Everybody is a chess player, but very few are chess doers.  

It’s a point that Kevin Pryor emphasizes. Since rejoining chess, Pryor has risen to be one of the biggest chess doers in the nation as president of the US Chess Federation.  

From his Gainesville home, Pryor travels each month to help the chess doing get done so chess players can play. He led the US delegation to the 2024 World Olympiad in Austria and attended the World Blitz and Rapid Championships in New York late last year. 

But he also hosts a weekly chess gathering for rated players at Perkins Restaurant in Gainesville, teaches chess at Terwilliger Elementary School and serves as president of the Jacksonville Chess Club and vice president of the Florida Chess Association. 

“It goes back to chess doers,” Pryor said. “The doers are fewer and far between. Everybody plays.”   

As president, Pryor’s duties include forays into international chess politics and the regular duties of attending tournaments, untangling logistics and dealing with disciplinary issues, like cheating. But his doings started locally before garnering national attention as success followed—largely through his personality and professional training.  

Pryor returned to chess in Jacksonville, where he lived for decades as an operations manager at Johnson & Johnson.  

He attended a tournament with around a dozen players, trying to get back into chess after not playing since college. He asked about the local chess club and was told the club had died. A small annual tournament, with help from other clubs and a few gatherings hosted by former members, was all that remained. 

That was 10 years ago. In late September, Pryor received a commendation from the city of Jacksonville for his work in restoring chess to Northeast Florida. Pryor helped revive the Jacksonville Chess Club as an official nonprofit and started tournaments for the metro’s roughly 1.5 million residents.  

The work in Jacksonville spread to the whole state as part of the Florida Chess Association, and the work for Florida led to the US Chess Federation.  

“That’s the problem that I’ve always found with chess,” Pryor said of the packed weekly events in Jacksonville. “If you do it reasonably well, not expertly well, people really enjoy it so much that it becomes hard to tamp down on the numbers.”   

Chess isn’t Pryor’s first time boosting participation in clubs and organizations. He was president of the North Florida Bicycle Club and headed his son’s Boy Scout Troop, pushing an above-average number of the boys to reach Eagle Scout status.  

Pryor said he analyzes how something is run, picks out problems and searches for solutions. It’s what he did for 37 years at Johnson & Johnson, and it’s a bit like second nature.  

He explains that while watching his grandchildren at softball or tennis practice, he sees inefficiencies and wants to jump in to help form two hitting lines so kids can get double the repetitions. 

Historically, chess players have earned a reputation for being introverted. Pryor said they show up and play their game while staying solitary, stoic. A classical chess game can last over four hours at national tournaments, so it makes sense that a lot of thinking and inwardly focused people come to play the game.  

But to build clubs and keep people returning, Pryor said you need engagement and conversation. As an outgoing person, Pryor said he naturally started reaching out, building connections and creating spaces where chess players can also bridge the 64-square gulf between each other.  

“We need people who are going to be ambassadors for chess—to reach out, interact, make connections, draw people in and build some ongoing relationships,” Pryor said. “That’s the part that chess players don’t always do a good job of. We love to play. We may be good over the board, but then we detach.” 

In Jacksonville, Pryor used the same formula to engage female chess players as he used for the Boy Scout Troop—turn the kids into friends. Accomplishing Boy Scout requirements is easy when you just get to hang out with friends, and the Eagle Scout accolades come almost as a bonus.  

Getting young women involved in chess started after Pryor talked with a high-level player about what her friends thought of her chess prowess. Her friends, she said, didn’t know; they’d think it was weird.

Pryor started a girls-only chess tournament (Queen’s Cup) and provided lunch in the middle. The players naturally began forming friendships, and the tournament grew. 

Jacksonville’s chess scene grew as the chess-doing infrastructure was built, Pryor said. Then the Florida Chess Association looked to replicate the success.  

A member of the Jacksonville Chess Club had joined the state association, and he soon pulled Pryor up to help. Reopening communications and establishing strong scholastic tournaments, Florida chess blossomed.  

As a member of the Florida association, Pryor attended the US Chess delegation meeting and began to finally realize the range of the game. 

“People are coming from all these different states, and I hear them getting up and talking and caucusing and all of that, and I said, ‘Wait, there’s more to this?’ I thought it was just a local thing of people sitting in a garage or in a living room, and it’s big stuff,” Pryor said. “It’s people who are running hundreds of players, hundreds of students, like small economies.” 

Leaning on his personality, Pryor began conversations with attendees at the national meeting, and national leaders also reached out to him.  

Pryor had gained a level of national notice for sparking chess in Northeast Florida, considered a chess wasteland, and in Florida more broadly. He said officials from US Chess heard about the success, held an 8-person panel interview with him and encouraged him to run for the executive board.    

About six years after the initial Jacksonville tournament, Pryor joined the executive board. He just started his second stint as president and said he will likely move to an at-large board member position to finish his term.   

Being new to the at-large chess world came with learning curves. At a tournament in New York, Pryor asked Grandmaster Boris Gelfand, a six-time World Championship candidate, if he was a player and how he was doing.  

“Once he said the name, I went, ‘I’m so sorry, Boris. I had no idea.’ And then he goes, ‘You have a good story to tell,’” Pryor recalls with a laugh.  

But it’s also a clean slate to start new relationships for US Chess.  

Pryor said he’s worked to strengthen the relationships US Chess has with other organizations like FIDE, the Saint Louis Chess Club, and Chess.com. Pryor said the Saint Louis Chess Club, independently funded through billionaire Rex Sinquefield, does an excellent job hosting the US Chess Championships to determine the American Open and Women’s champion.  

“They do an amazing job,” Pryor said. “We got lucky in many respects to have Rex and Jeanne Sinquefield be benefactors.” 

US Chess receives 70% of its annual budget, around $3 million, from the fees paid by roughly 100,000 members. Compared to private companies with billions of members worldwide, like Chess.com, Pryor said US Chess is working to exit the mom-and-pop stage of operations and logistics.  

He said the hotel dynamic shifted during the COVID-19 pandemic around big tournaments, hurting scheduling and making it harder to stay in the black.   

Pryor said the executive board must instill discipline for actions at tournaments, whether cheating or threats. Losing chess is an ego blow, and in the moment, he said players can deal with it improperly, forcing action by the federation.   

Pryor’s start on the US Chess Executive Board coincided with his move to Gainesville in 2020. The move placed him closer to grandchildren after just retiring from Johnson & Johnson. 

Gainesville is a hotbed of chess, Pryor said. But the chess happens mostly in schools and is more hidden than in Saint Louis with its World Chess Hall of Fame.  

Oak Hall School, Buchholz High School, Lincoln Middle and Williams Elementary have each won national titles in chess. The Oak Hall Eagles are perennial favorites to win an armful of state titles and at least one, if not more, national titles behind the coaching of Tim Tusing. 

The Frazer School broke into the local chess scene within its first year in operation, winning two national titles. 

With all the scholastic chess, Pryor said he surveyed the landscape and talked with locals to find a gap. From those conversations, he started weekly rated chess games at Perkins Restaurant.  

On Oct. 15, the chess gathering celebrated two years of rated games—105 straight weeks with 180 unique players visiting. Pryor told the group that he had promised more rated games and pointed to the two-year mark as fulfillment.  

He works with a small cohort of other chess doers to help him juggle the responsibilities that sometimes clash when he has to travel and miss a Wednesday night. Building that cohort in Jacksonville allows the club there to also thrive.  

“To a certain degree, I’m as busy now as I was when I was working corporate managing, so the doing has increased, but I also made a commitment to myself that I would play,” Pryor said.  

Pryor rejoined chess, aiming to play more. But the journey as a chess doer sometimes sidelined the playing part. Over the years of chess doing, Pryor said he watched comparable chess players improve and their ratings climb. He said he committed to playing 60 games in 2025 and keeping up his skills. 

Pryor hovers around a 1500 rating for classical after shifting to the London System instead of his tougher King’s Gambit opening that he’d been using. He started the shift four years ago when he was winning around 35% of his games. He saw success right away and hit his classical peak (1519) in September.  

Being the US Chess president sometimes brings a larger spotlight to Pryor’s playing. He said a tournament director sent out an email letting everyone know the president of US Chess would be playing, creating a good bit of buzz in his section. 

Even as a player, Pryor reaches out as president, offering his opponents a business card and a custom multitool.  

Pryor said players seem to enjoy battling the president—especially after a victory.  

During the US Open, Pryor said he’d battled to a strong advantage against a nine-year-old opponent. He said the kid was glum, realizing his lost position, until Pryor missed a tactic. The kid spotted the right move and turned the game into a win.  

Pryor said the kid proceeded to bounce out of the tournament hall and let everyone know that he’d beaten the president.