Game of Kings

by Michael Weinreb

  This is fine with Willy and Oscar and Ilya and Nile. They can use the money, even if it’s usually twenty or thirty bucks for first place, even if it’s just a nine-way split of, say, twenty-seven dollars, and even if they come home with a cheap trophy that’s worth more than the check they’re carrying in their pocket.

  “Aw, man,” Willy says. He and Oscar are standing in the hallway between rounds, examining the pairing sheets. “I hope we don’t have to play each other.”

  He turns to Oscar, whose oversized headphones are nestled around the neck of a hooded sweatshirt. “Naw,” Oscar says. “It won’t happen.”

  It happened once before, at a Right Move tournament, and the resolution remains in dispute. What happened, Willy says, is that he assumed they were going to play it out until it became an obvious draw, until no one had an obvious advantage, and then they’d raise their hands and show the tournament director the position of the pieces and he’d credit them both with half a point. But they got about twenty-five moves into it and Willy looked at Oscar and said, “Draw?”

  And, according to the legend, Oscar said, “No way.” And he went on to win the game. But Willy doesn’t really count that as a defeat.

  “It was a mix-up,” Willy says. “That’s all it was. A mix-up.” He’s wearing baggy jeans and a pair of Nikes, his typical Sunday-morning uniform, and a divot of pubescent hairs trail from his chin in a rough outline of a goatee. Willy’s been coming to these tournaments all through junior high and high school, and now that he’s a senior, he’s among the best players in the field. There are a few of them, bunched up around 1600 or 1700 in USCF rating, a level well below master, but one that can be attained with a certain amount of training and skill. Usually, at least three or four of the top five come from Murrow. Usually, unless he sleeps through the morning, Willy is among them.

  The father of the modern chess ratings system, the man whose derivations would help define the self-worth of generation of chess players, was a Hungarian physics professor named Arpad Elo, an eight-time Wisconsin state champion who helped found the United States Chess Federation in 1939. Twenty years after its inception, the USCF asked Elo to chair a committee formed to improve its unreliable and often inaccurate ratings system; what he came up with, a few modifications, has become the standard, known in common parlance as the ELO ratings, after its founder. One’s ELO number is based on an algorithm that incorporates past performance and the opponent’s rating, and the probability of victory, and adds and subtracts points based on these factors. It should be simple, but it was devised by a physics professor, after all, and only a physics professor could attempt to simplify his own calculation by describing it as “the measurement of the position of a cork bobbing up and down on the surface of agitated water with a yard stick tied to a rope and which is swaying in the wind.”

  What emerges from this equation, the sum total of this esoteric metaphor, is a number that can range from zero to 2400 and beyond, with beginners often starting at around five or six hundred and grandmasters like Fischer and Kasparov stretching the upper echelon into the 2800s, each on the opposite ends of a caste system that looks something like this:

  2400 and above—Senior Master

  2200-2399—Master

  2000-2199—Expert

  1800-1999—Class A

  1600-1799—Class B

  1400-1599—Class C

  1200-1399—Class D

  1000-1199—Class E

  “It is a measuring tool, not a device of reward or punishment,” Professor Elo once said of the system, according to his New York Times obituary. “It is a means to compare performances, assess relative strength, not a carrot waved before a rabbit, or a piece of candy given to a child for good behavior.”

  And yet it is impossible to ignore the numbers, or to attend a chess tournament without hearing the numbers bandied back and forth. In time, your number becomes your defining trait; whatever it may be, it can always be improved upon. There will always be someone who is precisely and measurably better than you are, which means there is always something more to be done.

  What Willy would really like to do more than anything, at this point in his life, is find a way to get out of Bedford-Stuyvesant. His is the classic New York immigrant story: He came to New York from the Caribbean island of Martinique with his mother and his younger sister when he was seven years old. He left his father behind and hasn’t seen him since. Now that he’s nearing his nineteenth birthday, he’s started to cultivate his own notions of flight. Willy would like to go to college in Paris. He has relatives there, and they’ve suggested to him that he apply to the American University of Paris, and because Martinique is a French territory, and Willy has a French passport, he could go to school for free. He likes the sound of that: a faraway place, a get-away, without the financial burden on his mother, Irene, who works at a factory and a hair salon to support her children. Willy is given to creative reverie; at times during tournaments, even when he’s supposed to be focused on the game, he seems to have drifted onto some far-off cumulus cloud, accompanied by the lyrics of the latest popular rap CD. When he says maybe he’d like to study music production, he says it with a certain conviction, as if he sees no reason why he couldn’t become the next Kanye West, and if Oscar or Nile want to bust on him for it, that’s fine.

  “He’s such a good liar,” Nile says one day, “I actually start believing him after a while.”

  Willy took up chess in the second grade at P.S. 23 in Bed-Stuy, when a representative from a nonprofit organization known as Chess-in-the-Schools walked into one of his classes and said he was looking for kids to play chess. No one volunteered, because what inner-city boy is going to risk his livelihood by volunteering to play chess in front of his peers? So the man pulled names out of a hat, and Willy was chosen.

  This was how Willy began playing chess, and after that, he never stopped. Something clicked. Willy is no better than an average student, but here was something he could grasp, something he could improve upon, something at which he could achieve tangible success. He started playing in tournaments nearly every weekend. He started taking home trophies. He went to middle school at I.S. 318 in South Williamsburg, which, with the help of Chess-in-the-Schools, had begun to incorporate the game into its curriculum. Here he met Oscar, and together they helped 318 win the first of a string of middle-school national championships, and eventually, with Weiss’s help, they gained entrance to Murrow, a considerable upgrade over the local schools they would have attended if not for chess.

  Willy is not what is known as a “book” player. He doesn’t do a great deal of studying; he does not memorize specific lines and perfect certain tactics. He has a rudimentary knowledge of a few openings, and beyond that, he relies mostly on instinct. He does not overthink. “I just play,” he says. “I have no idea. I used to study, like, lines for the French Defense. Now, I’ll just study the first five or ten moves, and then I’ll play anything that feels right or looks right to me at that moment.”

  At tournaments like this one, where many of his opponents are rated two hundred or three hundred points lower, Willy will try to trick them into speeding up the game. Each player has thirty minutes on his side of the clock (known as Game/30) at Right Move tournaments, a fairly brisk pace, and by making his moves without much premeditation, Willy can often con his opponents into doing the same thing. It becomes almost like a five-minute speed game or a one-minute “blitz” game, in which reflex supplants the cognitive depth that characterizes games at elite and professional tournaments, where each side often has two hours of time on the clock.

  Willy has won each of the first three rounds this morning, and when he defeats a considerably younger boy in the fourth round, he wins sole possession of first place and a sixty-dollar check, enough to buy a birthday gift for a friend and have a few dollars left over to throw around in the card games at school (Oscar finishes in fifth, out of the money, and Ilya and Nile finish near the middle of the field of forty-four). Willy
’s trying to spend less of his time playing cards and more of his time attending class, but it isn’t always easy, and over the years, he’s fallen behind in his work. He turns nineteen in the spring. He’d like to finish school and move on already. But the temptation to skip is always there, lingering. If you skip at Murrow, no one is there to discipline you. Mr. Bruckner, the longtime conscience of the school, has vanished. Even Mr. Weiss, without whom Willy would have never gotten into Murrow, has his own responsibilities, his own classes to teach, his own family to look after. Mr. Weiss does his best, but he can’t do everything.

  The other day, a freshman named Shawn Martinez, another I.S. 318 graduate with a rating over 1900 who will most likely man Murrow’s No. 3 board at nationals, called Willy and said, “Yo, I just hung out in the lunchroom all day playing cards.”

  “You know,” Willy says now, while waiting for his trophy and his paycheck, “somebody told me before I got to Murrow that it was easy to pass if you went to class. But Shawn, he’s about to fall into the same boat I was in. Colleges don’t take into consideration that the freedom gets addictive.”

  Most weekdays, Ilya Kotlyanskiy begins his day by waking up early and riding a city bus for forty-five minutes, from Bay Ridge to Midwood, from an apartment on the second floor of a split-level house on Bay Twenty-second Street to the sprawling red-brick high school on Avenue M where he was accepted after passing a musical exam on the violin. Murrow was not his first choice, but since he couldn’t score high enough on the admission tests to get into Bronx Science or Stuyvesant, he figures Murrow is the best he can do. It is only his junior year, but already Ilya is preoccupied with grades and test scores, with polishing his résumé and his extracurriculars so he can somehow get into a college like Columbia or New York University. He can’t imagine that happening. Ilya is harder on himself than anyone else, and he assumes that since he attends a public school in New York City, and since he didn’t get into an elite public school like Stuyvesant, what chance does he really have?

  If it happens, if he somehow gets into a good college, well, then, he is of two minds: In his heart, he would like to be a scientist, because he has an abiding interest in physics. If he could go anywhere, he says one day, he would be at MIT.

  Of all the trophies Ilya has brought home to his parents’ modest apartment in Bay Ridge, he is proudest of the one that sits atop a curio cabinet, set apart from all the others. This one is not a chess trophy. It is a physics trophy. He won it for devising a way to drop an egg off the fourth floor of a building without breaking it. The solution involved a basketball and some sort of cushioning mechanism.

  But Ilya has another aspiration, which often overshadows his ardor for science: He would like to make piles and piles of money, or at least, he would like to make enough to live a comfortable life. And because Ilya is still somewhat naive about the vast possibilities open to American citizens, he cannot imagine how he can possibly reconcile these two desires. You can either do what you love or you can do what is best for yourself or your family. You cannot possibly do both. So Ilya takes business classes at Murrow, and he figures when he gets to college, he’ll major in something with more practical applications, something that will earn him the sort of cash his parents don’t have.

  Ilya is short, though not as short as either his mother or his father, and he has deep-set brown eyes and a distinctive nose that lends his face a weary air of maturity. His father, Alex, whose thick mustache cannot disguise that same melancholy disposition, works as a civil engineer with the Department of Transportation. His mother, Nelli, a tiny woman with amber hair, is a nurse at Long Island College Hospital. Ilya was born in Odessa, a coastal Ukrainian city with a population of more than a million people, and the family came to America when Ilya was almost five years old, after they were sponsored by relatives in Dallas through a Jewish organization. At the time, his father (who had grown up in the industrial town of Kamenets-Podolskiy, and gone to college in Moscow) was working for a large factory that, amid the collapse of the Communist system, was on the verge of closing. Corruption was rampant. The rich were getting richer, and the underclass was growing.

  Ilya remembers small things about his home country; certain streets, certain scenes. He also remembers it wasn’t always the kindest place for a Jewish boy to grow up. He remembers that when certain people in Odessa found out you were Jewish, they didn’t hesitate to ostracize you.

  Ilya is the best student on the Murrow chess team. In fact, it’s not even close. He is also its best-dressed member, its most skilled musician, and its official captain, despite the fact that he is, with a rating hovering around 1650, the fourth- or fifth-best player on the team. “I won sixty dollars at a tournament in the Catskills in October of 2003,” he says. “Then I started taking chess more seriously. That was one of my first major tournament successes, I should say. I got it together that time.”

  He is the captain because he is, by a distant margin, the most mature person among this bunch. In many ways, Ilya is more driven at age sixteen than most thirty-two-year-olds, and he is far too busy to be drawn in by Murrow’s temptations toward truancy and idleness. He goes to school, he goes to orchestra practice, and then he works an internship at Washington Mutual Bank that carries with it all the drudgeries of an actual job. Ilya doesn’t particularly like this work, but it means experience, and it means money, and both of those things are more important to Ilya than idle time.

  His family’s apartment, on a quiet street near Gravesend Bay one block from a police station and a neighborhood pub, is modest and clean. Next to a television set in the living room and below a picture of Ilya with his friend from the Stuyvesant chess team, Anna Ginzburg, a parakeet prances around in its cage. There are photographs of the Kotlyanskiys’ only son all over the place, and on a table near the kitchen, his chess trophies are stacked together like the skyline of a small city. Taped to the wall above them are certificates of achievement and photos of Ilya with various local dignitaries and politicians. Here is Ilya with the Brooklyn borough president, Marty Markowitz. Here is Ilya with Mayor Bloomberg. In a few weeks, Ilya will travel to Washington, D.C., and pose with the president in the oval office, all because of chess. His father doesn’t play, but his father’s father, Simon, was a master-level competitor in the Soviet Union. “My parents like it,” he says. “It’s much better than doing drugs in the street.”

  Shortly after he moved to America, Ilya went to a drugstore with his grandmother and she let him pick out a board game to play, because there was little else for a small child with no grasp of English to do except play board games. He needed something simple, something that didn’t require a detailed examination of the instructions. So he chose a chess set. And his grandfather on his mother’s side, Anatoly, also a master-level player, taught him the game. Soon after that, Ilya began taking lessons at a chess school on Ocean Parkway, run by a former United States women’s champion named Angelina Belakovskaya. Now, he’ll often take private lessons, whenever he can afford to pay for them, although they’ve been put on hold this fall while he prepares for the SAT.

  Ilya also plays the violin in the school’s orchestra, which is, ostensibly, how he found his way to Murrow. He had already heard about the chess team, and he learned that a certain number of students are accepted to the school each year after passing a music exam. Ilya played an arrangement, then went through a few scales for one of the music teachers. It was good enough, even though Ilya wasn’t sure it would be. He was accepted. Mr. Weiss took him onto the chess team, and soon began taking him to tournaments.

  Sometimes, Ilya will go on his own to tournaments upstate and in Philadelphia and at Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut, traveling with the friends he’s met who attend nearby Lincoln High School or Brooklyn Tech or Stuyvesant. They’ll get four or five or six or seven people and pile into a hotel room, sharing beds and staying up all night playing cards; somebody’s father or mother will drive them in one direction, and somebody else’s mother or father will
drive them home. Often, Ilya’s father, a man so small and quiet he tends to fold into the scenery, is one of the drivers.

  These tournaments are the only breaks Ilya tends to take from the daily drudgery of school and work. Even there, he considers himself an abject failure if he comes home empty-handed. “I still can’t really get over it, all that money and five hours of travel one way for nothing,” he e-mails after a poor performance at one tournament. Once, at a relatively meaningless tournament played near Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, Ilya sat on a concrete bench near the Poet’s Walk, alone and forlorn, near tears.

  “I had the game won,” he said. “And I lost it.”

  Ilya doesn’t speak much about his home country, partly because he remembers very little, but one day, he mentions his sister. She was a year older. She fell ill and died in a Ukrainian hospital because she couldn’t get the proper medical care. It was a hard country, Ilya says, and it was even harder for a family of Jews. Perhaps because of what his parents had been through, perhaps because he spoke English only haltingly in those early years in Brooklyn, Ilya was an especially sensitive boy, subject to torment and ridicule at school.

  Once, in the second grade, a classmate who had been bullying Ilya threw a basketball at his head and left him with a concussion. That was the breaking point. Ilya decided he was going to retaliate in the most direct way possible: He was going to kill him. The next day, Ilya approached him at lunch and offered him a Snickers bar. “Let’s just be friends,” Ilya said. So they shook hands and Ilya left him and went to watch. He’d put a pin in the candy bar; someone pointed it out to the boy before he could eat it. He was spared. So was Ilya.