It’s 10 at night and my husband, Ilya, is breathlessly asking me if he can wake the kids to show them the online chess game he just finished. He’s joking. Mostly. Since it is a scene I witness often in daylight hours, I sense that if I weren’t scowling, he’d romp in and wake our son and daughter — both scholars and chess players at Success Academy Upper West — to show them a tactic he found that lets him win with a forced “mate-in-3 [moves].” Years ago, when we were first dating, he and I played chess all the time, frequently getting in two to three games a day while stretched out on a blanket in Central Park’s Sheep Meadow. He always won graciously, but still I’d be slightly irked and very stubborn, so I would challenge him again – sometimes with thinly veiled aggression. It was interesting, though, because I was learning how he thought. One happy Sunday afternoon when I finally did win, a non-sportsmanlike grin spread over my face as I finally checkmated his king. Victory was sweet. – See more at: http://successacademies.org/education-blog-item/what-chess-means-to-my-family/#sthash.yL1uuHXO.dpuf