Game of Kings

by Michael Weinreb

  Shahade is in her mid-twenties, with a shock of reddish-blond curls that she has, in the past, both dyed and disguised with a succession of wigs. She has a degree in comparative literature from NYU and a part-time job as a teacher at I.S. 318 and CIS, where, along with her brother and Elizabeth, she helped teach Nile and Willy and Shawn and Oscar and Dalphe. She also gives private lessons, participates in performance art, and has published a feminist manifesto called Chess Bitch, a memoir/history of women’s chess in America (she appears on the cover wearing a come-hither expression and a bright pink wig).

  Shahade grew up in Philadelphia. Her father and her older brother were both master-level players by the time she started taking chess seriously, while still a teenager at the Masterman High, a public school for gifted students (in 1996, Greg Shahade led Masterman to a national high-school championship). A few months later, her father, a burly man with a commanding presence, told her she would never be as good as he was; she went running out of the house. She began playing the game with absolute, naked aggression. “In retrospect I see my chess style was loaded with meaning—to be aggressive was to renounce any stereotype of my play based on my gender,” she wrote in Chess Bitch. For practical reasons, she’s toned down her style of play since then, but she remains almost pathologically competitive, an attribute that, Bruce Pandolfini would say, hampers her abilities as a teacher.

  The Shahades and Elizabeth Vicary and their clique of friends imagine themselves as a new breed of chess player, more hipsters than nerds, more artists than actuaries. When the old stereotypes are reinforced, as when a television show called Beauty and the Geek puts up fliers at the Marshall Chess Club searching for a few misfits to fill the latter half of the title, this pisses off Jennifer Shahade. She’s witnessed the next generation, and she’s taught boys like Nile and Willy, who are anything but the traditional definition of a geek, and the way she figures it, the best thing she can do for the game is to bring it to places it’s never been before. In 2003, she played an exhibition match at a downtown art gallery, and she wore a slinky black dress, black gloves, and a black flapper’s wig. And her opponent, friend, and rival, who may turn out to be the most talented chess player ever to graduate from Edward R. Murrow High School, wore the same outfit, entirely in white.

  The circuitous route to America took Irina Krush and her family from the Ukraine through Austria and into Italy, and while they waited in limbo for their papers to arrive, with nothing else to do, Irina’s father, an accountant, taught her how to play chess. This was in 1989; Irina was four and a half. When she was six, she won twenty dollars in a tournament at the Manhattan Chess Club, playing against men six and seven times her age. When she was twelve, she became a master. By the time she was fourteen, Irina’s rating had risen above 2400, and Murrow’s reputation as a home to exiled Eastern European chess talent had been firmly established. If you were a competitive chess player from Brooklyn, you just knew, the way Irina did, that this was where Anna Khan had gone, and this was where you belonged.

  Maybe she could have taken the test and gotten into Stuyvesant, but what did she want with Stuyvesant? She had no desire to spend her formative years doing complex math homework and competing for college admissions. To tell the truth, she’d never much liked math. This might have been due to her eyesight, which started to degenerate somewhere around the third grade; in the five years it took her to get over her pride and admit that she couldn’t see the equations on the chalkboard, any passion she had for numbers died.

  And what did she want with numbers, anyhow? The reason her eyesight had deteriorated must have had something to do with all the reading she did in poorly lit rooms. She loved to read; she still does. If only she could have been a writer, or even a dancer—but for reasons she couldn’t explain (maybe because she was an accountant’s daughter), chess became her mode of self-expression. This has always been the way she’s viewed the game, not as a clash of egos, not as some grand metaphor for war, not like Fischer and Kasparov have characterized it, as an opportunity to emasculate another human being. The best games, like that time in Buenos Aires when she sacrificed her knight and then her rook (and still managed to win), form like pearls do, over time, over a series of moves, which is why she does her best work in games with longer time control, games that unfold in four or five glorious hours. Oh, she knows there’s an inescapable logic at work here, and she doesn’t deny it, and she can respect that sort of thinking as well. But this is not the essence of chess. The essence of chess is all wrapped up in beauty. Even if you lose. And maybe this is a feminine perspective, but hell, she’s known plenty of men who can appreciate the beauty of the game as much as she can. Otherwise, why would they spend all those hours studying by themselves? Otherwise, what would be the point?

  That’s how it worked for Irina too: As soon as she stopped working exclusively with teachers (first her father, until she was nine, and then a professional coach) and started working alone more often, around age twelve, that’s when she fell in love with the game. Just thinking about a move made her happy. By thirteen, that love had grown, and by fourteen, by the time she wound up at Murrow, it had consumed her, to the point where the traditional subjects she studied in school just couldn’t measure up.

  Irina wanted freedom and understanding from a high school. She wanted room to roam, permission to play chess tournaments in Europe and take her assignments with her. She wanted a program tailored to her needs, and this is what Murrow and its flexible system could offer. “She didn’t give a damn about school, and her father didn’t give a damn,” says Saul Bruckner, the former principal. “So I made up a special program, and I convinced her to stay.”

  Even Bruckner, who didn’t play chess, who knew nothing about the game, understood that Irina Krush was a once-in-a-generation talent, a fact that became clear when she won the U.S. women’s championship at the age of fourteen. “Coaching Irina is like coaching Wayne Gretzky,” Eliot Weiss told The NewYork Times in 1999, when Irina was fifteen. “How do you coach Wayne Gretzky?”

  The simple answer was that you didn’t. In fact, Mr. Weiss hardly saw Irina, except when she accompanied her team to tournaments; his job was to smooth things over with her teachers when she was absent, to legitimize this pursuit of hers. Her high school years are such a blur that she can’t remember much of what she did while she was there. By the end of her sophomore year, in 1999, she had finished virtually all of her class requirements. Her junior year, she came to school in the morning, took an American history class, and went home and studied. Her senior year, as far as she can remember, she didn’t go to school at all, except when it came time to graduate. A Web site called Smartchess.com sponsored her travel and her lessons. When she was fifteen, she won acclaim for her innovative thoughts as an advisor in a chess match Garry Kasparov played against “the world” on Microsoft’s Web site, in which visitors to the site voted on the moves to play against him. One of Krush’s suggestions was so novel that even Kasparov didn’t see it coming. She had her own instructional videos, known as “Krushing Attacks,” which were sold on Smartchess.com. She studied the game for five or six hours a day, sometimes more. She had no real friends at Murrow because she was a ghost, a vague concept of a student, perhaps the most extreme example yet of the freedom Saul Bruckner was willing to grant to those who had earned his trust.

  And how else was she supposed to compete with those young Russian masters, the ones who were either home-schooled or didn’t go to school at all? She always finished her work, and she always went to class when she was supposed to. So why go through the motions of getting an education, when all she wanted to do with her life, at this moment in time, was to play chess?

  By then, Murrow needed Irina Krush much more than Irina needed Murrow. These were lean years for Weiss’s team, which was suddenly bereft of highly rated talent. They had finished fortieth at the nationals in Los Angeles in 1998, and with Irina elsewhere, they placed twenty-third in Sioux Falls in 1999. But in 2000, Irina’s
junior year, they arrived at the nationals in Charlotte after winning both the city championship and the state championship for the first time since 1994. Eliot Weiss brought seventeen kids with him that year, which was Rita’s first year as the team’s silent partner.

  Here is what Irina remembers about that trip: The weather was nice. Charlotte was a pretty town. And at some point, she lost a game. How she lost that game, she can’t remember; that might have been the time she tried an e4 opening instead of d4, just fooling around with something new, and by the time she tried to dig herself out of trouble, extending the length of the game, it was too late. It didn’t seem like much of a big deal at that point, but then the final round ended, and the results were tabulated, and Murrow had lost. By half a point. The Masterman School, the Shahades’ alma mater, finished first. Afterward, Irina left her bag in the hotel, which was adjacent to the airport, and she went running off the plane at the last minute to retrieve it. When she didn’t come back, Mr. Weiss got off to find her, and the plane left without them, with the rest of Mr. Weiss’s family on board. They had to wait another six hours and take a connecting flight through Greensboro, and they arrived in New York exhausted and deflated.

  So Irina figured she owed it to Mr. Weiss to play at the Supernationals in Kansas City in her senior year, in 2001. These tournaments meant nothing to her, really, in the midst of her quest for more exclusive titles (International Master, grandmaster) and more money to help pay for college, but it was the least she could do to repay her coach’s kindness. Among the five thousand players at that Supernationals, Krush, at 2445, was the highest-rated, and she won her first three games with ease, until history repeated itself in an eerie way: She lost to a boy from Georgia named Richard Francisco, with a rating almost four hundred points below hers. And Murrow lost the team title to Hunter College High, another public school for the gifted (this one on Manhattan’s Upper East Side), by half a point.

  These losses hurt Mr. Weiss much more than they hurt Irina, of course. And it’s not like either of them still sulk about it much. But for all of this talk of beauty trumping victory, for all this talk of scholastic tournaments meaning so little to elite players, Irina Krush remembers the losses. Even if, four years later, nearing her graduation from NYU, she can’t remember the details of these trips, even if she can’t remember a damn thing about her senior year, even if she can’t even remember what city she traveled to for Supernationals in 2001. Of course, there were other players who lost in Kansas City, some in the final round with the pressure on, but Irina wasn’t like them. Maybe it had something to do with her background, with that vestigial regard for Russian culture she carried within long after she became an American girl. This game, it meant more to her to than most people could ever know.

  ELEVEN

  TIRESOME DAYS AND SLEEPLESS NIGHTS

  HERE COMES OSCAR SANTANA AT THE END OF THE SCHOOL DAY, shambling through the halls in a red patent-leather jacket spangled with corporate racing logos, and here comes Sal Bercys, fresh out of gym class, wearing track pants and a fleece sweatshirt and looking like he’s got Sisyphus’s boulder crammed into that gargantuan backpack of his. They meet at a crossroads on the fourth floor, just as the last band of the day lets out, as their classmates swirl and duck and chatter all around them. Oscar fishes a deck of cards from the pocket of that shiny Technicolor coat, and then, as if driven by a subconscious urge, he begins to shuffle. “Me and my cards,” he says. In these hallways, in this new era at Murrow High School, Oscar’s deck is considered contraband material, but he and his friends have found ways to get around these draconian regulations. Mostly, they do this by hiding in the back of the lunchroom during their free periods and falling into marathon sessions of Stupid and Texas Hold ’Em. At times these sessions are so long that they neglect their next class, and this is one more reason why Oscar’s chances of graduating this spring are looking more and more bleak. He’s trying, though. He really is. And his flow of pocket money, well, that’s never been better.

  “Who is this guy, anyway?” Sal says, through clenched teeth.

  This guy he’s referring to is Lev Khariton, a chess teacher, chess writer, and all-around chess gadfly who’s been invited to lecture this afternoon, Thursday, February 17, nine days before the start of the state championships in Saratoga Springs. And, for the first and only time all year, Mr. Weiss has declared attendance at chess club mandatory, for both the newbies and the traveling team, which does not sit well with Sal. “Sal has a very busy life,” Oscar says, his tone deadpan and nasal, his eyes trained on the cards.

  Sal ignores the joke entirely.

  “This guy isn’t even a grandmaster,” he says. “He isn’t even an IM. He’s just a 2200. What are we going to do with this guy, anyway?”

  “I think we’re playing a simul.”

  “Uh-uh,” Sal says. He’s spinning in place now, his Diesel jacket flapping up above his waist, backpack twisting around his shoulders. “I’m not playing in any simul with this guy. No way. If he wants to lecture, fine, but I’m not playing any simul.”

  “You can beat him,” Oscar says.

  “I don’t care,” Sal says. “Maybe if we bet ten dollars a game, then I’d play him. What is this guy, a million years old, anyway?”

  Oscar shrugs. “Is it just us?” he says, meaning the traveling team, the top eight.

  “I think it’s everybody.”

  “You mean I gotta sit there with all those clowns I ain’t never seen in my life?”

  “Remember when they took that team photo, and they said it was the chess team?” Sal says.

  “I think Mr. Weiss just grabbed some of those people out of the hallway.”

  “I know. I think he posed a bunch of dummies.”

  Here come Willy and Nile now, joining the summit, and here comes one of those faceless newbies, Adalberto, his hair gelled and teased into spikes, unsure whether to join them or not. “You,” Sal says, and Adalberto stops dead, and his eyes widen, and he braces himself.

  “No new players on the team have pride, except for you,” Sal says.

  Adalberto tries to take this coolly, but he can’t help it. He nods, and then the whole charade breaks open and Adalberto is grinning, big and silly and proud. He keeps on walking toward Mr. Weiss’s classroom, past the flyers posted on the hallway walls (Senior Prom, Senior Trip, pay your dues now!!!), past the display of angst-ridden pencil drawings from the senior art classes, utterly mystified that the top chess player at Murrow High School, one of the best high-school chess players in this country, even knows who he is.

  It was hard to tell at the time, but Sal’s comments to Adalberto could have been taken as a hint that Sal was changing, that behind the grand pronouncements, a certain humility had emerged. His failure last November in Crete at the World Youth tournament had led Sal to question his entire view of himself, his attitude toward the game, and his views of those around him. That tournament was horrible, Sal kept on saying. Just horrible. So he had gone to the U.S. Championships with fewer expectations and less self-assuredness, and he’d had what he would describe later on as “the best tournament of my life.” After that, he’d told himself there was no room for overconfidence.

  Oh, he was still confident: He knew when he could win, when he should win, and he wasn’t about to deny that he had certain abilities that others didn’t. He still liked to tease and to mock, because that was his way, and he still didn’t think it was worth debasing himself by playing against a clearly inferior opponent, someone like Lev Khariton. On the outside, he was still very much Sal. But he had found out something about himself that some teenaged boys never do. He had found out that he had limits.

  So this is the scene that greets Lev Khariton: Shawn sits in the back of the room, tossing a small rubber ball to himself, and Nile is wearing a Miami University basketball jersey that appears to have swallowed his entire torso, and Sal is sitting three rows back, flirting with the aspiring model once again (this time, she’s showing him her
portfolio, and Sal is rolling his eyes), and Willy and Oscar have once again fallen into an interminable argument (about hotel accommodations in Saratoga, specifically regarding the unlucky soul who will be forced to share a bed with big ol’ Shawn), and Dalphe is measuring the time until he has to leave for the Thursday Chess-in-the-Schools session, and Ilya turns around and whispers, “I doubt this guy even knows what he’s up against.” Somewhere in the midst of this, a birthday card for Rita’s eightieth is going around, and Mr. Weiss is urging everyone to sign it, even the newbies who have never heard of Rita, who aren’t sure if Rita is another teacher, or Mr. Weiss’s mother, or what. “If it wasn’t for her, we might not be here,” Mr. Weiss says. And then, a muttered punch line: “Well, we’d be here, anyway. But not anywhere else.”

  When they’ve settled into their seats, gathered before this small man with a nimbus of gray hair clinging to his scalp for dear life, Lev Khariton begins to lecture in a voice thick with Russian inflection. He’s all hard consonants and elongated vowels, and he uses the word yes as a bridge, the way teenage girls fall back on like. He’s wearing blue jeans and sneakers with velcro clasps, and he squints at his audience through a pair of foggy polyurethane lenses. “So,” he says. “I don’t exactly know your level, yes? I came to know you from the newspaper. I don’t recall which one.”