ‘Oh yeah! This is what I need to do’ … It’s almost infectious to be in the room with him. I was very encouraging of him to get out and play competitively. Once he had the basic skills, I knew he needed to get out and see a bunch of other kids that are at his level. I see good things for him.”

“Not all the kids like to sit down and analyze their own mistakes, but I think he’s kind of figured out this is how you get better,” Beyer continued. “We’ve done some games together where we’ve gone through and identified, this should have been this move instead of that move, and he’s learning. There’s no telling how much better he can get.”

At the club’s Jan. 18 meeting, Toma Tsai played four games against four different players, during which he drew the first game and checkmated the next three. He played fast, so fast that in many instances he was making his next move almost before his opponents had finished — and he planned his play ahead, setting up combinations and laying traps for his competitors.

“Thought so,” Tsai remarked with a smile when one of his opponents advanced a pawn, which he immediately removed with a bishop.

He tends to rely on his rooks and bishops for much of his play, supplemented by his queen, while leaving his castles and pawns largely in place. Tsai remembered that one occasion, during a game against a friend, he started with a king, eight pawns and two knights and then eliminated all of his opponent’s pieces before the game was over.

Playing youth chess also requires coping with non-chess problems, like leg wrestling under the table while a game is in progress — and the trash talk can sometimes be fierce for grade-schoolers.

“That you’re allowed to do that is absolutely stupid,” one player commented.

“I already beat you, so I don’t want to make you sad when I beat you again,” another said.

These minor matters are among the organizational challenges facing the club’s coach, who is known affectionately among his players and the library staff as “Dr. B.”

“My dream has been to get a scholastic team together and compete around the state,” Beyer said. “There are scholastic tournaments — sometimes they’re schools, sometimes they’re not schools — and I thought it would be a lot of fun to get something like that. It requires a fairly steady commitment from the same players week after week after week. And we’ve had trouble with that. A lot of kids will come, they’ll play for a couple weeks and then they’ll disappear. We compete with the soccer and the dance classes and a lot of other things that kids get involved in … It would be really nice if we had a larger team of children that were coming by on a regular basis and together getting better.”

Beyer’s interest in and enthusiasm for the game goes back to his own time as a youth player.

“I started playing when I was a kid, and I enjoyed it. I started playing tournaments when I was in high school, and I got a real kick out of it,” Beyer remembered. “Then my career kind of got in the way, and I stopped playing competitive chess for a long time. In the past several years, I’ve personally gotten back into it, playing a number of tournaments each year now. So far I haven’t run into any kids that I can’t reliably beat. If I did, I’d say it’s time for them to get a tutor who’s better than me.”

Over the weekend of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Beyer was playing in a tournament in Phoenix.

“I actually did pretty well,” Beyer said. “I was in a very competitive section … When you first start out, you’re playing a lot of people who are not very good. As you get better, you start playing better people … Anyone I played the entire weekend was rated significantly higher than me.”

Beyer’s U.S. Chess Federation rating is currently 1647, ranking him 195th out of 1,552 registered players in the state. Tsai does not yet have a provisional rating with U.S. Chess.

Looking to the future, Beyer is hoping to organize a competition with the Cottonwood library and their chess club if a scholastic team proves to be too difficult to organize.

“Frankly, if all we get out of it is an occasional player who just decides that he’s going to make chess his thing, then I guess we’ve accomplished something,” Beyer said.

“It would be so great if people in the community know about the chess club,” Michiko Tsai said.