Game of Kings

by Michael Weinreb

  Galvin is a soft-spoken man with heavy-lidded eyes and a playful streak who, over time, has perfected the Zen-like art of herding several dozen restless junior-high schoolers through strange airports (318 regularly brings about forty children to each national tournament, far more than any other school). He was born and raised in New York, and lived in Staten Island and Brooklyn, and taught himself to play chess during college. He’s still not particularly good at it (his rating is around 1200, lower than many of his students’), but he’s developed a low-grade obsession: More than once, when he has visitors to his classroom at 318, he has to tear himself away from a game he’s playing online.

  Over the past seven years, 318 has become a citywide dynasty, a minor-league version of Murrow. On occasion, parents have moved into the neighborhood so their kids could play chess. Other kids, like Dalphe Morantus, who lives in Canarsie, have traveled halfway across the borough to study with Elizabeth. I.S. 318 pulls kids from feeder schools like P.S. 31, an elementary school in Greenpoint that is also sponsored by Chess-in-the-Schools. Galvin calls 318’s program the “Yankees of chess” (he likens himself to a general manager, and Elizabeth to the manager). It’s a claim that’s been proven at the city championships and the state championships and the K-12 nationals, held each fall (in which teams are separated by grade; Murrow doesn’t participate), and the more prestigious junior-high nationals in the spring (which, this year, will be part of the Supernationals). The travel budget alone for the chess program is more than fifty thousand dollars, and at this point, less than ten percent of that comes from Chess-in-the-Schools, which has grown increasingly more detached from 318 as the school has proved its own self-sufficiency in chess. The hope, says Galvin, is that eventually the program can survive on its own, without any assistance from CIS, which puts Vicary—still a CIS employee—in the midst of an awkward push-and-pull.

  The problem is one of vision: The administration at 318 sees nothing wrong with breeding winners, striving for victory, and loading the trophy cases in the school’s stairwell with a staggering amount of hardware. But CIS would like to think of itself as a purely altruistic organization, as a refuge for inner-city children, concerned more with long-term than with short-term results. Perhaps because of that, ever since that first championship, 318’s accomplishments have gone almost unnoticed: CIS no longer bothers to issue press releases or contact the newspapers or the board of education when 318 wins another championship, and despite the fact that the school has an exponentially larger chess club than any other city school, the money they get from CIS, according to Galvin, has actually been cut by fifteen percent each of the past two years. Marley Kaplan, the president of CIS, seems almost embarrassed by what 318 has done, by the way it continues to monopolize the major championships. “Some teams become dynasties,” she says. “But eventually that dynasty is going to die. We don’t want dynasties. It’s not really what we’re looking for. Our program isn’t really about chess; it’s about what chess can do for kids. We aren’t trying to create champions.”

  This theory makes no sense to John Galvin, and it makes no sense to Rubino, who took over when Fierstein retired five years earlier. They have trouble understanding why other schools are allocated an equal number of instructors’ hours even though they bring six or eight or ten kids to each CIS Saturday-afternoon tournament, and 318 often brings four dozen. It’s not a question of need at this point—the school has its own segment of its discretionary budget dedicated to chess (between sixty and seventy thousand dollars), and last year got a significant donation from an unnamed benefactor—but it’s an issue of common sense. It’s not about the winning for 318, either, Rubino insists (“Sooner or later,” he says, “we’ll lose”), but how can winning and opportunity be considered mutually exclusive?

  Witness Shawn and Nile and Willy and Oscar and Dalphe Morantus, all of whom won championships at 318 and, because those championships gave them a reason to strive, slipped through a back door into Edward R. Murrow, one of the best high schools in Brooklyn, and a far better option than they might have had otherwise. “The real world of chess,” Galvin says, “tends to be zero-sum. It’s win or lose. Their mission—it tends to be more social.”

  The problem, as Galvin sees it, is the game doesn’t work that way, and life doesn’t work that way, and if anyone understands that, it’s kids like Willy and Oscar, kids who never caught a break until they happened into a class taught by a woman who happened to find herself at the same time they did.

  She has a half decade of teaching experience these days, and Elizabeth Vicary appears to have discovered her life’s calling. She still lives five minutes from I.S. 318, in a sparsely furnished fourth-floor walk-up apartment on Union Avenue, with a galley kitchen and one small bedroom and a chessboard set on a tray table in the center of the living room, near the computer. It is a no-frills building in a no-frills neighborhood, near a Walgreen’s and a gas station, but this is her home. Most of the kids in the neighborhood are her current or former students. (Once, Oscar and his little brother came by to visit when she wasn’t home, so they found a way to break into the front door of the building, and left her a note.) The kids call her Miss (as in “Hey, Miss, can I go to the bathroom?”) and in return, she calls them geniuses and visionaries. Her classroom is a virtual laboratory, with a library of books on the back wall and a bank of computers near the window and the chessboards set out in a U-shaped pattern in the back of the room. There are aphorisms (Being Wrong Is The First Step To Being Right, It’s OK To Make A Mistake) and principles and instructive series taped to the wall above the door and next to the coat closet and beside the bulletin board, handwritten on oversized pieces of newsprint, with titles like “The Four-Move Checkmate” and the “Notation of Pawns” and “Tactics” and “In the Opening.”

  On a bleary winter afternoon, Elizabeth is perched on a stool in front of thirty sixth-graders, wearing a leather skirt and a pair of knee-high brown leather boots and using the pieces on an oversized two-dimensional chessboard to expound on what she calls “threats.” The children have arranged their squat wood-backed chairs into a semicircle at the front of the room, facing the blackboard and the caricatures above the blackboard of recent world chess champions.

  “Threats in real life? Good or bad? Bad, right? Well, threats in chess are”—and here she elongates the word like taffy, enunciating each syllable in a dulcet voice that still carries traces of a British accent—“ex-cell-ent.” She has a list of students’ names in her lap, and every time she raises a question, a half-dozen arms shoot up into the air, and she either calls on someone (by name) or chooses someone at random from the attendance list (by name). If there is one trick she has learned over the years, it is to invoke names. This she does with alarming regularity.

  Once, not too long ago, a student waltzed through the door of her classroom, Room 319, and declared it “the Fun Room.” The fact that many of her kids take naturally to her subject, that they see as it more like a recess than another dreary class, serves to her advantage. “I didn’t think I’d have the patience to teach,” she says. But in here, she is in charge, and if anyone tries her patience, if anyone dares to mouth off or disobey orders or neglects to clean up their mess, they spend their time exiled in the hallway during the final segment of class, that precious time reserved for playing games. Often, in the midst of giving a lesson, she will halt in midsentence and fix a frigid stare upon the child (or children) who is trying her goodwill.

  “Who’s talking? Louis, is that you?”

  And most of the time, because this is the Fun Room, because it is the one room in this school that feels nothing like school, a single well-placed threat will shut their mouths.

  Her best students have been the progeny of cabdrivers and hardware-store employees and laundry workers. Most of their parents remain distant and removed from Elizabeth’s tutelage; they sign permission slips and they show up for car pools, and this is the extent of it, and it is nothing like what goes on at the p
rivate schools, where the mothers and fathers have been known to dictate the tenor of their children’s activities. Often, as with Oscar’s mother and father, they don’t quite understand this sudden fixation with something they’ve always regarded as a game, a glorified version of checkers. Suddenly, they’re bringing home permission slips to travel to Florida and Tennessee, and asking their parents, many of whom have never boarded a plane themselves, to sign for them.

  It means something different to all of them. They can treat the game with grave urgency, as Shawn did, or they can consider it a social outlet. One of Elizabeth’s current students, an eighth-grader who lives in the Lindsay Park Houses, says that his mother is so obsessed with him passing the test to get into Stuyvesant that she hardly lets him leave the house. So chess club is his one place for making friends. He doesn’t much care about winning or losing, but his rating has jumped six hundred points in the past year. “I just want to be popular,” he says. “I’ve never been popular before.”

  Marta, on the other hand, doesn’t have this problem. Marta is both popular and remarkably mature for a seventh-grader; before she started playing chess, her average in math was a 94. Now it’s gone up to a 99, and this never ceases to amaze her, how those two things seem to correlate, how she can go from her chess class to her math class and everything seems to make so much more sense, because chess class doesn’t feel anything like math class.

  Marta, whose parents are from Poland (and whose father still frets over all the traveling she does for chess), who lives in Greenpoint and commutes half an hour every morning just to get to 318, is already something of an aberration among her classmates. This is because she is a female in a culture subsumed by testosterone. And this is a reality that doesn’t seem likely to change anytime soon.

  The third cycle of Murrow’s unorthodox four-part school year begins in February, the week after the city championships, and by that time, the Thursday-afternoon chess club meetings have become a decidedly boyish affair. Most of the girls who showed up those first few weeks of school have vanished without explanation, and the few who remain are of the decidedly casual sort, like the striking sophomore and aspiring model who does not seem to belong here at all, yet continues to come, if only to engage in a series of barbed flirtations with Sal. (Sal: “All three things you say about me are wrong.” Girl: “No they’re not. You’re sad, you’re depraved, and you’re a little boy.”)

  There is one exception, and her name is Nataliya. She is fourteen years old, petite and pale-skinned. She wears her chestnut hair tied back in a ponytail and often leaves her coat on while she plays. Nataliya was born in the Ukraine, and lives in Brighton Beach, and graduated from I.S. 228, the same diverse middle-school that Alex Lenderman attended. In the ninth grade, she wound up at Lincoln, the massive Coney Island high school. After hearing about Murrow, Nataliya transferred. And even though her father doesn’t play chess, and no one else in her family plays chess, Nataliya decided to learn. She tried playing on the computer, but it wasn’t the same thing, so she joined the chess club, and she started playing in the Right Move tournaments, and by the time of the city championships, her rating was a respectable 990.

  One day at chess club, in a slow moment between games, Nataliya sat atop a desk, reading the final ten pages of Catcher in the Rye. None of the other girls in her class, she was saying, had a clue about Holden Caulfield. “Every time they start talking,” Nataliya said, and then she rolled her eyes and mimed dropping her head to the desk. They think he’s gay, because all he does in those first few pages is talk about boys, or they think he’s mentally ill, or they think he’s all of the above. “I don’t think he’s either one,” she said. “I think it’s something everybody goes through.”

  Nataliya was the only girl to play for Murrow at the city championships, in the high-school junior-varsity section. She spent the time between rounds writing in the pages of a journal she’d brought with her, surrounded by hyperactive young boys venting their competitive fury through card games and hip-hop music. She finished in thirty-sixth place out of fifty-nine entrants, with two points, and when it was over, her attendance at chess club meetings grew more sparse. And eventually, by the time the weather began to turn, by the time eight of her male classmates started making plans for the trip to the New York State Chess Championships in Saratoga Springs, she would stop showing up altogether.

  Anna Khan was sixteen years old and the reigning women’s chess champion of Latvia when she enrolled at Murrow High School, the latest pubescent prodigy to arrive in Brooklyn from a distant corner of the crumbling Soviet empire. This was in 1993, ten years after Eliot Weiss founded the school’s chess club and a few months after it won its first national championship. And for reasons entirely beyond Weiss’s control, Anna Khan was the first female ever to compete on his traveling team.

  Anna Khan would lead Murrow to two more national championships, in 1993 and 1994. Eventually, after changing her name to Anna Hahn, she won the U.S. Women’s Championship in 2003 and earned the title of WIM, which is the abbreviation used for a “Women’s International Master,” a less stringent title than “International Master,” and one that many of the best male players in the world deride as a second-class designation. On a Web site that archives past games from top players, the comments under Hahn’s entry and photograph are a catalog of puerilities (“Anna Hahn can mate me any day. Growl.”) But then, this is the way it has always been. Since the inception of competitive chess, the upper echelons of the game have reeked of sexism, and women who dare intrude upon this sanctity are often treated with as much subtlety as if they’d wandered into the back room at Scores. “Guys aren’t going to stand around and watch a guy’s game because he’s a guy,” Bruce Pandolfini says. “Maybe if he’s Bobby Fischer, but not for any other reason. But that’s not why they stand around women. And if they say it’s for any other reason, they’re lying.”

  Forty-five years earlier, when a U.S. women’s champion named Lisa Lane drew a sudden barrage of media attention (she was on the cover of Sports Illustrated, and was profiled in Newsweek and The New York Times Magazine, which described her as “comely” and “shapely”), Fischer, an equal-opportunity bigot, dismissed her and her entire sex with a barrage of insults. “They can’t concentrate, they don’t have stamina, and they aren’t creative,” he said of female chess players. “They’re all fish.” And that attitude didn’t cease with Fischer: In 2002, Garry Kasparov told the Times of London that “chess is a mixture of sport, psychological warfare, science, and art,” and that “when you look at all these components, man dominates. Every single component of chess belongs to the areas of male domination.”

  Of the top players in the world, only one, Hungarian Judit Polgar, is female, and fewer than ten of the world’s 950 international grandmasters are women. Some efforts are being made to alter this: In recent years, Kasparov’s own foundation has sponsored an all-girls national championship. But there remains a consensus among many of the best male players that this imbalance exists for a reason, that women are not wired for chess in the same way as men, that they are, by nature and through societal pressure, more social creatures, and that they would prefer to interact with others than be locked in a room by themselves, poring over esoteric middle-game theory. Which is why most of these girls, when they reach the age of twelve or thirteen, an age that Bruce Pandolfini calls “crucial” to one’s development as a chess player, simply fade away. Which is why approximately ninety-seven percent of competitive chess players in the United States happen to be male.

  Of the thirty-five participants in the high-school varsity section at the city championships, two were girls. One of them was Anna Ginzburg, who came up through the Chess-in-the-Schools program and landed one of those coveted spots at Stuyvesant High School. Ginzburg wears wire-rimmed glasses and has a tangle of thick brown hair and a penchant for feminine accessories, like her “Mrs. Affleck” tote bag. On the back of her Chronos digital clock, she’s written her name in permane
nt marker, dotting the I with a flower and underlining the whole thing with a feminine flourish. When she was younger, she was painfully shy, but now she’s gotten used to it, to being outnumbered and overlooked. At times, she is able to assimilate into this boys’ world, beating them at cards and surprising them over the board and returning their banter when necessary. (Anna’s rating is 1656, about the same as Oscar’s, whom she defeated at cities after an overconfident Oscar hung a rook.) But the worst part, she says, is that when she travels to tournaments, she has so few people with whom she can share a hotel room. In that sense, she is very much on her own.

  Because there is such disparity in numbers, the women who break through in competitive chess, the women who can manage to thrive amid a sea of testosterone, tend to be unique and forceful personalities. Some, like Elizabeth Vicary, admit that they thrive on the attention (one Russian women’s GM, Alexandra Kosteniuk, has posed for so many risqué photo shoots that she’s been called “the Anna Kournikova of chess”). Many say they’ve never felt discriminated against, and that if anything, it’s just the opposite: Men are so deferential, so cowed by their presence, that their brains often seize up and start melting when they play. Adults turn into randy adolescents. They make silly moves they would never make against other men, and when they are called on these things, they attribute their carelessness to the sex of their opponent: Against a man, I would never make such a move. “In most games, I am thinking about girls for fifty to seventy-five percent of the time, another fifteen percent goes to time management, and with what’s left over I am calculating,” grandmaster Alex Shabalov once admitted to Jennifer Shahade, the strongest female player ever to be born in this country.