Greater Peoria Chess Foundation


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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.



Kingsmen are now meeting Monday Night at Hardees

The Kingsmen Chess Club will resume our Monday night meetings June 12th at the Hardees in the Willows Knolls shopping center at 7pm as usual. This is a temporary site, we are working to find another permanent site since the Pizza Works has decided to close on Mondays. Many other restaurants in the Peoria area have been closing on Mondays for some time. Hardees is not a good long term solution as it closes early. Kingsmen met at Hardees previously a few years ago, but moved when we found the Life Togerther Center. Please continue to watch this space for further updates.


Services

School Donations

Our school program provides sets & boards to schools in the greater Peoria area 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. All of these are free to the schools, they only need to have an active club and request the materials.


Training & Competition

Hult Youth Chess Club meets every Friday evening at the local Schnuck's Market at University & Glen in Peoria. Friday night is fun. We enjoy controlled chaos as we hold a new tournament every week. Kids are split by skill levels so that everyone can have fun and compete with players of their own strength.


We also offer a summer chess camp, workshops, and the Friday night Hult Youth Chess Club. If your group has a particular need please let us know and we will see how we can help.


Adult Community Participation

Kingsmen Chess Club meets every Monday evening at the Life Together Center at Sheridan & War Memorial.. members usually start arriving about 7pm and the evenings activities start at 7:30. Play lasts until 11:30pm or so. The club provides rated & unrated play and the yearly Peoria Championship. The club has been ably run by Wayne Zimmerle for nearly 30 years.


We also sponsor a number of successful regional tournaments each year. Click Tournaments on the above menu for more information. The club also has a local rating system which takes into account participation as well as playing skill to determine the club's yearly champion.


IESA Support

We provide support for the Illinois Elementary School Association annual state middle school championships by providing the sets and boards for the event. When covid hit and IESA ran into funding issues, we held a chess tournament and donated the profits directly to IESA.

Coordination & Scheduling

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 provide assistive tournament organization & direction help to schools.


USCF Scholastic Membership Program

At our 2019 board meeting we approved a new program to help underwrite USCF memberships among our local students who are participating in GPCF tournaments. To be eligible students must be a new or expired member who's membership expired in the month of the tournament.This is an experimental program which may or may not be continued in future years, depending upon our success this year. We are hoping to add hundreds of new scholastic players with this commitment to rated chess and increase the numbers of participating members, especially among our inner city youth.
Note: We have already provided more than 300 new US Chess memberships with fresh faces attending nationally rated tournaments.