Game of Kings

by Michael Weinreb

  It does not take them long to figure out that this place is not exactly Brooklyn. The site of the state championship revolves from an upstate location to a downstate location each year, and this year it’s upstate, in Saratoga Springs, whose downtown business district consists primarily of one main street, known as Broadway. But this Broadway, well, it’s not exactly Broadway. The Prime Hotel and Conference Center stands at the far end of town, near a liberal-arts college called Skidmore, near the bars where Dylan got his start and Don McLean is said to have written “American Pie.” Before it became known for its bohemian culture and its horse races, held in front of capacity crowds each August, Saratoga Springs was a resort town, replete with spas and mineral springs. It was founded a few miles north of the site where the Battle of Saratoga turned the American revolution in favor of the colonies. Even now, the town feels like a placid retreat: the buildings on and off Broadway, down narrow side streets that dead-end within a couple of blocks, are small and quaint, and chain stores coexist with used book-stores and coffee shops, and nearly everyone you see on the street is white.

  None of this really matters to the Murrow boys, of course—the history, the geography, the world outside of the hotel. As long as they can get some kind of fast food, pizza, Subway, McDonald’s, and as long as there are chess sets and a deck of cards, they can subsist in this environment for as long as necessary. They can fend for themselves. Friday night they order from the local Domino’s and Oscar works his magic, somehow managing to sweet-talk the deliveryman (“Brooklyn-style,” Sal says) into reducing the price of the pies by ten dollars. And when they are finished eating, they play cards. And they keep on playing well past the “curfew” Mr. Weiss has established, so that the next morning it is not hard to discern those impulsive souls who stayed up half the night. Even Dalphe Morantus, the innocent little freshman, who has done all he can to not get sucked into this vortex of dubious behavior, was jumped by his roommates at four in the morning for no apparent reason. And now they are all paying the price.

  Just take a look at Oscar, who’s wearing a rumpled red bowling shirt and taking life-sustaining hits from a bottle of Mountain Dew. Or Shawn, he of the lead-weighted eyelids and the drooping skull, or Willy, staring at a brick wall in a hypnotic daze. Oscar and Shawn shared a bed last night, the two biggest boys on Murrow’s roster wrestling over the blankets, and now Oscar is accusing Shawn of cheating at a game neither of them has actually played before, this thing called Plunder Chess, whose inventors have strategically placed sets throughout the hotel accompanied by hyperbolic press materials, in order to market their novelty. “Imagine what would happen in a game of chess, if your chess-men could acquire additional moving capabilities as they played? What if your queen could move as a queen or a knight and your pawn could move as a pawn or a bishop? How about escaping check by letting your king move as a rook? Well . . . imagine no more.”

  To be honest, these notions do not excite Oscar very much. It is almost eleven in the morning, time for the start of Round One, and Oscar would be quite happy to imagine crawling back into bed for a few more hours, thank you very much. The only good news is that the competition this year is almost nonexistent: Of the thirteen highest-rated players in the high-school section, eight are from Murrow. If they can stay awake, they should be able to win. Only their rivals at Stuyvesant, at one of the best public high schools in America, could think of keeping up with them. And with Sal and Alex as Murrow’s top boards, even that seems like a long shot.

  “It’s gonna be like a fricking head-to-head matchup,” Oscar says to one of the boys from Stuyvesant, Daniel Rohde, rated 1674, a skinny boy in a Peyton Manning football jersey whose father is a grandmaster and whose mother, Sophia, a scholastic chess teacher, is an official at this very tournament. And at this very moment, Sophia Rohde is considering the first-round pairings board she has just posted, loaded with names from Murrow, and she is muttering, “Poor little Stuyvesant.”

  It is hard to take this lament seriously, given the circumstances. In few aspects of life do the boys from Murrow have the edge over anyone, let alone a flock of kids from a high school whose student body’s average SAT score is somewhere around 1400, and whose number one board and team captain seems destined to wind up as a congressman. Josh Weinstein, in addition to being an all-city soccer player, is also a club hockey player, and he joined the track team for the hell of it this spring, and on top of that he runs a popular school-related Web site. He has a winsome smile and mussed brown hair and the self-assured presence of a boy who has never wanted much for anything. He grew up on the Upper East Side, the son of an art dealer and a fashion designer, and he attended private schools all his life before gaining admission to Stuyvesant. In the fall, he will start his freshman year at Princeton, where he will major in public policy, with the goal of becoming a politician, in addition to being the fourth board on the Princeton chess team. He has played the game on and off since taking kindergarten classes at the Dalton School, mainly because he was one of the only kids in his class to stay awake during chess instruction with the school’s renowned teacher, Svetozar Jovanovic. One year at Dalton, his team won a national championship. They were honored at an assembly, and their classmates and teachers afforded them the requisite applause. “After that,” he says, “nobody really gave a shit. People liked it if we won, but if we didn’t, nobody really cared.”

  He made some good friends at Dalton, but the whole insular private-school vibe wasn’t really his thing. Some of his friends were pushed so hard by their parents that they quit playing chess. But Weinstein always found a way to motivate himself. When he was in the eighth grade, he wrote an essay about Woodrow Wilson and decided he didn’t want to go to college anywhere else except Princeton. Once he gained admission to Stuyvesant by scoring in the top couple of percent on a citywide entrance exam (the same exam used to determine admissions to Brooklyn Tech and Bronx Science; top scorers get their first choice among those schools), Princeton became a concrete possibility.

  There are three thousand students and a hundred different clubs at Stuyvesant, not to mention the several dozen social strata present at any large high school, let alone one with such underlying competitive pressures. Josh Weinstein is one of those rare teenagers who is able to move among them. After soccer season ended in the fall, he transitioned straight into chess club, which meets on Monday afternoons in a classroom on the eighth floor of a building so close to the World Trade Center that it was used as a base of rescue and recovery operations in the aftermath of September 11. Ever since the old advisor, William Arluck, retired a few years back, the students at Stuyvesant have essentially been running the chess club on their own; this year, Weinstein’s father is footing the bill for their trips to the state and national tournaments, with the expectation that the school will reimburse him for the expenses. This is part of the reason they see themselves as underdogs here. They have no Eliot Weiss to organize them, and they have no Rita to bankroll them, and they have no Sal, and they have no Alex. They have the advantage in so many aspects of life, except this one, and maybe this is fair play, or maybe, as some of their opponents have claimed, it’s hellaciously unfair, but it certainly puts a boy like Josh Weinstein in a position to which he is not accustomed.

  The first-round pairings might as well be a joke; Shawn’s got a 995, a cherubic kid chomping on a stick of gum whose rating is half of his own, and Sal’s got a 1700 (for Christ’s sake, he could beat a 1700 if he were still sleeping). There is nothing even resembling a challenge here, except the one issued by the tournament director, Steve Immitt, a disheveled man with a stooped walk who issues the same unheeded decree at every scholastic tournament he’s ever officiated. “There are going to be times when you’re going to want to cheer your teammates on,” he says. “We can’t really have that. We’re not going to allow it. We ask that you check your board quickly and get out of the tournament site.”

  The good news for Murrow, at least in this round, is that there is n
othing worth hanging around to watch in the Grand Ballroom, yet another bland and windowless cavern, this one with maroon patterned carpets and mirrored walls. Some of their opponents are so inexperienced they don’t even have ratings; they come from upstate schools with fledgling programs. “My goodness, what’s an Edward R. Murrow?” says one of their parents, upon scanning the pairings.

  These are longer games than what they faced at the city championships, sixty minutes per side instead of thirty, but against such weak opponents, who needs the extra time? The pace of a chess game can be contagious. Sometimes you’re better off moving fast, forcing the pace, throwing off the timing of a less-experienced opponent and leading him into a trap.

  Down the hall, Sal and Alex have been sequestered in Seattle Slew, a small conference room named after the 1977 Kentucky Derby winner and adorned with oil portraits of thoroughbreds. It’s set up in the manner of a professional tournament, with three rows of chairs facing the top four tables: two from the high-school section, two from the junior-high section. These chairs are ostensibly for spectators (“They’re trying to be like nationals or something,” Willy says), and despite a story planted on page three of The Saratogian, the local paper—“Some of the country’s best scholastic players will compete, including 15-year-old Salvijus Bercys (former junior champion in Lithuania) and Alex Lenderman, 15, the No. 1 and No. 2 players, respectively, in the United States”—for most of the next two days, the spectators are comprised almost entirely of the following people: Mr. Weiss, Elizabeth Vicary, Alex’s father, and John Galvin, the teacher at I.S. 318 whose students are playing at the top two junior-high tables. The doors to Seattle Slew are left open and nobody seems bothered by the tinny stream of elevator music trickling into the room like the sound track to a root canal; accompanied by Seals & Crofts, Alex sacrifices his queen, which leads to an easy victory over an opponent who never saw the checkmate coming. Murrow finishes round one with eight wins, and zero losses. They are on their way once more.

  This is not the best day to be Josh Weinstein. He’s been fighting off some kind of bug all morning long; now he’s sucking on saltines and drinking Gatorade and trying to bring himself back against Willy Edgard, Murrow’s, what, No. 6 board? This shouldn’t be happening, but, hell, this is what happens when you actually start caring about chess. Sophomore and junior year, for the first time in his life, Weinstein didn’t put much effort at all into his chess, just kept at it so he could put it on the résumé he sent to Princeton. So senior year, he starts to find that love again, figures he should give chess one last full go before he graduates, and what happens? He starts playing worse, and he starts second-guessing every move he makes.

  And now he’s down to nine seconds on his clock against Willy. And each time he captures a piece, he sweeps it onto the floor with an angry flourish, so there are black pawns and bishops and knights littering the carpet at his feet. It doesn’t look good for Weinstein, but there is good news: Willy is running on empty himself. The lack of sleep has begun to catch up to him, and he’s playing defensively, trying to milk a victory by speeding up his own pace. He knows he shouldn’t get caught up in a blitz game against an opponent like Weinstein, but this is Willy, and he can’t help himself. Weinstein is able to conjure each move within the five-second delay before the numbers on his clock dribble any further. He starts picking off Willy’s pawns. Willy offers a draw; Weinstein refuses. And by the time he pins Willy’s king, he still has those nine seconds to spare.

  And what is going on with Oscar, at the other end of this long row of tables next to the mirrored wall? Well, Oscar’s dog-tired, too, which explains why he just drew with a 1200. Hard enough playing three games of chess in one day, let alone playing three games of chess in one day on three or four hours of sleep. And despite all of this, nobody seems particularly concerned that the team score, the cumulative results of each team’s top four boards, now goes like this: Murrow 8, Stuyvesant 7.

  It is impossible to escape the tyranny of the ratings system in chess. It is a measure of one’s intelligence, one’s self-worth, one’s identity, and one’s importance within the societal hierarchy. Your rating is the cumulative statistical evaluation of every tournament game you have ever played, and because of that it is considered a foolproof system, one that has been evaluated and reevaluated by professors and statisticians with a fanaticism for the game and too much extra time on their hands. Part of its beauty is that it can determine precisely the odds of, say, a 1700 like Ilya beating a 2100 like Weinstein: somewhere around eight percent. But none of these numbers take into account the human element, mental fatigue, physical ailments, the tendency of the mind to wander or to freeze up when faced with added pressures like a running clock or a captive audience. “It’s a game of little differences,” says Bruce Pandolfini, the famed chess coach. “Working slightly harder. Focusing slightly more. Perhaps looking a half-move further ahead, or sleeping a little bit more so you’re in better shape, or eating better. Those things do matter.”

  Often, these things work against a boy like Ilya, so self-aware, so high-strung. But as afternoon slips into evening, and Ilya goes back downstairs to check the pairings and sees that he’s facing Weinstein, he figures, for once in his life, that he has nothing to lose. He had said that he wasn’t ready to eat before the second round, that food only made him fatigued, but Ilya had already met his goal by Saturday afternoon, to win two of his three games each day, so he figures he can relax his restrictions. In midafternoon, long before he becomes aware he will face Josh Weinstein, Ilya feasts. On his way toward the elevator, while trying to balance a cup of soup atop a sandwich and maintain a grip on the soda in his other hand, he says, “I figure my third game will either be easy or hard. So I’m breaking the fast.”

  And because Weinstein is tired out and sick and still pissed off about his near loss to Willy, the numbers start to mean less and less. For those couple of hours, Ilya is free: no worrying about his job or his classes or the SATs or where he might get into college or what he might study once he gets there or how he might possibly live up to the expectations he’s built for himself.

  Weinstein, playing white, opens by pushing a pawn to e4, and Ilya responds by meeting that pawn at e5, and the game progresses, Weinstein playing a variation on the Vienna opening. (See the first diagram on the following page.)

  Ilya hates the Vienna; never plays it himself. But he was ready for this; he knew what was coming. He’d played Weinstein at the city championships, and he was black then, too, and with his third move, instead of taking a pawn, he’d moved out his bishop to the c4 square. This was a book play—it makes the most sense, according to common

  theory—but in this case, with this opening, Weinstein knew the book on the Vienna a hell of a lot better than Ilya did. (Before they’d started the game, Weinstein had even said something to him about that last game, about bc4 and what a futile move it was, anticipating that Ilya might try it again.) So he was better off taking the pawn, throwing him off. What did he have to lose?

  With his sixth move, Ilya takes a knight with his bishop and briefly puts Weinstein into check, giving up his bishop to gain an advantage in position, mounting an attack on Weinstein’s queen’s side. It goes back and forth from there, the castling, the trading of pieces—“I had many problems in development and counterattacking,” Ilya would say later. “The only thing that saved me was that I surprised him by taking that pawn early on”—until Ilya begins advancing his pawn on the queen’s side, the game sliding toward a draw. And then, suddenly, he sees it—knight takes pawn on c4:

  Twenty-five moves per side to this point, and Ilya has the distinct advantage. In chess notation, an exclamation point signifies a good move, and two exclamation points signify a very good move. This move, Ilya labels with three exclamation points (!!!). It is bold, it is shrewd, and it is debilitating. Weinstein can capture Ilya’s knight with his queen, but then Ilya is up a pawn heading into the endgame, and more than that, he has a distinct advantage
in position: Eventually, he will queen one of his pawns, which means that eventually he will win. Instead, Weinstein plays a safe move, and Ilya takes another pawn, and then it is only a matter of time, a matter of playing it out until the end and bleeding those final seconds off the clock.

  That night, after Ilya’s miracle, after Murrow wins seven of its eight third-round games to take a two-and-a-half-point lead over Stuyvesant (11.5 to 9), Mr. Weiss orders pizza again, and they eat it downstairs in the common area of the hotel, and even Ilya’s father, the weekend’s designated driver, a man so small and so quiet that he can sit in one place for hours and go virtually unnoticed, leaves the sanctuary of his hotel room to join them. Ilya’s father doesn’t play chess, even though his own father was once a master in the Soviet Union; all he knows is that his son either plays well or plays poorly, based upon his demeanor. But he has such grand expectations for Ilya, his only surviving child, the first member of the family to grow up in this country, free of religious bias and economic destitution. How can Ilya, such a bright and promising young talent, not succeed in everything he does?