Game of Kings

by Michael Weinreb

  “All right,” Mr. Weiss says. “In bed by midnight tonight, right?”

  The fifth round, on Sunday afternoon, is where the whole thing unravels. All those years of training, all that instruction, all the effort by Mr. Weiss to bring a team like this together, and it doesn’t mean a damn thing if you’re too tired to think straight. They could make it for only so long on such little sleep, on a harried Vegas itinerary of play all day and play all night. The good news for Oscar is that he’s turned fifteen dollars into seventy-six by playing Hold ’Em; the bad news is that he has three games of chess to play yet, on virtually no sleep. Somehow, fueled by the bagels Mr. Weiss buys for them on Sunday morning, they win six of eight matches in Round Four, although Ilya, despite being way up on time, breaks his winning streak against a 1900, and an exhausted Willy gives up a draw to a 1200.

  And then, at 12:20 P.M., the pairings go up for the fifth round, with this at the top:

  Sal Bercys v. Alex Lenderman (FORCED!*!*)

  That word, and the trail of punctuation that follows it—FORCED!*!*—are meant to assuage them both, to help them realize that despite the fact they are teammates, and this match will almost certainly cost their team a half of a point regardless of the outcome (they’ll get a total of one point out of it, instead of the two Sal and Alex could pick up if they were playing separate opponents), the tournament organizers had no choice, since Sal and Alex are the only two undefeated players remaining in this tournament. FORCED!*!* How much good did that word do either of them? None. Absolutely none. And nobody hates being forced into this more than Sal and Alex, who would have to perpetuate the charade of competition once more before accepting another draw. For the first time since they’d started playing on the same team, with the help of his “victory” at the city championships, Alex’s USCF rating (2436) has nearly caught up to Sal’s (2453). It’s a sign of how the status quo seems to be changing, how Sal has discovered his limits after his experiences last fall, how Alex is growing ever more protective of his rating, and how the irreconcilable differences between the two of them seem to grow week by week. There is nothing Sal would like to do more right now than play this one out, but because Mr. Weiss is his teacher and Mr. Lenderman is his ride, he can’t do it.

  That the winner of this tournament would qualify for the Denker Tournament of Champions in Phoenix, a scholastic event pitting the best players in each state against each other, means nothing to them, either, and neither does the fact that the winner of the Denker could win a college scholarship to the University of Texas in Dallas.

  “What’s the weather in Arizona?” Sal says.

  “It’s hot there, but it’s air-conditioned,” says Harold Stenzel, the ubiquitous and mullet-haired Long Island chess official, who happens to be working the Seattle Slew Room this morning.

  “How hot?”

  “It’s like a hundred and eight during the day.”

  “Do they have sun-conditioning too?”

  “The best time to go out is early in the morning,” Stenzel says. “When the sun’s coming up.”

  Sal rolls his eyes. As if.

  “What’s the point of going there?” Alex rasps. “So I can go to Dallas College? I’m not going to go there.”

  “Well,” Stenzel says, looking at Sal, “you already won the scholarship two years ago, when you won the U.S. Juniors.”

  “I’d say I’m not going there either,” Sal says. “It’s too far.”

  “Well,” Stenzel says, “Dallas is a little bit cooler than Arizona.”

  “Yeah,” Alex says. And now he turns to his father. “But you still have to go far away from your parents for four years.”

  “You might change your mind by the time you’re a senior.”

  “Maybe,” Sal says. “But I’m a sophomore. A stupid, stupid, sophomore.”

  The draw takes approximately one minute to play out, and when it’s over, Sal and Alex retreat back to the hotel hallway to play blitz, to attempt to settle their ongoing power struggle once more. At the same time, events in the Grand Ballroom are unraveling quickly and catastrophically. The pairings have fallen into place for Stuyvesant, affording them three head-to-head matchups against Murrow: Shawn versus Justin Li (1470); Nile versus Eugene Belilovsky (1759); and Ilya versus his friend, Anna Ginzburg (1585).

  The disaster commences with Oscar, who plays the Orangutan, the b4 opening, against Gregory Kimmel, the 1900 who ruined Ilya’s streak. Then he decides to sacrifice his queen, as he says afterward, “for no apparent reason.” Down he goes. Nearby, Willy is leaning forward in his chair, the back legs dangling in midair, trying to find a way to milk a draw, down a queen and a bishop against an Indian boy who seems far too little to be playing in this section. And Ilya is trying to force Anna out on time, since she has only eleven seconds on her clock and he has sixteen minutes and everybody knows Anna struggles with time trouble, but he’s down a knight and she’s in better position. She’s taking deep breaths and sipping from a foot-tall can of some kind of energy drink and her Nikes are bobbing up and down. And Ilya’s back to worrying about where he’ll finish, about whether those three wins yesterday might land him in the top five, whether a top-five finish might be worth mentioning in his application essay to Georgetown or MIT or NYU, whether he’s ready for the SAT, whether his father will still speak to him if he loses to Anna, a girl he knows he should be able to beat. He had a premonition the afternoon before, that if he somehow managed to beat Weinstein, the gods of chess would punish him with a bad day on Sunday, and now the prophecy is fulfilling itself.

  Shortly after Ilya resigns, Shawn does the same, the victim of a sneak attack from Justin Li, Stuyvesant’s fourth board. Then an overmatched Nile does the same against Belilovsky, so now Stuyvesant’s picked up at least three points in this round alone.

  “I can’t see anything,” Willy says on his way out of the room.

  “You drunk?” Shawn says.

  “Naw,” Willy says. “I’m tired. You guys kept me up all night. Why would I be drunk?”

  “You said you can’t see nothing. I thought you was drunk.”

  “What the hell’s going on?” Sal says. “How are we losing to Stuyvesant?”

  “Hey, Willy,” says a passerby, one of his friends from Chess-in-the-Schools. “How did you lose to that little midget?”

  “Huh?” Willy says. He’s standing near the pairings board, listening to a Cam’ron CD and zoning out.

  “How’d you lose to that little dude?”

  “I’m hungry,” he says, “and I can’t see anything.”

  Not that Dalphe isn’t hungry too. He’s starving, actually. For such a little boy, one who’s often mistaken for a sixth-grader instead of a high-school freshman, Dalphe can put away the calories. But he’s trying not to think about the sandwiches for sale in the lobby, or the meal Mr. Weiss promised he’d buy them that afternoon. He’s trying to finish off this game against an 1884, a kid rated three hundred points higher than he is, and while he doesn’t realize it, he just might save Murrow’s weekend in the process.

  At a young age, Dalphe Morantus was something of a prodigy. His mother, a Haitian immigrant who works in the administrative offices of a Queens hospital, sent him to P.S. 233 in their Canarsie neighborhood, where he learned the game from a Chess-in-the-Schools instructor named Eric Hutchins. When he was in the fourth grade, he beat a Russian women’s grandmaster in a simultaneous exhibition at Borough Hall in Brooklyn. He went to his first nationals with Chess-in-the-Schools that same year, in 2000, and he tied for first place in the K-6 under-900 section, cementing his place as one of the program’s great young successes; there is a an enlarged photo of Dalphe, a close-up of those great big eyes and that round expressive face, on the wall near the entry to the CIS offices. He applied to I.S. 318 for junior high (even though it’s halfway across Brooklyn from Canarsie, a working-class neighborhood at the end of the L subway line) so he could continue playing chess, but then he got lazy when he got there and found other i
nterests, like hip-hop dancing classes. By the time he got to Murrow (Mr. Weiss had first made contact with him in the sixth grade), with a rating somewhere around 1500, his enthusiasm for the game had begun to wane. At Murrow, he had no one who could teach him. He had no Ms. Vicary, he had no Mr. Hutchins, and he certainly couldn’t afford to pay for private lessons.

  But the week before this tournament he’d gone to see Mr. Hutchins at the CIS offices, and Mr. Hutchins had taught him an opening he’d never seen before, a variation on the Vienna, and his opponent fell into the trap Mr. Hutchins had explained.

  With his sixth move, Dalphe pushes a pawn from d2 to d4, and now he’s attacking one of black’s pawns and opening up the center of the board, and while his teammates are shriveling up all around him, Dalphe is on the offensive. His win (over an 1800!) is the only one of the round for Murrow, and he emerges from the Grand Ballroom with a dazed grin and Sal rubs his head and Oscar hugs him and Willy shakes his hand, and they all realize that their littlest member, who had enough sense to get a solid night’s sleep in a different hotel room last night, has just bailed their asses out.

  “You’ve got to be joking,” says Daniel Rohde, running a finger over the previous round’s results, the yellow Xerox tacked to a bulletin board detailing Murrow’s carnage: Draw, Loss, Loss, Loss, Loss, Loss, Loss, Win. “We’re up by half a point on you guys.”

  “No,” Willy says. “We’re up half a point.”

  Rohde rubs Dalphe’s head. “I forgot about this little joker,” he says.

  “I beat an eighteen hundred,” Dalphe says.

  “Is that such a great thing?” Rohde says. “Because I don’t think so.”

  The team scores now read like this: Murrow 16.5 (Bercys 4.5, Lenderman 4.5, Morantus 4, Santana 3.5), Stuyvesant 16 (Weinstein 4, Li 4, Belilovsky 4, Ginzburg 4).

  “I’m really furious at everyone who lost to Stuyvesant,” Sal is saying.

  What this means is that Sal must win in the final round, and Alex must win as well. But even if that happens, Stuyvesant could still win. So Oscar has to win too, and if he doesn’t, and Dalphe loses as well, and Stuyvesant’s players win four games, the upset is theirs. What all of this means, of course, is that the pairings will determine everything. In the meantime, they wait in a hotel lobby in a strange town with little money and nothing to eat, with Mr. Weiss far off in another wing of the hotel watching his children play in the lower-rated sections, oblivious for the moment to all of these harrowing scenarios.

  “I need to win,” Willy says.

  “Everyone needs to win,” Sal says.

  “I need to play Anna Ginzburg,” Dalphe says. If he can beat anyone on Stuyvesant, he figures he can beat her. “But I want food.”

  “Mr. Weiss said he’d buy us Chinese food,” Sal says.

  “I don’t care what food. I just want some kind of food.”

  “Where is Mr. Weiss?” Willy says.

  “If I play Lenderman,” Josh Weinstein says, working his way into the conversation, “I’m going to bust out the new shit.”

  “What new shit?”

  “You’ll see,” Weinstein says. “The new shit.”

  “I can’t play Justin Li,” Dalphe says. Li’s only a 1400, but he’s been on a roll this week, upsetting Shawn and winning four of five games and leading people to wonder whether he might be far better than what his rating indicates. “I can’t beat Justin Li.”

  “Hey,” Sal says. “Be optimist.”

  “If I had some food in my stomach, I could think more positively.”

  “We can blame the tournament director for this,” Willy says. “For making you and Alex play each other.”

  As it turns out, Dalphe will not have to play Justin Li. Oscar will have to play Justin Li. The pairings go up at 3:14 in the afternoon, and they look like this:

  Sal versus Gregory Kimmel (1906)

  Alex versus Josh Weinstein, Stuyvesant (2111)

  Oscar versus Justin Li, Stuyvesant (1471)

  Dalphe versus Eugene Belilovsky, Stuyvesant (1759)

  Ilya versus Riyath Mallahi (1411)

  Nile versus Brett Cimorelli (unrated)

  Willy versus Aditya Doddpameni (1214)

  Shawn versus Courtney Kaplan (1500)

  By now Mr. Weiss has returned to appraise the situation; it’s the first four matches that truly matter, and Mr. Weiss has informed Oscar that if ever there was a must-win in his chess career, this is it. Oscar has never really heard anything like this before; he’s always gotten by on charm and instinct, and he doesn’t have any idea how to defuse his anxiety except to keep on doing what he’s accomplished with such success all weekend: He places a wager. He makes a bet with Eugene Belilovsky, Stuyvesant’s No. 3 board (and Dalphe’s opponent)—not on his own game, but on the match between Lenderman and Weinstein. If Alex wins, he gets another two dollars and fifty cents. It is a bet made of wishful thinking, of course, because if Alex defeats Weinstein, a certain amount of the pressure is off. But if Alex loses, then Oscar simply cannot lose.

  The chess clocks in the Grand Ballroom are set off at precisely 3:30 in the afternoon. Oscar, playing with white, opens with the Orangutan, pawn to b4. Li answers by moving his knight to f6. He has seen Oscar play the Orangutan before. He does not seem taken aback at all. He has the momentum here.

  In the Seattle Slew Room, Weinstein has unveiled the new shit against Lenderman. The match is a study in physical contrasts, the robust young jock against the gawky little boy with the head for numbers. Weinstein had been studying a new opening called the Budapest, but openings have always been his weak point; his openings were full of tricks and tactics, and against Lenderman, that wasn’t going to work. He’s not playing it properly, anyway, and he’s down on time, and this is what’s always hacked him off about playing someone like Lenderman: He just waits for you to make a mistake. Now that he’s made one, there may be no way out.

  And then there is Sal, up against Gregory Kimmel, the 1900 with the anachronistic Prince Valiant haircut who’s already beaten Oscar, Ilya, and Dalphe. And yet this is the one game Mr. Weiss isn’t concerned with at all. Sal does not look anxious. Sal does not get anxious; Sal gets pissed off, like he is right now at his teammates for shirking their duties, and then Sal wants to crush someone. Figuratively speaking, of course. Most of the time, Sal beats you by playing positional chess, by reserving his aggression for the proper moments, by turning the slightest edge into an insurmountable advantage, by slowly demoralizing his opponents. Sometimes, this can take a good long time. An hour and a half into the game, the pieces are even, the position is even, but Mr. Weiss has no real doubt that Sal will find a way to win. It’s Oscar and the others who worry him. He wants to see them do this, to prove they can win under pressure. If not for their school, then for themselves.

  But Oscar is down on time, and it doesn’t look good, and Dalphe, down a bishop and a pawn, has just resigned, and Ilya’s curse has perpetuated itself and he’s lost once more, to go from 3-0 one day to 0-3 the next. Oscar had a beautiful position early in the game, he would say later, but he made a couple of missteps. Now his clock is down to six seconds, which is when, driven by desperation and outrage and his own jitters, he makes one last massive and inexplicable gamble, sacrificing his queen in an attempt to . . . well, he can’t explain why he does these things sometimes. Except in that cluttered mind of his, Oscar figures the only way to dig his way out of an inextricable mess like this one is to do something entirely illogical.

  Five minutes later, he resigns.

  Good thing for Oscar that Weinstein has completely bombed with the new shit. When he resigns, the score is Murrow 19 (Sal 5.5, Alex 5.5, Shawn 4.0, Nile 4.0), Stuyvesant 18 (Weinstein 4, Belilovsky 5, Li 5, Ginzburg 4), and the last hope for an upset resides within the head of Anna Ginzburg, who’s in the process of drowning against a 2032 named Robert Cousins. A draw isn’t good enough; somehow, she has to pull out a win.

  “There’s no way she’s going to win it,” Willy says, aft
er undertaking a scouting mission to the Grand Ballroom to check on her progress. “It’s down to bishop and pawn versus bishop and rook.”

  “Alex won,” says Sal, who has already won with ease. “That means we’ll win.”

  “All right,” says Willy, “so then we won.”

  “But Anna has to lose.”

  “Anna lost! Anna lost, yes! Anna lost!”

  The cries come from Dalphe, rushing out of the doors of the Grand Ballroom at 5:28 in the afternoon. And with that, the team from Edward R. Murrow High School—tired, hungry, and mostly broke—finally, absolutely secures its sixth consecutive New York State High School Chess Championship. And the immediate reaction is one of utter relief.

  “Now,” Sal says, the words spilling drolly from his lips, “we can shake hands.”

  It has been decreed that the victory celebration will take place at a restaurant called the China Wok on Broadway, which comes as a great relief to the starving masses. Dalphe, dazed and approaching delirium, is ecstatic at the mere mention of it.

  On the way back up to their rooms in the elevator, Mr. Weiss asks Ilya if his father is coming with them.

  “No,” Ilya says.

  “Why not?”

  “He just—he doesn’t feel like it.”

  “How come?”

  Ilya says, in a mumble, “Because he’s not happy with the way I played.”

  “Why? You played well.”

  “Not well enough for him.”