The Answer Is
Always on the Board.

This spring, ESPN put a name to something that had been spreading through NBA locker rooms for years: the league's quiet chess boom. Giannis Antetokounmpo stripping LeBron James on a late possession because he'd read the play before it happened. Victor Wembanyama taking on all comers in Washington Square Park. Derrick Rose building an entire chess festival in Las Vegas alongside Magnus Carlsen. The reasons they give are remarkably consistent: not about becoming a coffeehouse champion, but about anticipating a move, recognizing patterns, staying a step ahead, staying calm when one decision decides everything.

But there's a difference between playing chess and weaponizing it. For the league, the game is a hobby. For one program, it's a discipline. The NBA is discovering the game. Poison Pawn is the authority on turning it into an edge.

Westwood · February 2023

It began with something small: a new chess set on the glass table in the lobby of UCLA's Mo Ostin Basketball Center. Nobody on the team had ordered it. It had been delivered by the founder of Poison Pawn — a crisp black-and-white board, a set of redesigned pieces — and it was less a gift than a delivery system for a method. When Jaime Jaquez Jr. sat down nearby and noticed it, the basketball conversation was over. He wanted to know if the man who'd brought it was still around. He wanted in. As The Athletic chronicled that spring, the Bruins were quietly becoming something stranger than a Pac-12 contender. They were becoming a chess team.

The System Underneath

Here is the distinction the whole story turns on. For most of the league, chess is a pastime. Poison Pawn turned it into a method. Founded by Seth Makowsky and his wife, the program uses the game as a vehicle for cognitive training: a way to teach athletes to process faster, anticipate further, and decide cleanly under pressure. Makowsky — whom The Athletic has singled out as the most unusual quarterback guru in the game — has been a performance coach at UCLA since 2019, and the same chess-based system that ran through the football program ran onto those boards in the basketball facility.

The framework has a name. Makowsky teaches it as CDP — Control the Middle, Develop the Pieces, Protect the King — three chess principles that double as a decision-making operating system. Michigan State volleyball became the first collegiate women's program in the country to partner with Poison Pawn, and the client list runs through NFL quarterbacks, MVP-caliber baseball players, Olympic gold medalists and NBA champions.

Inside Westwood

What made UCLA different wasn't that one or two players dabbled — it was that the habit took over the room. By the time the Bruins reached the 2023 NCAA Tournament, more of the team played than didn't. Every player had his own board; two community sets lived at the Ostin Center; injured guard Jaylen Clark closed out an online match against Jaquez moments before media availability, while Russell Stong finished off Tyger Campbell down the hall. Where other programs killed downtime on PlayStation, these guys played chess.

“Every move you make is your own.”

Westwood to South Beach

Jaquez is the clearest proof that this travels. He singled out one thing as the part reshaping his game: the Blitz work with Makowsky, which he credited with helping him make good, quick decisions — and stick with them. As a Miami Heat rookie, Jaquez made the 2024 All-Rookie First Team, launched his own bot on Chess.com — joining Luka Dončić and Jaylen Brown — and was written up in the New Yorker for trading games with a teenage prodigy. He has said that playing chess before games gets him sharp and in the right mindset for the court.

“It's like the game of life. There are so many reads, so many options… You have to constantly switch it up, adjust, and react to your opponent.”

The Through-Line

Strip away the boards and the bots and the Washington Square Park crowds, and what the whole movement is really chasing is a single transferable skill: the ability to make a great decision when the moment is fast and the consequence is real. Anticipate. Read the trap. Commit. Protect the king.

The NBA found chess. Poison Pawn built the method that turns it into an edge — the framework, the protocols, the discipline underneath the hobby. Not that elite athletes play the game, but that someone figured out how to make the game train them. The pieces were always on the board. The advantage is in knowing how to use them.

This spring, UCLA's women cut down the nets for the school's first NCAA championship, led by senior Gabriela Jaquez — Jaime's younger sister. The same program that made chess part of its culture now houses champions on both sides of the building. The next chapter is already being written.