Club de Ajedrez Trebejos

Saturday lessons and a club in print

Youth development appeared during the club's earliest period. At Estrada's request, Jorge Esperón taught Saturday classes in tactics and strategy, and Trebejos held its first youth tournament in 1972 with ten participants.

A second edition in 1973 drew sixteen. These were small events, yet they reveal an early institutional choice: the club would not rely only on experienced competitors, but would create recurring occasions in which younger players could study and test themselves against peers.

From September 1974 through March 1975, Trebejos issued seven editions of an information bulletin. It combined club and national chess news with annotated games, problems and studies.

Contributors included Walter Estrada, Lincoln Maiztegui and José Bademian, while analyzed games came from players such as Roberto Silva Nazzari, Gustavo Martínez, Álvaro Islas and Daniel H. Matteo.

Distributed free to members, the bulletin turned everyday club activity into study material and preserved an unusually detailed trace of its intellectual life.

Keeping an institution alive without a guaranteed room

During a period without a stable venue, Trebejos continued operating in Pedro Lamas’s home. Lamas’s home became the meeting place while the club lacked a room of its own, a practical solution that kept the community together around chess.

The same recollection connected Trebejos with several generations of prominent Uruguayan players, including Daniel Rivera, Lincoln Maiztegui, Andrés Rodríguez, Pedro Lamas, Roberto Silva Nazzari and Bernardo Roselli. Their participation belonged to different periods and roles.

Curi’s reconstruction places them at the club or representing it at various points in its history.

An anniversary tested through events and multiple teams

In its fiftieth-anniversary year, the final of the 93rd Uruguayan Absolute Championship was played at Trebejos and Municipio B. This placed the club among the venues used for the country's leading individual competition, rather than only among its possible entrants.

Trebejos A also finished second in the absolute division of the 2022 Interclubs. Together, those records show a club able both to receive high-level chess and to field a competitive team half a century after its first documented match.

The 2024 Interclubs gives a clearer measure of organizational depth. Trebejos A placed third in Category A, while Trebejos B and Trebejos C finished first and second in Category B.

Three well-placed teams show participation extending beyond a single top roster. For Trebejos, recent competition matters because it fits a longer, carefully documented pattern: chess transmitted through teaching, printed analysis and shared places, even when those places were not always permanent.