Game of Kings

by Michael Weinreb

  On certain occasions, the grandmasters and elite players will make an appearance at the Right Move tournaments at Brooklyn, men like Leonid Yudasin, men who are hoping to make a few extra dollars either by playing simultaneous games against inferior opponents for twenty dollars per try or by playing in blitz tournaments like the one that’s going on today. Yudasin is an Orthodox Jew, and he’s wearing a black yarmulke and a matching suit. His USCF rating is somewhere around 2700, among the top players in the country, and at one point, a dozen people are clustered around one of his games, trying to figure out what the hell is going on. “I feel like an idiot,” someone whispers, “but I don’t have a clue who this guy is.”

  There are other elites playing in the blitz tournament this morning, like Gata Kamsky, a former child prodigy with a famously overbearing father who quit playing competitively to attend medical school, and Polish champions Kamil Milton and Alex Wojtkiewicz and Russians Yury Shulman and Yury Lapshun. This is not especially unusual. The amount of chess talent concentrated within a few dozen square miles in New York City, largely because of the influx of Russian and Eastern European immigrants, is staggering. No other region in America comes close. Of those, many choose to reside in Sheepshead Bay and Coney Island and Bay Ridge, in neighborhoods whose signage is primarily in Cyrillic, and they play games or teach classes to young immigrants in the back rooms of clubs in Brighton Beach.

  Amid this fog of pale faces and thick consonants, a teenager with coffee-colored skin is wandering about in a replica Allen Iverson jersey, like a nearsighted man trying to spot a taxi. He is a big boy, two hundred thirty pounds of flesh and urban-themed apparel, and his eyelids appear almost stuck together, and he has a bewildered look plastered on his plump mug. He appears to be on the verge of curling up in the corner and hibernating for the winter. The boy’s name is Shawn Martinez, and he is a freshman at Murrow, and his rating is slightly above 1900, which makes him the team’s No. 3 board, the strongest player on the team besides Sal and Alex. Among a team of independent spirits, Shawn may be the most individualistic of them all. He spends his nights at home in Crown Heights, parked in front of the computer, playing chess, and he spends much of his school day avoiding class in the school cafeteria, playing cards and listening to music and wasting time however possible. As far as he’s concerned, the Right Move tournaments are no longer worthy of his time or his effort. But Shawn also fancies himself a pretty damn good blitz player, and so this tournament has drawn him out of his cocoon.

  Blitz games are furious and expeditious and sloppy, the chess equivalent of a playground pickup game. In blitz (during which each player puts either three or five minutes on his clock), and especially during a subset of blitz called bullet (in which sixty seconds are put on the clock for each player), the action becomes a blur, fingers moving to pieces, fingers pounding the hammer atop the clock, eyes darting about the board, pieces shifting, pieces falling, captured pieces dropping to the ground with a steady tumble. Blitz is as much about reflex as it is about strategy, and in blitz, if you happen to nudge a piece to a more favorable square and get away with it, or if you happen to capture a piece illegally and your opponent doesn’t notice, well, then so be it. Blitz is the game favored by the hustlers in Washington Square Park. It’s street chess, and this is what Shawn likes about it, because there’s a certain edge to it that slow play simply can’t replicate. Also, in blitz, at the right moment, a 1900-rated player can beat a grandmaster, and this evens the score between someone like Shawn, who picked up the game only a few years ago, and this clique of men who learned how to castle shortly after emerging from the womb.

  Because of the way he looks, because of his sleepy visage and his slow drawl and the extra weight he carries, people have never taken Shawn to be much of an intellectual threat. That’s why chess matters to him as much as anything else in his life. That’s why, if the game’s being played his way, he’s willing to take on anybody, anywhere, at any time. “He’s a really sensitive kid,” says Jennifer Shahade, one of his teachers at Intermediate School 318, where Shawn stumbled into the game entirely by chance. “You can tell he cares so much about winning and losing.”

  Shawn and Oscar have a symbiotic relationship, if only because they are both Puerto Rican, the only two Hispanic players on Murrow’s eight-man roster. Sometimes, when they play a two-on-two variation of Bughouse, in which a pair of games are played simultaneously and teammates can trade captured pieces and reuse them, Shawn and Oscar will be teammates, and they’ll communicate entirely in Spanish. It doesn’t matter that they’ve both spent virtually their entire lives in New York City; they share a certain brotherhood, a direct connection to each other in a city that remains divided by ethnicity.

  This Sunday’s tournament is not exactly a showcase for Oscar, who blunders with the Orangutan and finishes fifth in the Open Section, and it’s not a breakthrough for Shawn, either, who loses his final two blitz games and finishes twenty-second out of forty-one in the tournament. It’s not a great day for the newbies, either, as the four sophomores who joined the club cold turkey in the fall—Rex, Renwick, Robert, and Adalberto—win a total of two games among them. “This stuff is hard,” says Renwick, who’s mostly been practicing in the free chess forums on Yahoo! But on this day, the stars are two of Murrow’s other top boards, Ilya and Willy, who are both undefeated heading into the fourth and final round. That’s when something disconcerting occurs: There is a direct intercession of emotion upon the proceedings.

  Willy’s opponent in the last round is an eighth-grader, a cherubic-looking boy wearing a yellow button-down shirt and a braided belt. Late in the endgame, with only a few pieces on the board, the boy offers his hand. A draw. Willy pushes one side of his earphones back from his head, purses his lips, and then he shakes his head, refusing the draw. After another series of moves, the boy tries again. Willy gives him the same placid look, settles into another track off the latest Eminem disc, and refuses once more. So then the boy raises his hand, in an attempt to summon a tournament director, someone, anyone, to review the notation of moves he’s been keeping, to mandate a draw, which can be done if the game is void of any winning possibilities (a “dead draw”) and the clock is the only factor in determining a victor. Meantime, the game goes on; the boy’s clock continues to run toward zero. What once seemed a dead position suddenly turns to Willy’s advantage. The boy drops his hand to his side. Willy makes a few more moves, and then he somehow squeezes out a win, and his opponent screws up his face and begins to cry. The boy lets out a series of thick, heaving sobs, and it seems as if he might never stop, and his wails begin to pierce the cone of silence within the cafeteria, which only renders the moment more awkward. A series of conferences ensues: with the boy’s father, with one of the tournament directors, with several of the other tournament directors.

  Willy’s expression doesn’t change. It never does, really; even when he is rattled, he maintains a preternatural cool. “He talks so slow and relaxed,” one of his friends’ parents told me. “Cool, calm, collected, intelligent: That’s Willy.” That doesn’t always translate to the board, of course. Like at nationals last year, when that kid got up near him and began a sprint toward the bathroom but couldn’t hold it in and puked right next to Willy’s feet. That threw him off so bad he didn’t win a game the rest of the day. “Or that time at nationals when you lost to that kid because you said he looked like Michael Jackson,” Oscar says.

  “Naw,” Willy says. “That ain’t what happened.”

  “Yeah it was,” Oscar says.

  “Naw,” Willy says. “That ain’t it at all. You guys don’t listen to me at all.”

  One thing Willy does not discuss often, if at all, is his sister. Laura was a chess player, too, and had come up through I.S. 318 and the Chess-in-the-Schools program, just like Willy, and the previous May had finished in the top ten in the sixteen-and-under division at an all-girls chess tournament in Chicago. In the seventh grade, she was a straight-A student, but in the eight
h grade, her struggles began, and she chose not to go to Murrow so she wouldn’t have to share a school hallway with her brother.

  In November, her mother filed a missing persons report. Date of Last Contact: November 24, 2004. “Before she ran, Laura was seen in the area of Nostrand Ave.”

  She resurfaced shortly after that, and eventually came back home, but their relationship remains distant, and it’s something Willy doesn’t discuss. At home, his bedroom is on a separate floor, and his mother is at work almost all the time, and he mostly keeps to himself. “I don’t know what Laura does,” he says.

  So it was a harsh way for the boy to lose a game, but such is life, and such is the learning process, and now Willy has finished the day undefeated, as has Ilya, which means they’ll each take home thirty-five dollars.

  “Kid had a draw, and he didn’t take it,” Willy says while waiting for his check. The case for the Eminem CD is splayed open on the table, near his elbow, next to his Discman. “He should have stopped the clock when he called the tournament director.”

  Nobody seems to know much of anything about the boy Willy defeated. It’s a funny thing—the same faces show up at the Right Move tournaments virtually every week, and they spend hours together, sitting three feet from each other’s faces and kibitzing between games all morning long, and yet most of their knowledge of each other is based on generalizations and assumptions. And so one of the competitors in the open section, a student at another Brooklyn public school who happens to be listening in on the conversation, delivers a response in a low, sharp whisper, which is based entirely upon speculation. It is based upon the simple fact that the boy’s father has accompanied him to this tournament, because among the public-school contingent, parental attendance is such a rarity.

  “Fucking rich kids,” he says.

  Nile Smith

  SEVEN

  CHESS AND THE CITY

  THE FOUNDER OF THE RIGHT MOVE CHESS FOUNDATION (MOTTO: “Free Chess for Youth”) lives in a luxury apartment building on East Fifty-seventh Street with crystal chandeliers and seventeenth-century Flemish tapestries in the lobby. His home is on the forty-second floor, and he has a terrace with an unobstructed view of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, which is what sold on him on this location in the first place.

  “This country’s been very good to me,” Fred Goldhirsch says, and he takes a seat in a black leather Eames lounge chair in his living room. He is thin and gray and slightly stooped and still speaks with a trace of an Eastern European accent. In 1938, in the midst of the Anschluss, the Nazi annexation of Austria, SS soldiers burst into his family’s home and ransacked it and left him huddled in a heap on the floor. He was thirteen years old and he was Jewish, and a sponsorship from relatives in America that same year almost certainly saved his life.

  Goldhirsch fled the country with his parents, and they settled in the Bronx, where he worked as a caddy at a golf course. When he was eighteen, even though he was on the youngish side, he found a way to enlist in the army and went back to Europe. He fought at Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge. He spent those years hoping to come across the SS officer who had once bullied him in his own house (to no avail), then played soccer for the army’s Third Division team in Czechoslovakia while waiting to be shipped home in 1945. When he came back, he took up work as a civil engineer for the city, helping to plan and build a cluster of project homes on Staten Island. The job itself was miserable, but the industry was booming, so he decided to try building his own homes, in Queens and on Staten Island. Soon he was building entire developments.

  It should come as no surprise that once Goldhirsch built up a considerable amount of wealth, he started giving back. He sent his daughters to Marymount, an exclusive Catholic school on the Upper East Side, and he convinced the sisters there to begin a program to educate their students about the Holocaust. As he got older, and his body began to break down, and he could no longer play soccer and tennis, he turned to chess, a game he’d learned back in Austria. He joined the Manhattan Chess Club, where, by the late 1980s, he’d become a board member. The club was struggling to make ends meet, and Goldhirsch suggested teaching some classes to youth and turning it into a charitable foundation, a 501(c)(3). This suggestion met with a great deal of resistance, and in late 1990, along with his cofounder, Norman Fried-man, Goldhirsch broke his foundation out as a separate entity, and they started offering free chess classes for underprivileged city youths at the club.

  They advertised in chess magazines, and they sent notices to schools, and still they only drew about twenty kids. They started handing out free subway tokens, figuring that maybe their pupils couldn’t afford the cost of transportation. The attendance was still low. Finally, at the end of the first year, they ran a tournament. The number of participants tripled; it was as if they had come from out of nowhere. So the Right Move started running tournaments every month during the school year, and they negotiated with schools for space, and most weeks they draw around a hundred kids to the tournament in Manhattan (they also hold satellite tournaments in neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville, and offer limited programs in a few schools). The foundation’s budget is about a hundred and twenty thousand dollars (most of it Goldhirsch’s own money, since he does little fund-raising), and is run entirely out of Goldhirsch’s apartment /office, where he maintains a part-time secretary to help him run his businesses. A few years back, Eliot Weiss signed on as a member of the board of directors for the Right Move, and since then he’s used these tournaments as both a source of supplementary income (the directors are paid a nominal amount for running the tournaments) and as a recruiting tool for Murrow.

  Everybody plays for free at the Right Move tournaments, and nobody is turned away, regardless of rating or school affiliation or household income, and in a city where the lines of ethnicity and class grow ever deeper, they draw students from Catholic schools and Jewish yeshivas and public schools and private academies, many of whom make the hour-long commute to the Upper West Side on sparsely populated Sunday-morning subway trains. (One day a boy arrived late, well after the first round had started, and approached John McManus, the Catholic schoolteacher, and told him a murder on the subway had kept him from arriving on time. “I’m not even sure I’d want to play after dealing with something like that,” McManus says.) Some participants are members of teams preparing for the city and state and national championships, like Murrow, like Hunter; others simply have nowhere else to play competitive chess. “We were the first ones to offer free tournaments for youth,” Goldhirsch says. “Now there are other organizations doing it, and sometimes we get a few less kids. But what’s that they say about imitation being the greatest form of flattery?”

  In fact, this is still a relatively recent phenomenon, the notion of chess as charity, as an educational tool, as a cultural equalizer in underprivileged neighborhoods. The first stirrings came in the wake of the Fischer-Spassky match, and they came largely from one man, a gawky figure who fell so hard for the game at the age of thirteen that he checked every single chess book out of the Brooklyn Public Library and skipped school for a month so he could read them all.

  In the beginning, there was Bruce Pandolfini, and there was virtually no one else. Even now, three decades after he became the first professional chess instructor in New York City, he will assert himself, with a certain amount of neurotic calculation, as the reigning world champion of pedagogy. “I’ve given more private lessons than anyone on the planet,” he says. “And I’m willing to bet on that.”

  Pandolfini lives on the fifth floor of a prewar building on the Upper West Side, in an apartment that resembles the stockroom of a used bookstore. Here is an abbreviated sampling from one of a number of piles of books stacked next to his couch: Pride and Prejudice,The Concise Columbia Dictionary of Quotations,The Oxford Book of Aphorisms, and Moby-Dick. On one midsummer day, a Faulkner novel lay in the center of his coffee table, and copies of his own books, more than two dozen, none of which he is particula
rly proud of, were scattered on bookshelves lining the walls: There was Chess Target Practice and The Chess Doctor and Chess Openings:Traps and Zaps and More Chess Openings:Traps and Zaps 2 and Bobby Fischer’s Outrageous Chess Moves and Power Mates and The Weapons of Chess and Pandolfini’s Chess Complete and Pandolfini’s Endgame Course.

  The chess community in New York City is an insular web of names and faces, all of whom tend to gather at select locations and share the same gossip. It’s rare, in most cases, to find more than a degree or two of separation. But even within this cabal, Pandolfini himself is a Zelig-like figure, a man who first gained renown as a PBS television analyst during the Fischer-Spassky match. He has since become famous as a teacher, a coach, a regular columnist for Chess Life magazine, and a fictional character, played by Ben Kingsley in Searching for Bobby Fischer, one that happened to share his name and occupation but few of his character traits.

  In real life, Bruce Pandolfini looks as much like Ben Kingsley as he looks like Elizabeth Taylor. His signature feature remains his hair, which at the time of the Fischer-Spassky match had grown (by his own admission) to hippie length, and while it is much shorter now, it is still tinted red and marred by kinky disorderliness, and is accompanied by a whimsical hyphen of a mustache.