Perhaps just as remarkable as the players and the games at the Saint Louis Chess Club and Scholastic Center are the tables themselves. Or, more accurately, Nate Cohen, the person who made the tables.
Just three years ago, Cohen was a 16-year-old home-schooled high school student in St. James, Mo., who didn’t even know how to play chess. And while his father, Phillip, owns Cohen Architectural Woodworking in St. James, Nate Cohen wasn’t exactly a student of fine wood craftsmanship. But when a family friend, Jeanne Sinquefield, asked Nate to make a chessboard and table, it was a challenge Cohen couldn’t pass up.
Nate did have some experience making furniture pieces. For three years in a row, he took first place in the Accelerated Christian Education’s International Student Convention for small furniture that he constructed.
But a chess table is far different than his ACE projects. Multiple varieties of wood must be precisely cut and pieced together. The tables must have elaborate joints to allow for expansion and contraction of the wood. And for aesthetic purposes, the grain needs to be just right.
His research took him to books detailing wood. He approached chess board craftsmen who were willing to work with a 16-year-old – probably not realizing he would someday become a competitor.
It was an eye-opening experience for Cohen.
“I generally thought of wood as just wood,” he said. “It goes a lot deeper than that. The chess board really opened my eyes.”
Making a chess table and board – at least hand-making one with the details worthy of a fine craftsman – required “a lot of precision. … It’s old-world craftsmanship. Spending a few hours here and there, find a few things that look just a little better and where the colors will blend a little better. Taking a little extra care with quality.”
After 40 to 50 hours of work, he delivered a magnificent table to Jeanne Sinquefield. That turned out to be only the beginning. Jeanne’s husband, retired investment company executive Rex Sinquefield, is the founder and president of the Saint Louis Chess Club and Scholastic Center.
When the center wanted new, handmade tables, it turned to the precocious teen-ager. But while it’s one thing to make a single table when you’re in a high school, it’s far different when you’ve started working full-time as a project manager at your father’s fast-growing business.
So while Cohen was managing multiple projects for his father’s company by day, by night he was building eight beautiful tables for the Chess Club. That was in early 2007. Since then, he has made four more chess tables.
Cohen isn’t sure it makes financial sense to go full-time into the chess table manufacturing business. At least not now. For starters, he’s only 19, and has been so busy working with his father’s company that he hasn’t started on college yet. Eventually, he wants to pursue an engineering degree with an MBA thrown in as well, and then head back to the family business.
But he admits to being a little awestruck as he considers that the best chess players in the country have sat at tables he constructed and moved their pieces on chess boards that he made from scratch.
“I’m very excited,” he says. “I’m just a kid of 19.”
And he still figures that someday he’ll learn how to play chess.
