The default / common way of expressing "chess" in ASL is to fingerspell it.
For what it is worth, a buddy (Deaf) and I used to play chess quite a bit and he
always signed "chess" using a mime-like sign that obviously started out as a
depiction of lifting a piece, moving it, and setting it down. The handshape he
used was a flattened-O.
I figured somewhere along the line he (or those in his social sphere) had just
started miming the act of "playing chess" and then over time fossilized it into
a sign.
After non-too-long I adopted that same sign whenever I was around him.
Then even later I noticed that quite a few other countries have a sign for
chess. A significant number of signers from other countries use a two-handed
version of the one-handed version my friend was doing.
Then it hit me. He is from New Zealand and moved here as a (young) adult.
It seems to me that the flat-O version has further evolved into a bent-3 version
(or it just independently developed due to fossilization of a mimetic depiction)
and spread.
Thus there is a fairly common "international" sign for "chess" worth adding to
one's mental "sign repository."
See:
https://youtu.be/MoN702ga0gw?t=216
Remember I'm not telling you stop spelling CHESS and start doing a mime like
movement.
Here in (north) America it is common to fingerspell chess (which we label as: fs-CHESS)
and thus fingerspelling (of the word chess) should be the first choice of
interpreters and others. Just be aware that chess nuts (even here in the
"States") may choose to use the international sign -- and over time that sign
might be adopted more widely here in the States.
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