California Youth Chess League (CYCL) is a non-profit organization with the mission of empowering youth to grow through chess. Besides the obvious benefits of playing chess like the increase in critical thinking skills, pattern recognition, and logical thinking, CYCL also promotes the use of learning techniques, dedication, time management, competition protocol, sportsmanship, and much more.

CYCL offers after school chess programs, evening classes, camps and tournaments.

The Sean Reader Memorial Chess Fund (aka Sean’s Fund) honors the memory of CYCL’s highest achieving student with financial aid for families who cannot afford chess classes, camps, and events. Additionally, Sean’s Fund provides high quality chess kits for young patients at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. These kits contain the strongest magnetic chess set on the market (because games are constantly paused in the hospital), Chessmaster Software (for PC or DS!), a CYCL instruction book, and a chess pencil. It all comes in a great nylon bag that keeps all these things together as patients are often moved from one room to another.

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The mission statement for the California Youth Chess League (a 501c3 non-profit corporation) is “Empowering youth to grow through chess.” To this end, we have designed our classes, club meetings and tournaments in such a way that the youth participating in these activities will indeed have many opportunities to enhance their lives.

Every Monday night (except holidays such as President’s Day and Memorial Day) everyone (whether you are in classes or not) is invited to come eat pizza and play chess at Vincenzo’s Pizzeria in the Valencia Plaza (on Lyons, just a block east of I-5). We are there from 5:30 until 8pm. Vincenzo’s generously donates a percentage of your dinner purchase to CYCL.

We hope to see you soon!

Coach Jay, Coach Michael and the CYCL Staff

Click Here for an application for financial aid for our chess classes through the Sean Reader Memorial Chess fund.