Walk into any weekend chess tournament in this country and you will find rows of children hunched over their boards in tense silence. What is easy to miss is the pressure drifting in from the back of the hall, where the parents wait. Families are often told that chess is a patient game of logic and quiet self-control, yet at the competitive level that calm has curdled into a fierce urge to win at any cost. A handful of parents now drill their children for hours on end, quarrel with tournament arbiters over rulings, and trade barbs with rival families between rounds. These parents are a small minority, and yet the damage they do reaches well beyond their own tables, from shattered friendships to gifted young players who walk away for good, to a slow stain on the good name of a game that is supposed to teach grace. Unsettled by all this, several provincial chess federations have started asking parents to sit through a short seminar on supportive behaviour before their children are cleared to register.

The tension came into the open last month at a parents' forum held by the Prairie Chess Guild in Regina, Saskatchewan. Of the roughly one hundred who turned up, most voiced the same complaint: a noisy few were souring the game for everyone else. The guild's head coach, Ingrid Vasquez, urged the room to ease off. The wisest thing a parent can do, she said, is step back and let a child settle on the game that truly speaks to them, or leave games behind entirely; given that freedom, children stop performing for an audience and begin playing for the love of it, and they flourish. Her one warning was about pride. A swollen ego, she added, is a weight a person is left to carry for the rest of their life.