USCF Mission / Chessplayers with disabilities
ALevelPlayingBoard
Chessplayers with disabilities find they are treated with equality—for the most part. By CHRISTEN MC CURDY
D
OMINGO SANTOYO WAS BORN WITHOUT ARMS AND without a hip socket in his right hip. As a kid, he loved sports—describing himself as a “very competitive person”— but his parents were reluctant to let him play.
“My parents, they were very protective and didn’t want me to
do contact sports,” he said, though by high school he was playing soccer and serving as the captain of his school’s swim team. Before that, though, starting in seventh grade, Santoyo found another way to fulfill his drive to compete: he learned to play chess and started to enter local chess tournaments in Texas. Before long, he asked his parents to hire a private tutor so he could improve. Santoyo played tournaments throughout Texas and his younger
brothers developed an interest in the game, and as a teenager traveled across the country and to Mexico and Canada to compete in tournaments. Now 20 and a student at University of Texas-Brownsville studying physics, Santoyo said he hasn’t played chess compet- itively for the past few years, but he does attend tournaments to watch, and he works as a private chess tutor for three younger students—one in sixth, one in eighth and one in ninth grade. Santoyo tried using prosthetic arms for a brief period when he
was younger. They weren’t “cool and robotic” like recently- prototyped prosthetic arms that connect to nerves in the shoulder (but still aren’t broadly available), he said. He wasn’t able to grab or hold things with the hooks, and the pull on his shoulders hurt. “I just said Mom, if this is just for aesthetics, I don’t need this,”
Santoyo said. “I do everything with my feet.” That includes chess. When he played in tournaments, he asked to use a higher chair so he could move the pieces with his
30 July 2013 | Chess Life
feet; he’s also set chessboards up on the floor to play. “Usually, [tournaments] are very acces sible,” he said. “Locally,
when I go out of town, or for nationals, I would just talk to the tournament director. I’ve never had a problem with that.” According to the U.S. Census 2008 American Community
Survey, 54 million people in the United States—or 19 percent of the civilian, non-institutionalized pop ulation—describe themselves as having a disability of some kind. Of those, 3.3 million use wheelchairs and another 10 million use a walking aid such as a cane, crutches or a walker to get around. Just under 2 million report a visual impairment, and one million have a hearing impair ment. Of those, the number who play chess is difficult to ascertain:
in terms of tourna ment play, for instance, U.S. Chess Fed er ation registration questionnaires don’t ask about disabilities other than blindness. Looking beyond the U.S., in October 2011 the World Chess Federation sponsored the 1st World Chess Games for Disabled People in Germany, and 80 people participated. The FIDE website notes plans for a second all-disabled tournament this October 21-29 in Dresden, Germany. By nature, the mind-game chess is of course a more accessible
sport than most. In addition, the game is flexible enough that people who aren’t able to engage with it in one way—for instance, those who can’t make it to many tourna ments, or just don’t like the speed and competitive nature of tournament play—have a number of other entry points available to them: clubs, online forums and mobile apps, correspondence chess (by e-mail, postcard, or—going further back—audio cassette and ham radio). “For me, chess is a sport. Since I am physically disabled I can’t play real sports, but chess has a lot of the competitive aspects
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