5 days ago
Justin Reid beats Kyler Murray to win NFL player chess tournament
For the second consecutive year, Justin Reid has beaten Kyler Murray in the finals of a chess tournament for current and former NFL players.
The tournament, known as Blitzchamps, saw Reid top Murray to emerge victorious from an eight-man field that also included Justin Herbert, Mack Hollins, Richard Sherman, Rashawn Slater, AJ Dillon and Harrison Phillips.
Reid, the first two-time champion of the annual event, said he sees the mental approach to chess as similar to the mental approach to football.
'I love [chess]. I'm obsessed with it. I play it almost every day,' Reid said, via 'Whenever we're getting ready to play a game [in the NFL] and you start to get excited because you know that moment is coming where you're about to go into combat with your brothers, I play one or two games to calm myself down and bring myself back to peace because I play my best when I'm calm and thinking clearly, rather then when I'm jacked up on emotion. So in those two ways, the games are very similar. You get too emotional and you make mistakes, a blunder here and there. If you stay calm under pressure, it ends up translating pretty well. . . . Sometimes you can see what your opponent is about to do before they do it. Both on the chess board and football field so you do a move to counter that before they even get to it.'
The prize for Reid was a $30,000 donation to his foundation, JReid Indeed, which provides opportunities to disadvantaged young people in Houston and Kansas City, the two cities Reid has called home in the NFL, as well as in Baton Rouge, where Reid was born and raised. After four seasons with the Texans and three with the Chiefs, Reid returned to his native Louisiana and signed with the Saints this offseason.
