BY VINAYA SAKSENA

CUMBERLAND — Bob Salvas of the Office of Children Youth and Learning (OCYL) is looking to get local kids involved in a mentally stimulating pastime that he himself got into at their age in a free tournament taking place Tuesday.

On Tuesday afternoon, Salvas will oversee a free chess tournament for children ages 14 and under, to be held at the site of the Cumberland Public Library and the Monastery that accompanies it at 1464 Diamond Hill Road. Registration will begin at 4 p.m., with the tournament starting promptly at 5:00. 
The tournament is the latest of a lifetime of chess-related endeavors Salvas has embarked on since he got into the game as a child. While growing up in Central Falls, he said, he and his best friend, John Carozza, became fascinated with the time-honored board game.
“I’ve been an avid chess player since I was about eleven, twelve years old,” Salvas said. “We used to watch kids playing chess. I always saw chess as sort of a mystery. No relatives I had knew how to play.”
Fortunately, another friend’s father did know how to play, and was happy to teach Salvas and Carozza. Salvas maintained an avid interest in the game until he got married in the 1990’s and began to focus more on his family and his job as a postal worker, having traveled to regional and national tournaments during the previous decade. Now, at age 51, he is back at it.
Salvas’ interest in chess began its resurgence after his children began taking swimming lessons at the YMCA. A friend turned him on to the idea of playing chess online. Later, when chess instructor had left the organization, a YMCA employee who had given his children swimming lessons asked Salvas if he would be interested in teaching chess at the organization’s Lincoln location. Since then, he has also done so on a volunteer basis at the public library, and has since become a paid instructor there under the auspices of the OCYL.
“To be honest, I probably couldn’t have done it before having my own kids,” Salvas said. “As a tournament chess player, it’s difficult to ratchet your game down to the level where you can teach. Lo and behold, I (realized) I have a gift for this. And I feel good about it.”
The open chess tournament, he said, also serves to highlight the start of the OCYL’s school year chess program, in which students between the ages of eight and 14 from Cumberland, Central Falls and surrounding communities earn chess strategy. In the past year, OCYL students have competed in their own Winter Chess Tournament and a second tournament at the Blackstone River Theater, and on Tuesday, the top players in each age group will receive medals.
Salvas said he encouraged novices to give chess a try as well, saying that if given the opportunity to learn, they often blossom into players who, whatever their achievement level, can get considerable enjoyment out of it, even when passed the age when they cane play football or basketball.
“The best way to learn chess is through somebody else,” Salvas said, though he noted that some learn from books ore elsewhere. “I’m still trying to master the game. Chess is really a lifelong activity.”