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On Friday, February 23rd, Adisa Banjoko hosted a chess event at the King Library in San Jose, California called, "Hip-Hop, Chess and Life Strategies." As part of the initiative for his Hip-Hop Chess Federation, his idea is to provide an arena for youth to interact with hip-hop artists in an effort to show the universal popularity of the game. "There's a lot of intelligence in hip-hop that does not get showcased," Banjoko said.
When asked in a KCBS interview about rappers' enthusiasm for chess, Banjoko stated,
"It started in the early 80s with the political rappers making a lot of chess metaphors, but then as gangster rap started to rise up, it looked like obviously a lot of the intellectual stuff was kind of dying off, but what you actually found out was because of the street hustlers that play chess, the metaphors came back!"
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