Chess Club plays against N.J. state inmates

“All of them were quite good players,” said team member Leo Kang ’14. He explained that the chess team didn’t expect such a challenge from the inmates and that many of the members were taken by surprise at the skill of the inmates.

The chess tournament at the State Prison has become a semiannual tradition for the chess team over the past decade, as team members return every semester to test their newest skills and strategies against the inmates.

Co-president of the chess team Jack Hutton ’13 said the event was originally formed in 2001 by the New Jersey Department of Corrections and John Marshall, a friend of Chess Club and a local businessman.

Kang said chess is one of the most popular activities that inmates partake in to pass the time in the maximum-security prison. All the inmates in the prison are serving sentences of at least 25 years for crimes such as murder, kidnapping and armed robbery.

Hutton said his first experience at the prison was “definitely nerve-wracking.”

“You’re just walking along those long corridors with security checkpoints, and it’s very serious and quiet, and you just go into this room with 60 prisoners,” Hutton said. “You’re on-edge a little bit.”

Hutton returned to the State Prison for the fourth time on Friday. But this time, he said he wasn’t nervous at all.

“Each time, the nerves do come back a little bit, but they fade away,” Hutton said. “When you actually start playing, you kind of forget that you’re in a prison.”

Hutton added that since this was his fourth visit, he has recognized some of the inmates from previous trips he had made to the prison. He noted that all the inmates who are allowed to play are in good behavioral standing.

Kang said that he wasn’t worried for his safety because there were about 10 guards there looking out for the students.

“The prisoners were actually quite civil. They weren’t tackling us, or anything like that — no intimidation going on,” Kang said. “Only on the [chess] board, not person to person.”

The chess match was organized as ‘simul’ games, in which one person plays against multiple opponents at a time.

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Kang said that since there were just five students and 60 prisoners, each Princeton student was playing against 10-12 inmates at the same time.

“Each of them would play their own game, and I would play one move, stand up and move on to the next board,” Kang said.

Hutton noted that the prisoners had a different style of playing than the chess team. While the students use the computer “to figure out what moves you’re planning on getting” or read books on chess strategies, the players in prison learn simply through practice. Hutton said the team members weren’t used to seeing certain moves because they’re not really “formal moves.”

“Although our best players could beat all of them, if they had the resources we had, they’d be at least as equally good as us,” Hutton said.

The prisoners also differed from the average chess player in using ‘trash talk’ against the chess team during the games. Hutton explained ‘trash talk’ as trying to “get in your head” by saying that one’s position is better than his opponent’s.

“You can’t trash talk back [to the inmates] because you don’t want to cause a riot or anything, so you just laugh it off and keep going,” Hutton said.

Hutton noted that he has played against many eccentric opponents in regular chess tournaments and that his matches against the prisoners were more-or-less normal chess experiences.

“If you took them out of their khaki jumpsuits and put them in street clothes, you wouldn’t think they were prisoners,” Hutton said.