Max Euweplein: The Giant Chessboard
Why is it significant?
Listen for the scrape of plastic on stone. On the square in front of you, people are dragging chess pieces the size of toddlers across a board laid into the pavement, while a ring of onlookers offers advice that nobody asked for... and that is half the fun.
Key Facts
| Place | Max Euweplein: The Giant Chessboard |
|---|---|
| Address | Max Euweplein, 1017 MB Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.36230, 4.88330 |
| Part of Walk | Amsterdam's Green Heart: Vondelpark, Oud-Zuid and the Concertgebouw |
| Generated | Generated |
Listen for the scrape of plastic on stone. On the square in front of you, people are dragging chess pieces the size of toddlers across a board laid into the pavement, while a ring of onlookers offers advice that nobody asked for... and that is half the fun.
The square is named after Max Euwe, and in the Netherlands that name still carries weight. Born in Amsterdam in 1901, Euwe was a mathematics teacher at a girls' school, a modest man who played chess in his holidays. And in 1935 he beat Alexander Alekhine, one of the most feared players who ever lived, to become world champion. To this day he is the only Dutchman ever to hold the title.
The match was a national event. It travelled from town to town across the Netherlands over two and a half months, newspapers printed every move, and people who had never touched a chess piece followed the score like a football league. Alekhine took the crown back in a rematch in 1937, and chess historians still argue about how much his drinking cost him the first time. Euwe never made a fuss. He went back to his classroom.
His second career was just as remarkable. Euwe became fascinated by a brand new field, computing, and ended up a professor of it, studying whether a machine could ever be taught to play chess. Then, as president of the world chess federation in the 1970s, he helped keep the famous 1972 match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky alive when it nearly collapsed before it began.
Here is a small secret about this square: it is one of the few places in central Amsterdam where strangers of every age and language sit down together for an hour without buying anything. The board belongs to everyone, and the pieces wait in a box for the next challenger. Now leave the game behind, walk west along the Stadhouderskade, past the main gates of the park, and turn into Roemer Visscherstraat, the quiet street that runs alongside it.