About Us

       In 2013, I started a chess club.  

      Why, you ask?  The family of a student ran an Aloha Math Center.  They wanted to promote their business, so they asked me to start a chess club. I called it Tri-Bridges Chess Club after the three bridges located just a few yards from the building. In 2013, Harry Potter was pretty popular, and there was something called the Triwizard Tournament in the “Goblet of Fire” movie a few years earlier, so there was slight name recognition.  I felt it would be an original name for what I hoped would be an original club.

      Our club got off to a slow start. Routinely, I would email 90 people, and four would show up on a club night. For spring, I had a rule: if nobody showed up in the first 90 minutes, I'd go home and not worry about the last half hour.  The club ran with few players, but in the summer, the site hosted the state championship, so a few more came out for that event. We started to build-  ten people, maybe 15, and the club continued to run over the next few years.  Unfortunately, the club did not bring people to the math center as the owner had hoped, so we eventually moved to a nearby church.

    After the move,  our club began to grow. However, the church had a no-money rule, so we couldn't give out trophies, prizes, or anything like that in a tournament. We started to run some tournaments at a local one-room schoolhouse near the church.  Membership was beginning to grow, and our club would play in the state tournament, one of the few tournaments that offers trophies for clubs.  

     By 2020, the club was doing well. We would have 40 kids come to the club on most nights, and occasionally about 50 came out.  We weren't a huge organization, and we're still not, but we're an organization that prides itself on doing what is best for the players—always encouraging them to play in the best section for them. We didn't get as many club/team trophies as some groups, but we did our best to serve the kids who came out and played in our club.  Even with this policy, we still win a few club trophies and have quite a few kids win individual trophies.  We even thought of moving to a different facility - our own rented space.

     Because of COVID, we could not start at our facility as planned.  In mid-2021, we began meeting, but we didn’t attract enough players to satisfy the building owner.  A parent of a long-time club member who owned a nearby building was kind enough to offer us his basement. Then, over time, the organization rented the upstairs space to us at a significantly discounted rate.  He sold the building in 2024, and we stayed on, renting most of it.  Though given a reasonable deal, we now have much more rent to pay.  Fortunately, we can run some tournaments and offer some classes.  In the winter of 2026, we will run 4 classes and at least 5 tournaments a month.

Books have always been important to me. I have loved reading since a young age, and have also been a collector. I started with series books, especially the Hardy Boys and the Three Investigators. Doc Savage, a pulp action hero that Bantam reprinted in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, was my focus in my early teens (and back in the pre-internet era, that was a complicated series to track down).

My love of books extends to collecting chess books.  On the other hand, my wife loves literature and is not a fan of chess books. (No one is perfect.)  When the club acquired a facility, I donated my books to it.   The chess club is primarily composed of children, who, sadly, don’t usually share my love of chess literature.  We still promote books for our kids, and more and more are learning to enjoy them, or at least learn from them.   Some duplicate books we receive are sold at events like the Irwin event for Pennsylvania, which we host for them, or we use them as prizes at events like the Holly Heisman Memorial.

Besides myself, our library was donated to us by a group of kind-hearted chess players, and we don’t sell those books.  However, we have been fortunate enough to acquire  a wide variety of other books, mostly, but hardly exclusively, in English. going back to the 19th century; unfortunately, those are not ideal for 99% of our club members.  While it is great for children to learn multiple languages, working through a century-old French chess magazine is not the way to do it.

We wanted to make an effort to get them into the hands of people who would benefit from them.  If we were able to sell them, the funds raised would mostly help pay the rent.  We would also like to help pay for team rooms at Nationals, additional books (of course), and items such as class space and better furniture.  We are in an area where rent is high, and we might eventually be hard-pressed to continue offering free club nights and inexpensive tournaments.

We now have a significant number of books and magazines (around 3000) that we would like to sell.  What is the best way to handle them? How can we best benefit our club with them? How can we get the different items to those who most enjoy and value them?  I have looked into  selling them on eBay or Facebook Marketplace. Another option is the famous Lund auctions (LSAK chess book auctions - Preserving the past and the future (chesslund.com)). The Lund auctions are fabulous, but because they take place in Europe, they are not ideal for most items sold in the United States due to the costs and time required to ship to Europe, etc.  Meanwhile, American sites like eBay are satisfactory, but they take a large cut, and it is easy for items to get lost among the large number of low-priced books sold on eBay.

Also, we will be able to help others sell their books for a cut and/or provide a site for them to use to sell their books.  The site is designed to take 5% of transactions between two private parties.  If you wish for our club to still have items for you, the cut will be 40%.  If you would just like to sell us items to list, we are interested, but we can only pay a small percentage of what we would then sell them for.

While the auction component of this site will be critical, we will also encourage book reviews from experienced and inexperienced authors.  We hope to include older reviews alongside recent and new releases.  We will also have a Links page to promote visiting the various book publishers.