At one after-hours party, a drunk Diana noticed three fat Italian men playing chess. She offered to play them for high stakes. The winner would receive an “eight-ball” (an eighth ounce of cocaine). Diana, who was by then a strong amateur player, won easily, but the men refused to give her the drugs. “I was so angry when they didn’t give me the cocaine that I ran around the party complaining.” Her antics caused the men to threaten her. Shortly thereafter, Diana, scared for her safety, fled Miami.
She didn’t know where to go, so her default plan was to drive back to D.C., where her parents still lived. “My father was abusing my mother at home, and I didn’t want to go back, but I didn’t know where to go.” On her way, Diana stopped off at a chess tournament in South Carolina, where she met a man who offered to put her up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was a fortuitous move for Diana.
In Michigan, Diana immersed herself in chess, playing as often as she could. When a few cocky masters teased her about her play, Diana was determined “to get good and prove them wrong.” As she immersed herself in chess, Diana felt her self-esteem soar. Diana improved rapidly and realized how smart she was. “Academically hopeless” in high school, Diana had assumed that she was dumb before she started playing chess. Her father had always given her that impression. “He always told me how stupid I was and how ashamed he was of me.” Her success in chess gave her confidence to enroll at a community college in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she got straight As. After completing the two-year program, she pursued a B.A. at the University of Michigan, in which she investigated the psychology of female chess players, surveying dozens of American women chessplayers. Diana found that many women chessplayers had come from broken homes, and had “messed-up” relationships with their fathers. She told me, “Chess was a way for them to express their feminism, as well as gaining belated approval from their fathers.”
She won a tournament in Michigan in 1977, and qualified for her first U.S. Championship to be held in Los Angeles. Her chess career was on the move. After finishing with the University of Michigan, twenty-three-year-old Diana moved to New York City to live with some chess friends. New York City, then as today, is the closest thing to a chess Mecca in the United States.
In New York, Diana still had “drug problems up the ying-yang,” especially with coke, to which she had developed a serious addiction. She was forthcoming about her most sordid moments in an interview in Ms. magazine, in which she said, “I wound up living in a sleazy hotel on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, hooking for cocaine. I became increasingly suicidal.” After realizing how low she had sunk, she checked into Bellevue Hospital and entered a rehabilitation program. At this point, chess was a lifeboat for Diana. “The logic of chess was an alternative system to the chaos of life.”
After Diana checked out of Bellevue, in 1980 on New Year’s Eve, she began to take chess more seriously, earning an expert’s rating and qualifying to play for the U.S. women’s team in the 1982 Olympiad in Lucerne, Switzerland, an event for which Diana has particularly fond memories. In Lucerne, Diana found the comforting social network she craved. “We got drunk every single night and partied. It felt like having a family.”
Lanni tended to land in relationships with other games players, such as Grandmaster Roman Dzindzichasvili, a great chess talent and obsessive gambler, and Paul Magrill, a backgammon champion. The guys she dated tended to be more successful than she, and in describing one such relationship, Diana said, “He was the star. I was just the girlfriend who took too many drugs.”
Diana became a bookmaker in New York City, a job she excelled at immediately. In speaking with Diana over the phone, I could understand why. Diana’s voice is both warm and authoritative, while her analytical mind is well suited to calculating odds and point spreads. “Chessplayers make good bookies,” says Diana, who had a great time in New York in the games world, though “it was hard to make ends meet in Manhattan.” She often wound up sleeping on the couch at the Barpoint, a game room, where ping-pong, backgammon, and chess were played till late at night. In the early eighties, rents on the Upper West Side skyrocketed, the club closed, and Diana realized she could not afford to live in the city anymore. In 1985, at the age of thirty, Diana moved to California.
In northern California, Diana worked as a poker dealer, “a completely legitimate job.” Diana still speaks fondly of poker, offering to give me lessons when she finds out I don’t play. “Poker is a very deep game, and it’s something you can use to make money all your life.” Diana feels that chess led her to more lucrative activities in poker and bookmaking and “saved me from choosing between the drudgery of nine-to-five minimum-wage work and the humiliation of stripping and prostitution.”
Diana resumed bookmaking after she relocated to Santa Cruz some years later and soon got into trouble with the law. Since moving to California, she had been arrested for possession of opiates and driving under the influence. When her bookmaking ring was busted through an informant, she landed in jail.
Diana’s time in prison was both wrenching and enlightening. She was incarcerated in the Dublin prison, the largest women’s facility in America. There were three thousand prisoners, many of whom, Diana tells me, were young Hispanic girls. “It was so sad. They were arrested as mules smuggling drugs across the border. They had been totally sacrificed by their boyfriends.” The atmosphere brought out Diana’s progressive and feminist inclinations. She has always wanted to help other women, especially around issues of pregnancy.
For Diana, jail life was not so miserable. She took opera appreciation and Spanish, and attended ice cream socials. Diana did have to work forty hours a week, like all inmates. “Since I was white, the guards gave me a good job in the gardening department.” Diana even started a chess club in jail, hoping to introduce chess as a popular pastime like it is in men’s prisons. Diana ordered chess sets for the inmates and advertised it in both English and Spanish. The club was given space in the pottery room. “The recreation department was very supportive of my project.” Some of the women already knew how to play, and Diana gave lessons to the others.
She was incredibly relieved when her four-month sentence ended; it was the small comforts she missed most: “I couldn’t wait to get out and have a real cup of espresso instead of the awful coffee they serve you in jail.” Diana regrets the long-lasting repercussions. She is not allowed to vote, and her record puts off some employers. She is terrified of a future arrest, admitting, “I am walking a very straight line these days.”
Now Diana teaches chess to kids, with a keen eye on her female students. She wishes she could play herself, but chronic back problems—the aftermath of a knee injury—preclude long periods of sitting.
Lanni is one of the most explicitly feminist chessplayers I spoke with, declaring, “I think women play better than men. Chess is a language, and women are better at languages.” She rails on “the testosterone baloney,” saying, “They still don’t have a clue about how it affects people.” But in her work of teaching girls, Diana does observe differences: “Winning is so important to men. Women don’t play as hard to win. They sometimes feel bad to beat their opponents. I have to remind my girls: ‘Someone has to win, it might as well be you.’”
Rachel Crotto was the first adolescent star of American women’s chess—she played in her first U.S. Championship as a twelve-year-old in 1972, and five years later she tied for first at seventeen. As it was for Lanni, chess was for Rachel a route to higher self-esteem. The ideas of the two women on the subject are uncannily similar. “I used to think I was stupid,” Rachel tells me. “But when my dad taught me chess, I began to beat everyone during the breaks at lunch. Classmates and teachers told me, ‘You’re such a good chessplayer. You must be really smart.’”
Rachel was on her own from the age of sixteen, when she ran away from home. She tried to make a living on her winnings from chess, giving up her studies at NYU to play in a tournament in Israel. “My family was not very happy with my decision,” Rachel jokes, “to
become a chess bum.”
Rachel became a close friend of Ivona Jesierska, an immigrant from Poland. Ivona spoke only Polish and Russian when she arrived in New York, and Rachel, who spoke some Russian, became a close confidant. Ivona describes to me how tough it was for her at first: “I would wait tables at a restaurant, and I spoke no English so it was hard to understand what the customers wanted.” The two played countless games of blitz and frequented chess clubs and roomed together at tournaments. Ivona has fond memories of late-night blitz marathons at Barpoint, a chess club in downtown Manhattan: “Diana Lanni used to sleep on the couch there—people were up till three in the morning playing blitz, ping-pong, gambling. Lots of Russian was spoken. It felt like home to me.”
Rachel and Ivona were both in love with chess and the jet-setting lifestyle it offered. But with no independent means, they struggled to get by. Rachel says, “I was always living on the edge. It was a struggle to pay the rent.”
At the 1986 Olympiad, held in Dubai, Rachel, at the age of twenty-seven, abruptly decided to give up the game. “I had a bad tournament and realized that if I hadn’t applied myself to studying by then, I probably never would.” I ask Rachel if she misses chess, and she tells me, “I miss the traveling,” adding, “and not having to work nine to five.” Ivona also quit semi-professional chess when her minimum standard of living was raised as she matured. Now Ivona makes a good living working as a chess coordinator and coach, but lacks the energy to play seriously. She told me wistfully, “If I was wealthy I would play chess all the time.”
Rachel Crotto. (Photo by Val Zemitis.)
Rachel felt estranged from the male-dominated and sometimes chauvinistic atmosphere at open chess tournaments. She once called into a radio advice talk show to say, “I am a woman chessplayer, and every time I play a man they underestimate me, assuming that I will play badly because I am a woman.” Rachel recalls that the host advised her to “dress very sexy, wear a low neckline, and put on a lot of makeup to use my femininity against them.” Rachel, a lesbian, says, “Obviously, I was not about to do that.” Rachel was neither open nor secretive about her sexuality, though she assures me that she never encountered any discrimination in the chess world as a result of it. Rachel debunked rumors I had heard that the large majority of female chessplayers in the 1970s and 1980s were lesbians: “I think that some players who were just not particularly feminine got mistaken for lesbians.” “If ten percent of the population is homosexual, I think the chess world reflects that number pretty closely.”
Diane Savereide. (Photo by Val Zemitis.)
Rachel’s ego was boosted by the attention she got as a young girl, but later, the scrutiny interfered with her relationship to the chess itself. She wanted to concentrate on the game, but was distracted by the attention she got. Despite lingering feelings for the game, Rachel hardly plays at all now. But she has a comeback fantasy. “I’ve always wanted to play chess as a man—in one of those big open tournaments with 400 people.” Rachel says, “I would like to know how it feels to be invisible. To be just one of 400 players. I always felt like I was on trial at tournaments. If I were to make a mistake, it would prove that I really was a stupid woman.”
The most dominant force in women’s chess during the time of Rachel Crotto and Diana Lanni was Diane Savereide, who won, or shared, a total of seven U.S titles from 1975 to 1984. (Crotto shared two of her three U.S. titles with Savereide.) Savereide had a major influence on fellow U.S. championship contender Diana Lanni also. “She was my hero,” Lanni gushes. “I remember being so psyched to ride with her each morning to the tournament hall on her motorcycle.” Savereide was the first American woman to maintain a national master rating, “the first strong female master in American chess,” said IM Jack Peters, also from L.A.
Saveriede describes living in a positive chess environment as a young girl, along with many active, prominent women in the American chess scene, including player and organizer Jacqueline Piatigorsky, whose husband was famous cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. Diane says, “When I traveled to other parts of the country, I discovered that chess players were not always so hospitable to women, but it was too late to discourage me.”
In 1975, Diane won the first U.S. Women’s Chess Championship that she played in, earning her a spot in a world-title qualifier. Diane won six more national titles and traveled from Hong Kong to Haifa to represent the U.S. in international events.
Nearing thirty, with seven national titles under her belt, Diane tried to make a go as a professional chessplayer. In the summer of 1984, she took time off from her job as a computer programmer to play in tournaments, but didn’t make enough money. She quit. “It came down to being thirty and deciding I had to make a living.” At the time, the first prize for the U.S. women’s champion was tiny. For becoming the best female player in the nation, Diane would get somewhere between $300 and $600.
For the past twenty years, Diane has played chess rarely. She sometimes misses the friends, travels, and intensity of chess. But she has always been too passionate about the game to play casually. Many professional chessplayers quit when they get real jobs, not because they don’t have time to play chess, but because they don’t have time to prepare and play their best. In 1990, Ilya Gurevich became the World Junior Championship. He was one of the most promising GMs in American history. He spent a few years as a pro player, but gave it up after earning a business degree at NYU and accepting a Wall Street job. He told me he quit because “I remember what it’s like to be in good form, but I can’t play that well now and it feels awful.”
Irina Krush. (Photo by Jennifer Shahade.)
Many talented American players quit chess because they cannot make a decent living at the game. The few who stay with it tend to be male.“The reason chess never became popular among women in America, while they broke barriers and proliferated in so many other fields,” Diana Lanni muses, “is that women still needed money as an excuse to use their brains. Thinking for free was unacceptable.”
After Saveriede quit chess, the U.S. championships began to be dominated by Russian immigrants, who had been strong players in the Soviet Union. However, these women came to the United States for a better life, hoping to make more money than they did as professional players. Many of them quit or played only casually so they could devote their time to more lucrative pursuits. Irina Levitina, three-time U.S. Women’s Champion, gave up chess for a career as a professional bridge player. Elena Donaldson, three-time champion, found a good job in computer programming and stopped playing for a while. Angelina Belakovskaya, another three-time champion, slowed her participation in her thirties to pursue a career in finance.
The highest-rated American woman player, Irina Krush, literally learned the moves between worlds, when her father taught her chess on the journey from Odessa to New York City. Irina is introspective about her split identity: “I am half American, half Russian.” Even her voice contains a curious mix of accents from Brooklyn and Russia. She expresses the most fondness for the Russian language. “I consider English a utilitarian language. When talking about emotions, I need to speak Russian—or at least English in a Russian accent.” As for playing chess, her coaches are usually Russian, and her early play was very strategic, marked by a keen understanding of the endgame. Her style has changed recently: “I used to always play against strong players as a kid, so I was used to defending.” Now her style is much more aggressive. “No one could call me a passive player.”
Over the board, Irina enters another realm, one of deep mental focus, but she also seems to savor the physical process of making moves. After selecting her move, she places her piece on the square with a determined yet tender touch, as if she is playing adagio piano. In immaculate handwriting, she records her move and then turns her concentrated gaze to the board. When playing Irina I feel particularly conscious of my own sloppier habits, like the faces I make and the scribbles I use to record my moves that are so difficult to decipher that one arbiter called them Chinese.
/> Irina is a scrupulous and independent thinker, both traits that she says come from her American upbringing. She is disturbed on a visceral level by lying and cheating. Irina once witnessed a competitor offer me a draw before a game that would affect the final standings of the tournament. I declined, but Irina was emotionally floored: “I am so upset I had to see that.”
Irina was so precocious in chess—she earned the master title as a twelve-year-old, her first U.S. title at fourteen years old, and the IM title at sixteen years old—that she and her parents arranged for her to take half her classes at home in order to accelerate her chess career. After graduating from high school, Irina took a year off to devote herself entirely to chess. She had some major successes, including the first norm toward her GM title. But her results were inconsistent and, more significantly, Irina was not happy. “I spent all day studying chess at home.” She felt alienated. “I realized I wanted to go to college.”
She decided to enroll in NYU, because along with her passion for chess Irina wanted to learn about business and politics and to improve her writing skills. “It takes me a while to write anything, because I have to choose just the right words.” Her perfectionist character is borne out by her record at NYU, where she earned a 4.0 average in her second semester, even though she was absent for two weeks to play in tournaments.
Soon after entering NYU, Irina began to date a chessplayer, Canadian champion Pascal Charbonneau, who was at about the same level as she. Pascal drove to visit Irina each weekend from his studies at UMBC in Baltimore, and they soon became a serious couple. Both have strong opinions about chess positions, and often disagree. In contrast to Irina, who has a solid foundation in chess theory gained from years of training, Pascal’s knowledge is more of a pastiche of things he has picked up from grandmaster friends, tournaments, and books. He is attracted to the geometric aspects of the game, and once told me, “The Bishop is really strong when it is three squares in front of a Knight,” the kind of adage that would be glib coming from an amateur, but was profound from Pascal.
Chess Bitch: Women in the Ultimate Intellectual Sport Page 24
