by Paul Hoffman
AT FOURTEEN, PASCAL PERSONALLY EXPERIENCED CHEATING FOR THE FIRST time at chess. In the last round of an open tournament, he faced an international master, and the two of them were in contention for $1,500 Canadian for the best performance of a player rated under 2400. “In the middle of the game the guy took out this peculiar little bottle that had a strong herbal smell,” Pascal recalled. “I didn’t know whether it was a drug or what. He looked nervous and started drinking it and he got pissed off when I smiled.” They reached a position in time pressure where Pascal had no winning chances and his opponent was a bit better. “He repeated the position three times,” Pascal said, “and I stopped the clock and claimed a draw by three-fold repetition. He said, ‘No, no, it’s not a draw.’” Pascal proposed calling the arbiter, who’d review the score sheets to see if the same position had indeed occurred three times, but his opponent objected. “He had tears in his eyes,” Pascal recalled. “He was agitated and said, ‘How can you do this? We should have made a deal and split the money.’” By drawing and scoring only 1?2 point each, they allowed another player to leapfrog them and win the $1,500. “He didn’t propose a deal before the game—I’ll give you $600 if you lose—because he thought he was going to beat me,” Pascal said.
Afterward, the master challenged him to speed chess at $5 a game. Pascal refused, and the master tried to entice him by offering him time odds of five minutes to two. Still he turned him down. “My father was so offended,” Pascal said, “that he got out his wallet and was ready to back me. I had to restrain him. Now that I’m older, I understand the guy’s behavior, even though I don’t approve. The money meant a lot to him, and many chess professionals like him were just scraping by.”
BECAUSE PASCAL’S WEEKS DURING HIGH SCHOOL WERE FILLED WITH HOMEWORK and tennis and basketball practice, he didn’t have much time to socialize. Even though he was incredibly busy, he was also lonely. He’d spend a couple hours each evening playing blitz on the Internet Chess Club and instant-messaging people. “I met this girl on ICC,” he recalled. “She didn’t play chess but hung out there, chatting. We messaged each other daily and then we started talking on the phone.” She was a chess groupie, and for more than a year Pascal, seventeen, considered her to be his girlfriend, even though the two had never met. “She lived in the United States and was three years younger than me,” he explained. “At that age, we couldn’t just pick up and travel.” Her parents were Jehovah’s Witnesses, and they didn’t approve of the relationship. They were afraid that Pascal was going to pull their daughter away from the faith, and once when it looked like the two of them might actually meet, her parents nixed the idea, the girl went into hiding, and her father reported Pascal to the police.
In August 2001, after graduating from twelfth grade, Pascal played in an eleven-round international chess tournament in Montreal and scored a respectable but less-than-exciting 41?2 points out of 11. Afterward he was supposed to join his family on a vacation in Maine, but instead he remained behind, telling his parents that he was working at a tennis camp. To the astonishment of his friends, who were envious of his conspicuous accomplishments as a student, an athlete, and a chess player, Pascal then ran away from home—first to Toronto, and then clear across the country to British Columbia. He was eighteen years old. He left his parents a note, but did not tell them where he was going. He stayed in touch with them by e-mail and first disclosed his whereabouts on September 11, in case they were worried that he was in lower Manhattan. Pascal was gone ten months. He missed the last year of school (there are thirteen grades in the Quebecois system), derailing his admission to the best universities in Canada and the United States.
“I’m not proud,” he said, “but I had to leave. If I had told my parents beforehand, I would not have gotten out of the house. I hurt them a lot.” He left home, he said, because he felt that his life was too routine and predictable; he needed to see if he could make it on his own. “I had no time for myself with chess and sports and school,” he recalled. “Everything seemed the same from day to day, with my life controlled by these activities. I felt that I was a tennis-and chess-playing robot. I was programmed to succeed. My parents were not pushy about what particular things I did, but I always felt pressure to succeed since the time I was small.” The fact that Pascal’s year-long relationship with his Internet girlfriend had gone nowhere also contributed to his sense of discontent.
Pascal wanted a more adventurous life than his parents, who were rooted with their families in Quebec: “I knew from my chess travels that there was an exciting world out there.” He respected his father, who had worked since the age of thirteen and became an actuary in Canada at a young age, but he felt that his father’s life was too staid. “He is very proud that he’s never been drunk,” Pascal said, “that he’s never had more than three glasses of wine. He talked to me a lot about his work, but never about girls before my mom. I don’t know if he was with any. I don’t think he lived outside his home until he got married, and that was at twenty-eight. He had reasons, of course, but I was afraid I was aiming for something similar.”
Pascal found a room in the home of an elderly chess organizer in Victoria, on Vancouver Island. “I made her day,” he said. “She’d be happy if I stayed forever, but it wasn’t the adventure I was looking for.” Soon he took an apartment share in Vancouver with two strangers, one of whom became his girlfriend.
“She was different than the girls I knew in Montreal,” he said. “She was very artsy. She was into writing, design, wearing pretty clothes, and going to galleries. She liked beautiful things and was beautiful herself.” She was twelve years older than he and an actress in Terror Firmer, a Troma send-up of a slasher film. “She murders men while having sex with them,” he said. “I’m glad I didn’t see it before we got involved.”
In Vancouver he continued playing chess for hours on ICC and made some money by doing audio commentary for games broadcast on a Canadian Web site called the World Chess Network. He drank a lot, ate too much, and learned to cook. His days were not overscheduled with sports. “I was happy,” he told me. “I was doing things most guys my age never did. Hey, I was living with a woman.”
As it happened, the 2002 Canadian Chess Championship was being held in the Vancouver suburb of Richmond, a forty-minute bus ride away. “I never played in a Canadian Championship before,” Pascal said, “so my expectations were not high.”
His Vancouver buddy Jack Yoos, whom he knew from their days together as roommates and teammates at the 2000 Chess Olympiad in Turkey, helped him prepare his openings. “Pascal is a great natural talent,” Yoos told me, “but his openings are truly atrocious. He can’t bring himself to study. So I would take some of the openings I play and create elaborate computer files about them and incorporate the latest wrinkles from recent top-level games. Pascal would breeze through the files in an evening and then go out and play my openings. It was frustrating because he was immediately getting much better results than me.”
In the eighth round of the eleven-round championship, Pascal faced twenty-six-year-old Alexandre Lesiege, his chief Quebecois rival, who was leading the tournament by a full point. Pascal needed to beat him to catch up, but that would not be easy: Lesiege had 200 rating points on him, which meant that Pascal had only a 24 percent chance of winning. Lesiege played the Caro-Kann Defense, a staple of his repertoire, and Pascal departed from his usual response, the Panov-Botvinnik Attack, and played the ultra-sharp Advance Variation, aiming to cramp Black from the start. By the eleventh move, Pascal had a big lead in development, but after inaccuracies on both sides, he failed to score a quick win. By the twenty-sixth move, Pascal was again much better; he was winning material, an advantage he converted into a victory thirteen moves later. It was the first time Pascal had defeated a Canadian grandmaster in a slow game.
“The timing was good,” Pascal recalled. “I started feeling confident about my chances because I had already faced nearly all of the other top players in the field.” Indeed, he cru
ised through the next three games and, having tied Kevin Spraggett for first, played him the two-game tiebreak match, in which he triumphed with a win and a draw.
The surprise victory surprised no one more than the eighteen-year-old winner. Yoos told me that “it took Pascal weeks before it fully dawned on him that he really was the champion of Canada.”
By this time, Pascal had had all the adventure he needed and was ready to go home and enter college. His parents welcomed him back. “We get along well now,” he said, “but we’ve never really discussed what happened. It would be too emotional for both sides.” In May 2002, he visited the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, which was ready to give him a full academic scholarship if he joined the chess team. He played one-on-one basketball with David Brogan, the president of the chess club. Pascal described Brogan as “a cool guy with an earring” who was trying to change the image of chess by having the club organize a bikini contest among undergraduate girls (an idea that was vetoed by the UMBC administration). When Pascal had possession of the ball and was trying to fake out Brogan by abruptly switching direction, he heard his right knee grind. Somehow he twisted it, tore ligaments, and collapsed on the court. “I never had a sports injury before,” he said, “but I was totally out of shape from my hedonistic life in British Columbia.”
Six weeks later he injured his knee again, on a nude beach in Vancouver. He and Yoos had taken a chess-playing friend there as a kind of joke. “I was running in the water and suddenly I fell down and started screaming,” Pascal said. He twisted his leg, and his friends, who thought at first that he was kidding, had to carry him out of the water and onto the beach. Fortunately, he’d kept his bathing suit on: as he lay there, in incredible pain, “a bunch of aging naked hippies with bad bodies and everything hanging out crowded around me to see if I was OK.” Finally a hovercraft ambulance pulled up on the beach and transported him to the hospital.
In September 2002, Pascal began his freshman year at UMBC with a bad knee. (One downside of Canada’s touted socialized medicine is the long waiting time for surgery.) UMBC was one of only two American colleges—the other was the University of Texas at Dallas—that gave full scholarships to chess players. UMBC had won the Pan American Intercollegiate Championship five years in a row, and the university’s president, Freeman A. Hrabowski III, credited the chess team with “an enormous amount of publicity focused on the life of the mind,” which helped to attract not just chess players but top students in general.
During Pascal’s second semester, however, the chess team’s exemplary reputation unraveled and the team was exposed as being a haven for Grobster grandmasters and opportunistic IMs who accepted the scholarship and housing stipend, but had no real commitment to the school. “One day,” Pascal recalled, “the administration contacted all of us and told us not to take any calls from the press. We thought it was strange that they didn’t want us to publicize chess, but one look at the Internet and it all became clear.”
On May 9, 2003, fellow teammate Alex Sherzer, a grandmaster whose nickname was “The Surgeon” because he had a medical degree from Hungary, had been arrested outside a juvenile detention center in Mobile, Alabama, and charged with traveling across state lines to solicit sex from one of the center’s underage residents, a fifteen-year-old bulimic with developmental problems. Sherzer had paid for a nearby hotel room with a hot tub; in the room, investigators had found a doctor’s bag, a statuette of Hippocrates, chess manuals, two sex toys, three bottles of Viagra, two dozen condoms, a few bottles of liquor, two shot glasses, recipes for mixed drinks, a copy of Lolita, three self-help books (Secrets of Seduction, How to Be the Best Lover a Girl Ever Had, and A Guide to Picking Up Girls), and a handwritten to-do list with reminders to eat lightly, exercise, and “sex w/a 15-yr-old in a few days!!!!!!”
Sherzer had met the teenager on the Internet in December 2002—she had posted a picture of herself in her school uniform—and the two chatted online for four months before her mother discovered the relationship and reported it to the authorities. Two weeks before Sherzer drove to Mobile, he conversed online with a male investigator for the Alabama Bureau of Investigation who was now impersonating the girl. In Sherzer’s trial in September 2003, his defense attorney called Judit Polgar, who had come all the way from Hungary, as a character witness. He also argued that it was the agent’s flirtatiousness that led his client to reserve a hotel room for the girl: if the agent hadn’t gotten involved and ratcheted up the sexual content of their interchange, Sherzer would have waited until the girl was of legal age. The attorney likened Sherzer to Sonny Bono, who apparently waited patiently for Cher to reach adulthood. The jury, which deliberated while Polgar played chess in the courtroom hall with a fellow grandmaster, accepted the entrapment defense and Sherzer was acquitted.
“I’m glad he wasn’t locked up and his career ruined,” Pascal said, “but the whole thing was pathetic, and had negative repercussions for our team. It was especially surprising because Sherzer is a buff-looking, smart man. He’s thirty years old and a doctor. You’d think he could get a girl.” Sherzer was attending UMBC as an undergraduate on a full chess scholarship (tuition and a $15,000 housing stipend) and was majoring in emergency health services. (“How hard can that be for a doctor?” Pascal said of his classmate’s choice. “It’s as if I majored in French.”)
The press made fun of Sherzer’s age. “Disturbing questions have arisen,” The Dallas Morning News reported, “not the least of which: What’s a 32-year-old man with a Hungarian medical degree doing in college chess? Answer: Making his 40-something teammates feel old, probably. Actually, despite the sex scandal, UMBC is…like the AARP.” Sherzer’s teammates included grandmaster Aleksander “The Polish Magician” Wojtkiewicz, forty, and Willie “The Exterminator” Morrison, forty-three, a chess hustler from New York City.
“On the college chess circuit,” The Baltimore Sun weighed in, “there are certain maxims: Advance your pawns, protect your king—and don’t be surprised if your opponent has gray hair.” When the UMBC chess program was under siege, the administration asked Pascal, all of twenty, with a full head of brown hair and a near straight-A average, to speak to the media.
UMBC had awarded chess scholarships for more than a decade, but it was not until 2004 that the first player with the rank of international master or grandmaster, former U.S. junior champion Eugene Perelshteyn, actually graduated from UMBC. A parade of top players attended the school but never made it all the way through.6 Some were shown the door when their grade-point average fell below a C. The organization that governed intercollegiate chess finally cracked down in the spring of 2004 by limiting a player’s eligibility to six years and setting a maximum age of twenty-six for newly recruited grandmasters.
In the wake of the sex and age scandals, Pascal noticed a change in professors’ attitudes toward the chess team. “They feared we were cheaters who couldn’t care less about school,” he said. When Pascal and teammate Pawel Blehm, twenty-two, took an accounting exam, the teacher asked them not to sit next to each other. “There was fifteen feet between us but that still wasn’t good enough,” Pascal said. “She made us move again and sit on opposite sides of the room. She kept staring at me and finally asked me how old I was. I guess she was afraid I was some perpetual undergraduate in my thirties milking my chess scholarship and she was relieved to learn I was only twenty.”
UMBC chess players often jetted off to collegiate, national, and international championships, and they depended on the cooperation of their professors to let them make up missed assignments and tests. “I had one professor who wouldn’t give us a break,” Pascal said. “I think he felt burned because Wojtkiewicz took his class and never made up the work. When I missed a quiz because my grandfather died and I went to Montreal, he wouldn’t believe me. The jerk penalized me.”
ALEKSANDER WOJTKIEWICZ, KNOWN AS WOJT OR WOJO, WAS ONE OF THE busiest chess professionals in the United States, making a living driving and flying around the country
to weekend tournaments and the Tuesday night all-masters competitions at the Marshall. Wojt resembled a burly Jack Nicholson, with his gravelly voice and insatiable passion for liquor, cigarettes, and women. He was born in Latvia in 1963 to a Russian mother and a Polish chess-master father, from whom he learned the game at the comparatively late age of ten or eleven. Wojt caught on fast, though, and at seventeen became the champion of Latvia. His mentor in those years was the fiery tactician and former world champion Mikhail Tal, with whom he played blitz for a couple of hours each morning. “Tal did not live in this world,” Wojt recalled, when we met at a bar in Vermont, where he was recovering from an embarrassing thumping at a late-summer weekend tournament. “I once had to lend Tal three rubles to pay the postman,” he said, “because his wife was out and Misha had no idea where she kept money.”
As a teenager, Wojt was one of the Soviet Union’s most promising young players and a fervent anti-Communist. The Russians, he told me, had killed his father and his grandfather. To evade the Soviet draft and the country’s “unjust” war in Afghanistan, Wojt disappeared, at the age of nineteen, into the St. Petersburg underworld. Four years later, in 1985, he was arrested for avoiding conscription and imprisoned in a KGB facility near Leningrad. He was released in 1987, after Ronald Reagan pressed Mikhail Gorbachev to set him free. Wojt apparently had the raw talent to reach the stratosphere of chess, but his progress had been thwarted by six years on the lam and in confinement. Even so, he had made the best of his time in prison by studying the game and devising an important opening innovation, dubbed the Prison Novelty, in his favorite variation of the Sicilian, the Accelerated Dragon.
