Game of Kings

by Michael Weinreb

  “Well,” Mr. Weiss says, “what does he expect?”

  Ilya doesn’t respond, because he cannot respond, because if he tries to talk, he’s going to break down right here in a crowded elevator, among his teammates, among complete strangers. He stares at the numbers as they count up to three and the elevator lurches to a stop. The doors open, and Ilya bolts toward his room at the end of the hall, where, for the past two nights, he’s shared a bed with the only man on this earth who could possibly expect more from Ilya than what Ilya expects from himself.

  “The Russians, they take it more seriously,” says Willy. “It’s, like, not just a game to them. Winning means more to them.”

  “I guess that’s why Lenderman’s dad goes everywhere with him,” Oscar says.

  “It’s funny, though,” Mr. Weiss says, “because that can be a mixed blessing.”

  Alone in his hotel room, searching in vain for a wireless connection on his laptop computer, Ilya fights back the urge to break down again. He finished twenty-second in the high-school section, and the top twenty places at this tournament received a trophy, which means Ilya is the only member of his team who will go home without one. (Willy took the twentieth-place trophy after taking the twelfth and final trophy in the varsity section at cities, and bragged afterward, “I got last place at cities, and now I got last place at states.”) And all that happened the day before has been washed away by Ilya’s failure on Sunday.

  His father is not there at the moment, but Ilya can feel his presence. In a minute, Mr. Weiss will knock on his door, and he’ll have to face him as well. He knows they want the best for him. He knows they’re looking out for him, and what he wants is to give those people, and his school, and even Rita, a woman he hardly knows, all that they deserve in return. They paid for him to come here, and he gives them a halfhearted performance? This is what he cannot stand.

  There was nothing else anyone could say to Ilya at that moment to console him. This feeling of failure was one he’d have to overcome largely on his own. Mr. Weiss did his best to take Ilya’s mind off it later, over egg rolls and sweet-and-sour chicken. When Ilya said he’d never been to Ben and Jerry’s, never even heard of Ben and Jerry’s, Mr. Weiss promised to take him there sometime soon. But he wanted to do something else, something more, because this was his captain, his best student, the one member of this team he could count on. So when a reporter from the Bay News showed up in his classroom a few days later, he saw his chance. Maybe if Ilya’s father could see it in print—maybe if Ilya himself saw it—he could change their minds.

  ... Team captain Ilya Kotlyanskiy, 16, a junior at the school, also came away with a “monumental” win on the first day of the competition, Weiss said.

  Kotlyanskiy defeated Josh Weinstein of Stuyvesant, a master level player [sic] rated more than 400 points higher than himself.

  “He went into the game and I didn’t think he had a chance,” Weiss said. “He looked for the win and he found it, and that’s a very difficult thing,” the coach added.

  Kotlyanskiy faced Weinstein in the city championships, and lost. This time around, he said, the Bensonhurst resident . . . learned from past mistakes. . . .

  “I didn’t have too much to lose, I can only gain from it,” Kotlyanskiy said.

  The Murrow team (from left to right): Eliot Weiss, Oscar Santana, Shawn Martinez, Sal Bercys, Ilya Kotlyanskiy, Nile Smith, Alex Lenderman, Dalphe Morantus,Willy Edgard

  THIRTEEN

  IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO CHANGE YOUR DESTINY

  THE ORIGINS OF CHESS ONLINE DATE BACK TO THE MID-1980S, TO THE dark ages of UNIX and 2,400-baud modems and primitive ASCII- DESIGNED boards, with lowercase ps serving as pawns and uppercase Rs standing in for rooks. This was before Netscape, before AOL, before Bill Gates became supreme ruler of the civilized world, before anyone save for a few prophets on the lunatic fringe had much of a vision of what the Internet would come to be. It was then that a genial man named Marty Grund discovered that he could dial up with his modem and play chess against his brother, and this was a miracle in itself, a radical advance over the age-old option of chess by correspondence. Or at least it was, until the day Grund got his phone bill.

  Not long after that, General Electric began a pay service called GEnie; the initial price for a 1,200-bit-per-second connection, on the evenings and weekends, was five dollars per hour. From there, Grund and a small community of fanatics migrated to a gaming site run by USA Today, and then, in the early 1990s, they ran across a new interactive service known as the ImagiNation Network, which claimed to be “changing the way the world makes friends.” For about one hundred and twenty dollars a month, you could log on to the network and play an unlimited amount of chess (or checkers, or backgammon, or bridge, or hearts).

  And then came the first stirrings of the modern World Wide Web, which eventually led Grund to a site started by a couple of graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. In 1992, Danny Sleator, a computer-science professor at the school, came across the site and eventually took it over. Two years after that, with traffic to the site growing, Sleator didn’t know what to do; he thought about giving it away, but his friends convinced him otherwise, and eventually, along with three others (including Marty Grund, who had volunteered to do tech support), he turned it into a commercial site. The site became known as the Internet Chess Club, and sold forty memberships in its first month. At that point, most people couldn’t grasp the concept of paying for anything on the Internet. “We were the evil capitalists,” Grund says. “We had to explain it to the naysayers. And most of those naysayers wound up becoming members.”

  Since then, the ICC has become one of the most popular chess sites on the web, rivaled only by another server called Playchess.com. The company has fifteen full-time employees and several hundred volunteers, some of whom serve as the site’s administrators. A yearly membership on ICC costs forty-nine dollars, with a fifty-percent discount for students. One hundred thirty thousand games are played on its servers each day by thirty thousand members; among them are simuls and exhibitions from grandmasters and International Masters, not to mention speed games and bughouse games and one-minute bullet games and odd variations like Fischer random, a novelty devised by Bobby Fischer in which the back row of pieces is set in random order at the start of each game. Most of the top players at Murrow have an account and a “handle” (or nickname) on ICC:Alex is Manest and Sal is Super13 and Nile is Peaceful Knight and Shawn is Quick Pawn. In a sense, ICC is their second home. In March, in the weeks leading up to Supernationals, this is their primary method of preparation. They have neither the time nor the inclination to slog through chess books, so instead they come back from school, they log on, they instant-message each other, they play games against friends, and they play games against strangers, amassing practical experience, tinkering with tactics on their own, and establishing their cyberpersonalities. When you “finger” their profiles on the site, you can find both information about their ratings in previous games and aphorisms or snippets of IM discussions they’ve added underneath. (Alex: “I like to make friends. Chess unites people over the world, so let’s have fun.” Sal: “It’s impossible to change your destiny.”)

  Few things seem more suited to the Internet than chess, which explains why it was one of the first successful manifestations of online communication. Now a top-level chess player like Sal or Alex can find virtually everything he needs online: Databases, statistical analyses, gossip, instruction, inspiration, and several thousand potential opponents of both the automated and human variety. Since Kasparov’s celebrated loss to IBM’s Deep Blue computer in 1997, the automation of chess and the power of the computer have grown exponentially, and all of this information has changed the game in radical ways. Virtually every grandmaster does the bulk of his preparation on the computer now, if only because computers can study the possibilities in ways that humans never can. Certain openings and lines of attack can be studied for hours at a time with the aid of a comp
uter, and every single variation can be accounted for, and counterattacks can be memorized. The element of surprise has been virtually eliminated, and because of this, the number of draws among top players has risen considerably. Once you know whom you’re playing in the next round of an event, you can study exactly the openings they’ve played in past games. Imagine a National Football League in which playbooks are readily available on the Web. For serious players, then, the Internet has become a Pandora’s box, and the line between preparing and cheating is often quite thin. There are stories of men who wear earpieces during games, then have friends look over the position, log on to computer databases, and relay the proper move to them. There are stories of grandmasters hiding in bathroom stalls and doing analysis on handheld computers, or getting text messages on cell phones.

  But it’s not just the cheating that looms as a concern. There’s also the fact that chess is already a pursuit regarded as the territory of the antisocial, and the fragmentation of the Internet only worsens these perceptions. “Chess is a particularly enclosed, self-referential activity,” wrote columnist Charles Krauthammer in Time magazine. “It’s not just that it lacks the fresh air of sport, but that it lacks connection to the real world outside—a tether to reality enjoyed by the monomaniacal students of other things, say volcanic ash or the mating habits of the tsetse fly.” Bad enough when chess players were loners who rarely left their rooms; now they’re also techie geeks who can’t break from the solace of their laptops. And while it is a beautiful thing for a boy in Brooklyn to be able to play against his friend in Moscow, it cannot serve as a substitute for the real thing, for the experience of facing a human opponent in a physical space, over an actual board. “I don’t like playing on the Internet as much,” says Jennifer Shahade, the Women’s International Master who teaches at I.S. 318. “It’s a little mind-numbing. I mean, it’s good for the kids to do ICC, if maybe they have two weeks without any chess opponents. But if they’re missing an opportunity to play with their peers, then it’s not so good.”

  At times, Marty Grund has had parents call him and ask to have their children banned from the site until they can pass their classes. He’s had members call him up and ask to be banned themselves. The last thing he’d like to accomplish through the ICC is destroy the notion of face-to-face, over-the-board chess. But in many parts of the country, those opportunities hardly exist anymore. Even in New York, only one major club, the Marshall, remains in operation, with a few small chess schools scattered throughout the boroughs.

  The Marshall Chess Club occupies the first two floors of a town house on West Tenth Street in Greenwich Village. Founded by a grandmaster named Frank Marshall in 1915, the club has subsisted in its current location, in what has become one of the priciest neighborhoods in Manhattan since 1931. There are tournaments at Marshall most nights of the week, held in a back room on the first floor, behind a curtain with a sign reminding participants to turn off their cell phones. Upstairs is a ballroom with vaulted ceilings and ornate details and photos of grandmasters on the walls and banquettes adorned with chess sets. Membership for residents of New York and the surrounding areas is $325 a year ($160 for International Masters), not including tournament fees, which is why the kids who yearn to play here, kids like Sal and Alex, so covet the free tournament entry certificates they can earn by finishing among the top placers at the city championships. The Marshall maintains its status because of the caliber of player it attracts. Since the highest level of chess talent is concentrated in New York, it is regularly populated by GMs and IMs, by men like Gata Kamsky and Leonid Yudasin. But despite all of that, despite the sense of community it offers, it is not nearly as cheap or convenient as the computer in one’s own bedroom.

  On ICC, a young chess player can practice against hyperintelligent computer opponents and he can play speed chess and he can keep up a constant dialogue with his friends, all at the same time. The site becomes a social network, like Friendster or My Space. At one point, in the midst of Sal and Alex’s constant bickering, Sal says, “I’m not sure how he pissed me off, I just know that he pissed me off. And he censored me, then we had supposedly become friends again, and then—what did he do then?—we had another fight and he censored me again. I can’t message him on ICC or talk to him. So I sent him a message and said if you censor me, don’t ever expect me to talk to you. But he kept on censoring me and then messaging me and then censoring me again so I can’t message him back. That really pissed me off, and then I censored him forever. But I think I did uncensor him. . . .”

  So a server like ICC affords its members both a sense of community and a cloak of anonymity, allowing a grandmaster like Kasparov to play speed chess against a seventh-grader from Massapequa, if he felt so inclined. In 2001, a British grandmaster, Nigel Short, insisted he had been playing games on ICC against an anonymous player he was “ninety-nine percent sure” was Bobby Fischer. Marty Grund and the officials who run the ICC weren’t convinced of Short’s claims, but the speculation didn’t bother them at all. This is the Internet, after all. The possibilities are infinite.

  In late March, two weeks before the Supernationals, Bobby Fischer, sixty-two years old, detained in Japan the previous July for trying to leave the country with a revoked U.S. passport, is granted Icelandic citizenship. Fischer is still a wanted man in America, after breaking international sanctions by playing his 1992 rematch against Spassky in Yugoslavia. “Mr. Fischer is a fugitive from justice,” a State Department spokesman tells one newspaper.

  Fischer emerges from exile looking haggard and weary. His beard is untrimmed and he wears a baseball cap pulled low over his face, and even now, as a man who has been granted amnesty from his past misdeeds by a people he has no direct connection with, he cannot stave off the worst parts of his nature. At his first press conference in Iceland, he tells ESPN reporter Jeremy Schaap that his father, the late Dick Schaap, is a “typical Jewish snake.”

  There’s something pathetic about the way the whole thing unfolds, and those who care about the image of the game seem to recognize it right away. “Maybe if we could get some top players to show some porn to kids we’d really strike it rich in the PR department,” writes one chess blogger. Here is the preeminent figure in their sport, rescued by a few people in Iceland who still revered him for what he had accomplished thirty years before, and how does he thank them? He comes off like a troglodytic neo-Nazi sympathizer on national television. “It’s quite sad,” says Bruce Pandolfini. “Fischer should have died young, perhaps. He should have stayed invisible.”

  Before he found a niche as a chess celebrity, Pandolfini worked as an errand boy at the Marshall Chess Club. He’d show up at nine in the morning, long before the club opened. One day he arrived and there was Fischer, upstairs in the corner near the window, studying the notation of a series of games from the nineteenth century, full of antiquated attacks and tactics that had long been left behind by most modern players. “Why are you looking at those, Bobby?” Pandolfini asked. “They seem interesting,” Fischer replied, and a few years later, at the U.S. championships, he employed a bishop’s gambit from one of those games to crush his opponent.

  “We’ve lost thousands of Fischer productions, artistic creations that would have enriched the chess world so much,” Pandolfini says. “That’s a tragedy, if you’re a chess lover. If Fischer had stayed in the public eye”—and not lost his mind—“chess would be all over the place right now. Everyone in America knowing the moves and rules of chess? That would have been done already.”

  The truth is, Sal doesn’t care much about what Fischer might have done since ’72. He doesn’t give a damn about Fischer’s anti-Semitism and his crazy proclamations and his contempt for the American government. For Sal, it’s not about what Fischer has become, or even whether chess led him to that point. It’s about what he used to be. When Sal was eleven years old and still living in Vilnius, there were two players whose games he used to study. One was Alexander Alekhine, the Moscow-born world champion
who died in 1946. The other was Fischer. He’d play out their games beyond the openings and try to see if he could guess their moves, and in this way he taught himself.

  It takes a prolonged effort to get Sal to open up like this about his past. He always has an excuse not to get into it. He doesn’t have the time or the patience for such reminiscences. He’s always got something better to do, even if it just means he’d rather go home after school and take a nap. It’s almost as if Sal would prefer to be shrouded in mystery; it makes him more interesting that way, doesn’t it? This is the aura that surrounds the so-called genius, isn’t it? This is the mythology. A Cuban grandmaster named José Raúl Capablanca insisted that he never studied, and his legend became that much greater. It was as if his talents were simply endowed.

  Sal would never declare himself a genius. A stupid genius, maybe, but nothing more than that. Sal is just . . . well, he’s Sal. There are certain people he doesn’t trust, and other people he thinks are too ridiculous to bother with. And if you think he’s bad, well, his younger sister, Brigita, she’s even worse. She’s a tennis player, and she was doing fine, until recently, when she called her instructor stupid. “She has no respect for, like, older people,” Sal says. “At least I don’t call them stupid.”

  Honestly, though, Sal’s learned quite a lot about himself these past few months. In these last few weeks before nationals, his life has finally begun to settle down. It was never his intention to make anyone angry, but he got back from that horrible world junior tournament he played in Greece last fall, and then he had to go straight to California and play in the U.S. Championships, and then he had to go to Washington when all he wanted was to go home and log on to ICC and catch up on his homework and maybe get some extra sleep. “That was the worst stretch of my life,” he says one spring day at the Marshall Chess Club, where he’s just come from the orthodontist, who tightened his braces, making his teeth hurt like hell. After all those trips, he failed a history class because he was hardly ever there. His average dropped from a 91 to an 88, which is still quite good for a boy who doesn’t seem to care much about getting into a top college. By the time they went to see George Bush, and spend a few days in Washington—well, it was nice to be there, but Sal really didn’t want to be there.