Greater Peoria Chess Foundation

The Greater Peoria Chess Foundation is a 501(c)3 non profit organization dedicated to encouraging chess in our community and school systems. Chess helps students to develop many life skills that will help them as they navigate with challenges that lay ahead.

Monday & Friday Meetings Moved to Arbys

Kingsmen Monday and GPCF Youth Chess Club Friday meetings are now meeting at Arbys on War Memorial Drive. Please join us, get a soda or something when you come. But more importantly, we can not only continue our meetings, but also expand our activities. Arby's is open until 10pm, so it may offer a better space where we can again provide organized activities. We will be holding weekly Speed Quads on Mondays, 10/5 games, in 4 player groups. Fridays will continue to be focused on our young players.

Quick Quad Mondays Beginning October 5th

The quads will be held in 4 player sections, using a Quick time limit format of 10 minutes with a 5 second delay. The quads will affect your Quick rating, but not your traditional Classical rating used with slower time controls. Quads will be sorted out by rating, so that the top 4 players in the evening will be in the first quad, the next 4 in the next quad and so on. If we don't have enough players to fill the last quad we will make adjustments by filling the bottom quad with the extra players. There will also be Quads available for unrated sections.

Skills you learn from playing Chess

Logical Thinking

Problem Solving

Goal Setting

Self Motivation

Actions have Consequences

Hard Work is Rewarded

Builds Self-confidence

Mental Alertness

Memory Development

Patience

Focus

Learning to Look for Patterns

Improved Schoolwork

Better Grades

The Effect of Chess on Standardized Test Score Gains

World Economic Forum’s latest job skill forecast for 2025 predicts that the most important skills will include analytical thinking, complex problem-solving, and emotional intelligence.
9 Reasons Why Your Child Should Play Chess
A more complete summary of the benefits of chess can be found Here.

GPCF Receives PPS Community Contribution Award

PPS Community Contribution Crystal Award

Peoria Public Schools awarded the 2017-18 Community Contribution Award to the Greater Peoria Chess Foundation at their June 11, 2018 Board meeting. GPCF provided chess sets and training software to PPS schools and supported a chess tournament at Von Steuben Middle School since 2017. Planned for this school year are more tournaments and a program to provide low cost US Chess memberships to students.

Visit the
Chess Underground
podcast with Pete Karagianis

Random Quote

Aphorisms

GPCF Youth Chess Club

The GPCF Youth Chess Club (K-12) meets every Friday night 7 to 10pm at Arbys near the Willow Knolls shopping center on War Memorial Drive. You can join us anytime for casual play with friends and school mates.

The Kingsmen Monday night adult chess club now meets at Arbys on War Memorial 7 to 10pm. (Click here to see the location on a map.)

Chess Mood

Services:

Our school program consists of providing sets & boards to schools which have an active chess club or chess team which meets regularly and competes with other schools. We provide teaching chess software which can be used either with teacher instruction or placed on a computer so that students can do self learning. We also provide a curricula, complete with instructor's notes and integrated with the software so that teachers, who are not chess players, can provide beginning teaching of the game to their students. We also provide USCF membership discounts for students who participate in our organized chess competitions. All of these are free to the schools, they only need to have an active club and request the materials.

For schools that are already active we can also help provide coordination with other schools as well as a schedule of tournaments for your student's participation.

We also offer a summer chess camp, workshops, and the Monday night Kingsmen Chess Club and the Friday night Youth Chess Club at Arbys near the Willow Knolls shopping center on War Memorial Drive opposite the old Hardess where we used to play. GPCF provides sets and boards for the annual IESA state championships for junior high and middle schools at the Peoria Civic Center. If your group has a particular chess need please let us know and we will see how we can help.