Game of Kings

by Michael Weinreb

  “We were in all of them, yeah,” says Mr. Weiss. “We have all levels here. We have twelve hundreds and fifteen hundreds and two thousands and above.”

  Rex and Renwick and Adalberto and Robert, sitting on the far side of the room, exchange blank stares. Twelve hundred? Fifteen hundred? Yeah. Right. Try nothing, zero, nada, and zilch. Maybe pride counts for something with Sal, but not with the opponents who embarrassed them at the city championships. They come to this game so late; no doubt, they’re starting to think maybe they’ve come too late. Even getting to twelve hundred is starting to look like an impossible dream.

  “In New York, there are many tournaments,” Lev Khariton is saying. “I meet a boy who is seven years old, and he plays in tournaments every weekend. But let me say, chess is also a science. In a sense, you can always improve, you can always learn, with all this computer science. But I show you an endgame, yes? This is from some years ago, from a tournament. I was in terrible time trouble, yes, and I still found a way to draw this game, yes?”

  Through all of this, Sal’s face is frozen in a metallic and vaguely sinister grin. Eventually, he lays his head flat on his desk, and when that position grows tiresome, he pulls a penny from his pocket and bats it around on his desk. Halfway through Khariton’s lecture, Mr. Weiss can sense the boredom among his top players. He pulls them out into the hallway and goes over the arrangement for the trip to states: Meet up at school next Friday; half of them will ride with Ilya’s father and the other half with Alex’s father. When he’s finished, most everyone scatters, except for Ilya, who sticks around to play in the simul against Khariton before he succumbs to the dreariness of his afternoon at the bank.

  It is clear from the way he considers the board, the way he props himself up on one leg to peer over the entire board as the middle game progresses, that Ilya is determined to win this game. Khariton is a good five hundred rating points above him, but this is a simul, which means Khariton will be playing seven other opponents at the same time, which means Ilya has the benefit of a singular focus. And Ilya is always foisting little challenges on himself like this. He is not afraid of losing; he is afraid of not living up to expectations, and when he does meet his expectations, he raises them ever higher. Often, his performance is not so bad at all, but if it does not live up to Ilya’s standards, or if he’s made an obvious blunder, he will not hesitate to denigrate himself.

  Khariton, playing black, opens the game with the King’s Indian, a complex series of moves that frees up a knight and bishop on the side of the board in order to attack white’s center. On his way out the door, Sal notices this and says, “Ilya, you’re playing against my favorite opening, you know that?”

  “Everybody plays the King’s Indian,” Ilya says.

  “Yeah,” Sal says. And then, as if he can’t resist a barb, he says, “But I’m special at it.”

  Ilya puts up an extended fight; he is the last surviving player in the simul, long after the newbies have all been vanquished. But he is not quite strong enough; he is not special like Sal, and the fact that he is more well-rounded than Sal, that he plays an instrument and works a part-time job and does well in his classes and has abiding interests beyond the game, means little to him at moments like this.

  “That boy, he reacts well, yes,” Khariton says after Ilya leaves. “But he just couldn’t get things together.”

  A week later, Lev Khariton stands on a busy corner on the Upper East Side, where he has just finished giving a private lesson. This is how he makes his living, as a full-time chess teacher. When he left Murrow that day (he had simply cold-called Mr. Weiss and asked to come in and lecture), he said he’d like to start visiting regularly. Then he asked, “Is there any way you could remunerate me?” To which Mr. Weiss replied that he’d have to check with the administration.

  Khariton also teaches twice a week at the Ramaz School, a Jewish yeshiva on the Upper East Side, and all of this produces just enough money for him to squeeze out a living, to support his wife and pay the rent for their apartment on Ocean Parkway. But then, it is hard for him to imagine doing anything else; his whole life has been defined by the game. In the time and place where he was born, in a nation that regarded chess as a pillar of its system of government, that was not such a fantastic notion.

  In the wake of the Russian revolution, in 1917, “came the idea of the game as a socialist sport,” wrote authors David Edmonds and John Eidinow, in Bobby Fischer Goes to War. “Chess in particular could help educate the proletariat and sharpen the minds of the workers, offering an ideologically sound activity after the rigors of a hard day’s toil in the factory or on the collective farm.” With that in mind, the All-Union Chess Section was created, under the auspices of a thick-necked Bolshevik named Nikolai Krylenko, and experts were hired by the state to spread the gospel of the game. Between 1923 and 1928, the number of chess players in Leningrad alone leapt from a thousand to 140,000. (The American Frank Marshall, on his return home from a chess tournament in Moscow in 1925, recounted traffic snarls caused by the hundreds of people hoping to gain entrance.) By 1951, the number of registered chess players in Russia had swelled to more than a million. The game had seeped into every aspect of the culture; at lunchtime, the stories went, factories all over Russia descended into deep silence while workers sat over their chessboards.

  Lev Khariton’s brother was fifteen years older and graduated from an institute in Moscow in 1952, with the nation in the last throes of Stalinism. Because the Khariton family was Jewish, Lev’s brother couldn’t get a job, and so he and his Jewish friends would come to the family’s downtown apartment and play chess all day long. They played blitz, and Lev, who was seven, would join in, and he would lose over and over again. For six months, he would lose, and then he would cry. Lose and cry, lose and cry. “Then the day came when I started winning, yes?” he says.

  He won again and again, until the winning actually started to get boring. So he asked his father to take him to a chess club, and they went to their district’s House of Pioneers, a cultural clubhouse situated in a nineteenth-century mansion where the neighborhood’s young children could study photography and dancing and singing, and where, in one musty back room, twenty-five or thirty boys would sit and play chess. There was no ratings system back then, so the boys were separated into five simple categories. Within a couple of years, Khariton had advanced from a fifth-category to a third-category player, and by the age of thirteen he was a first-category player. He was sent off to the nation’s central chess club, where he took group lessons with a coach and theoretician named Alexander Kostantinopolsky. Eventually, Khariton played for the championship of Moscow, went to university, studied English literature, and became a translator for the chess federation in Moscow in the era leading up to the Fischer-Spassky match of 1972.

  By then, his first teacher at the House of Pioneers, Yuri Brasilsky, had become an editor of chess literature in Moscow. In August of 1971, while Khariton was on vacation in Estonia, Brasilsky sent him a four-word telegram: LEV WE’LL TRANSLATE FISCHER. And this is what they did, in less than a month, at the urging of the government, who, given the inevitability of a clash between the Russian champion and Fischer, had decreed an urgent need for a translation of Fischer’s My 60 Memorable Games. The book was published in April of the next year, in time for the Fischer-Spassky match, and sales were brisk. Fischer had grown up studying the Russian masters; now the Russians were studying Fischer. “Overnight, I became very famous,” Khariton says. “Everybody knows me for translating this book, yes?”

  There is a certain irony to the fact that Khariton recounts all of this while he sits at a top-floor table in a multistory McDonald’s on Third Avenue in Manhattan, just about as far on the other side of the Cold War divide as one could get. Khariton’s jacket is zipped tight over a sweater and a button-down shirt, and every so often when he gets especially excited, a small piece of french fry, a potato projectile, shoots between the gaps in his crooked front teeth.

  Th
ese days, even without the same level of government support that Khariton once had, gifted young chess players still emerge on a regular basis from the former Soviet Union. Of course, by the time they come of age, they wind up scattered around the world, like Sal and Alex and Ilya, like Irina Krush and Anna Hahn. They emigrate to Europe and America, in search of more fruitful lives, just like Khariton did (he spent time in Paris and Israel before moving to New York in 1999). And here in America the opportunities are greater, and the fast food is tastier, and the distractions are plentiful, and the notion of chess as a serious sport simply doesn’t exist. Maybe Garry Kasparov has done well for himself, Khariton admits, but alas, he’s not exactly Schwarzenegger. Here in America, a man like Lev Khariton, a man who gained fame in his native country simply for translating a book filled with chess games, has to plead for work. Here in America, the students Lev Khariton does have don’t treat the game with the same reverence he did when he was young. They consider it a game, an entertainment. “Russians study chess very seriously,” Khariton says. “We had to work, because chess is not enough to give you a living. But you had to analyze, yes? It is not like I just came and improvised. Here, there is no professional approach to chess. In this country, if you can be a teller in a bank and make more than you could as a chess player, why should you bother yourself with tiresome days and sleepless nights, yes?”

  This very fact is what has always astounded Lev Khariton about Bobby Fischer. He saw Fischer in person once, when he came to visit Moscow in the summer of 1958 and played at the city’s Central Chess Club. Fischer was fifteen; Khariton was thirteen. (In 1992, when Fischer emerged from isolation for a lackluster rematch with Spassky, he declared the Russian translation of My 60 Memorable Games an illegal act because he received no royalties.) But Khariton had this support system, the chess clubs and the instructors and the government infrastructure devised to produce champions and validate the entire system. Fischer had few people to turn to, and fewer places to go. With the exception of certain acquaintances, he was very much alone in Brooklyn.

  So Fischer was a miracle, and Khariton doubts very much that a miracle like this could occur more than once. It requires something more than devotion, something more than commitment; it requires love. And this love cannot be forced. And this love must be coupled with other attributes, such as stamina (“You mustn’t break down”) and the ability to withstand defeat, which means the ability to overcome self-doubt. A few years ago, when Khariton interviewed Boris Spassky, he asked if Spassky had ever feared an opponent. To which Spassky replied that he feared only himself. “You should be totally devoted to the game,” Khariton says. “At one point, if you have a winning game and you lose it, you should come home and not be able to sleep at night, yes?”

  One of Khariton’s best students is a boy of grade-school age who lives on the Upper East Side and attends a private school in Manhattan. This boy, T, despite being American, has the love, no question. He can spend five or six hours staring at a chessboard and never lose his focus. But what does that mean? His parents, they ask Khariton sometimes if their son has what it takes to become a grandmaster or a world champion, and Khariton tells them he cannot answer this question. “Even the Lord cannot answer this question,” he tells them.

  This is another problem: The parents must understand what it takes as well. They must understand what chess means. They must regard it as a professional pursuit, just as Lev Khariton did when he was a boy. At a recent tournament, T’s parents came to watch, and T had a winning position, and he made a horrible blunder and was checkmated in a single move. He fell into a fit of hysterical crying. And his mother, his dear American mother, pulled him to her breast and she whispered to him, over and over again, “It’s just a game.”

  Just a game? And to think, Khariton says: It will only get harder for T, as he grows older, as temptations beyond chess emerge, as this country reveals itself as a place that sees no value in subsidizing talented young chess players, any more than it sees reason to subsidize Scrabble or mah-jongg or backgammon.

  “This boy, in his heart, already he thinks it’s something serious, yes?” Lev Khariton says. He is almost shouting now. “If the people around him think it’s a game, it’s very difficult to make progress, yes? You have to suffer a little bit. If someone is crying, it’s good. Yes?”

  TWELVE

  THE 2005 NEW YORK STATE SCHOLASTIC CHAMPIONSHIPS

  Saratoga Springs, New York

  Almost home now, and he’s riding this one out high above the board, with a foot on the floor and the opposite knee on the cushion of his chair, like Washington crossing the Delaware. His head is sagging toward his left shoulder, and his eyes are darting back and forth, between the seconds on the clock (38, 37, 36 . . . ) and the position of his pieces (What did I miss? Where is the trap?). That’s his queen poised in the center, and he pushes his king to the d2 square, a time-killing move, and he punches the clock and there it goes again, down under thirty, down under twenty, come on already (Don’t fuck this one up, do not fuck this one up). Saturday, 6:34 P.M., inside the Grand Ballroom of the Prime Hotel and Conference Center in Saratoga Springs, and Ilya Kotlyanskiy is this close (10, 9, 8 . . . ) to pulling off the upset of the day ( . . . 7, 6, 5, 4 . . . )—hell, the upset of his life—over Josh Weinstein, Stuyvesant’s No. 1 board, rated 2111, the all-city soccer player, the future Ivy Leaguer, the handsome fellow who just kicked off the bathroom slippers he was wearing and yanked the hood of his black Princeton sweatshirt (3 . . . 2 . . . ) over his ears. Even Sal is watching, and Sal is grinning, and Sal has just turned around and let loose with a look that says “Can you believe this?” Snap, goes the clock, as Weinstein flails at a piece and punches it with a single second remaining on his side, but it’s too late. Ilya makes another delaying move, and when it (snap!) comes back to Weinstein, he has only the standard five-second delay between moves to ponder a desperate flourish before his clock starts running again, one, two, three, four, five, and then that last 0:01 runs off and Ilya stands up from his crouch, head still pinned to his neck, and Sal slaps his back and Weinstein shakes his hand and it’s over. He’s done it! The perfect day of chess! Three wins, no losses, no draws! And he’s beaten Stuyvesant’s top board!

  He clears the pieces with as much calm as he can muster, sweeping them into his blue vinyl carrying case. Then he gets up and goes to pour himself a drink of water from a silver pitcher in the hallway, and his hands are shaking so badly he can hardly do it without spilling. Last night he shared a bed with his father and woke up with a stiff neck; he’s been popping Motrin just to get through the day. His father (who had served as one of the designated drivers, along with Alex’s father, since Mr. Weiss and his family met up with the team in Saratoga after spending the previous week skiing upstate) is upstairs in their room on the third floor, passing the time while his son plays chess. And for the first time in months, Ilya cannot wait to get back to him. “I’m going to go up and tell my dad now,” he says. And then, to himself, he says, “No one believed I could win it.”

  Before all of this, before Ilya’s father got lost on the wrong freeway and wound up taking six hours to make what should have been a three-and-a-half-hour trip, before eight city boys converged in this quaint little hamlet thirty miles north of Albany and twenty miles south of the Adirondack Mountains, Ilya had been abandoned by his teammates. This was a couple of weeks earlier, out in the concrete-and-stripmall wilderness of New Jersey. It was not an intentional snub, but it was something Ilya had gotten used to by now; so often in this dynamic, he was the odd man out. He wasn’t a member of the Russian elites, like Sal and Alex, and he wasn’t part of the Chess-in-the-Schools clique, and so what was he? He was their captain, and yet sometimes he hardly even felt like their friend.

  Every February a series of team tournaments are held, known as the U.S. Amateur team events. There is one in the South, one in the Midwest, one in the West, and one in the East, which is held at a Hilton in a middle-of-nowhere industrial par
k in Parsippany. Each team at the U.S. Amateur has four players, and the cumulative team results determine the winners. Because there are no cash prizes (only plaques and digital game clocks, which go to the winners in each section), and because it is one of the few chess tournaments of the year in which every man is not fending for himself, the pressure is more diffuse and the atmosphere is more congenial. Each team comes up with its own name, which cannot be obscene, but can certainly delve into the risqué (Rock Out With Your Rook Out) or the topical (Wepawns of Mass Destruction) or the nerd-fantastic (Hippogriffs), and the teams with the best chess-related name and the best chess-related “costumes or gimmick” win back their entry fees.

  The team that named itself Fock Lenderman wasn’t looking to win anything, except perhaps a small measure of revenge. They were out to embarrass Alex, who had withdrawn from their roster at the last minute when he realized he didn’t want to lose any ratings points over a tournament that was essentially meaningless. It was becoming increasingly clear, as his rating improved, that this was the way Alex and his father wanted to handle his burgeoning chess career. Their concern was for the bottom line, for what the games could provide them (in terms of both money and ratings points), and if that pissed off certain people, if it left them scrambling to find a fourth board at the last minute, well then, so be it. Let them have their fun. Alex and his father would spend their weekend at home.

  But Ilya had been looking forward to this, to a weekend away from his mother and father, to a couple of days in an overcrowded hotel room in New Jersey with nothing to do but lie around and watch bad television and eat junk food and play chess. He was supposed to form a team with Willy and Oscar and Shawn, but then, because CIS had paid for some of its students to play in this tournament, it saddled their team with another member, an Elizabeth Vicary protégé now at Brooklyn Tech (they called their team the I.S. 318 All-Stars). And it was too late for Ilya to join up with his other non-Murrow friends, who had already formed their own foursome (which was plaintively dubbed Size Doesn’t Matter). Maybe he could have gone there just to hang out and play blitz, but this wasn’t Ilya’s way. That would have been a waste of time, and Ilya didn’t waste time, and besides, the state championship was looming and the SATs were coming up in early May and the preparation for that alone (he was taking a Kaplan course, which he had paid for himself with the money he made working at Washington Mutual) was about to swallow him whole. So perhaps it was better this way; he’d come to states with a fresh outlook, with his brain uncluttered by potential openings and novel strategies, and maybe he could surprise the hell out of all those people who didn’t believe what he was capable of doing.