Game of Kings

by Michael Weinreb

  Here comes Sal, whistling a little ditty to himself. He insists he’s not nervous at all, except that he doesn’t much like playing on the No. 1 board, which is situated atop a riser in the front of the room. He’d prefer not to be on display like that, if he can help it.

  Ten more minutes. Still no pairings. Sal and Alex are jumping up and down now, and Alex’s pieces, ensconced in the same withering Spanish department-store bag, are chuffing and rattling, and there is nothing to do but gossip and wander and stare at their surroundings. At 1:36, there is an announcement: Due to a computer error, all the players in the high-school under-1500-rated section, whose pairings had gone up earlier, are sitting at the wrong boards. A groan, and then, one minute later, the open section pairings are finally posted, and thanks to a late entry by a thick-necked boy from Armenia with a provisional USCF rating over 2500, Sal is spared having to play on the stage, and on display.

  Past two o’clock now, a good hour after the first of the seven rounds was supposed to start, and the masses are still finding their boards and settling into their seats. And the room is beginning to come together, and the room is a sight, man, just your average day at Bizarro High School, all these smart-ass intellectuals and hipsters and geniuses and wannabe geniuses and misfits and preppies and born-agains thrown together inside an airplane hangar. Here is a Goth wearing a trench-coat and purple lipstick. Here is a boy in a Slayer T-shirt with a gusher of corkscrewed copper hair like Maradona, the Argentinian soccer star, used to sport back in the day. Here is a boy in a Harvard T-shirt with long dark bangs drooping into his eyes, and here is a boy in Priest Holmes’s Kansas City Chiefs jersey (because Priest Holmes is one of the few professional athletes who have admitted publicly to playing chess), and here is a bearded dude in a Chicago Bears jersey and a Sam Spade fedora. Here is a hyperactive young man with a ponytail and dark sunglasses who seems to think he’s made it to the final table at the World Series of Poker, and here is a boy on crutches, and here is a boy wearing a Burger King crown, and here is a boy with a Lincolnesque beard carrying a stuffed sheep with a studded collar (are those diamonds?) under his arm. Here are T-shirt slogans ad nauseam: Will Party for Food, Nintendo Rehabilitation Clinic, Only Jesus Can Save You, and others so crude and sexual and overtly hostile to women that they might cause a stir, if only there were enough females in this room to complete a quorum. As it is, there are hardly any, and even fewer among the top boards, although Anna Ginzburg has distinguished herself by donning a beret with her name printed on the front.

  Finally, at ten minutes past two, the tournament director for the K-12 section arrives at the front of the room. She is a small, middle-aged woman with close-cropped rust-colored hair, and she is wearing a sport coat and a pair of jeans, and seventy minutes after the appointed time, in a fit of misguided enthusiasm, she delivers this awkward proclamation: “Let’s get ready to rumble!” And off they go, to the sound of hundreds of clocks being punched all at once. Oscar pushes a pawn to b4,Alex sacrifices a pawn early on to gain an advantage later, and Sal takes it slow and steady. Due to sheer overwhelming size, the field has been split into four groups based upon ratings, so that in the first round the top players are paired against those in the twenty-fifth percentile, the twenty-sixth percentile against the fiftieth percentile, and so on. Because of that, Sal and Alex have it easy; they’re both facing 1800s. And Alex’s father, who accompanies him everywhere, who has come with him all the way to Tennessee, stands in a nearby corner like a sentry, a pair of royal-blue New York Knicks sweatpants riding up toward the bulge of his considerable midsection. Sal is up and pacing between moves, peering over the other boards, checking in on his teammates; he looks restless, nonchalant, almost bored at times. He has not brought his own set of pieces, nor his own clock, nor his own scorebook. He says, “I barely have to think here” at this tournament, in comparison to what he might have seen in Greece or in San Diego or even at Foxwoods a couple of weeks ago, and this is Sal’s ego talking, of course, because he still has one, he still knows he’s good. Back and forth he goes, pacing along the aisles, tugging on the sleeves of his blue T-shirt, kibitzing with tournament officials and with Alex’s father and with anyone who’ll bother to listen to him, all of which begins to infuriate the copper-haired woman in charge, who is here to enforce silence and order.

  Meanwhile, Ilya, who’s never quite sure what he is from day to day, starts off strong, beating Benjamin Francis from Georgia, rated 1991, by sacrificing his queen. The guy never saw it coming, Ilya says, and this is exactly the way he wanted to play, like he did that first day at states, fast and free, the precise opposite of the rest of his regimented life.

  It takes nearly three hours for Alex to finish off this blond kid from North Carolina, Matthew Green, and when he gets up, his father sighs and unfolds his arms. “Not an easy one,” he says.

  Times like these are when chess ventures into the realm of the physical, with seven long extended games, two hours on the clock for each side, packed into the course of three days. After a while, the synapses become stretched and the eyes become fatigued and it becomes hard to concentrate and even harder to plan ahead, to anticipate moves, to avoid making the type of blunder that leads to a lost game. At the highest levels of chess, no one would think of scheduling more than one game in a day. But this is the United States, and no one makes a living playing chess, and so tournaments are crammed into long weekends and after a certain amount of time the brain begins to melt, and you do your best to keep up, living off a sugar rush and a caffeine buzz and a catnap here and there. You try to conserve your energy against lesser opponents so you can expend it in the games that matter. But that doesn’t always happen. And then you find you’re exhausted. “You start to think, ‘I can’t play this game,’ ” says Irina Krush, who competed in this tournament in 2001. “You feel like you can’t play, so why should you torture yourself?”

  There are different theories and methods for combating this fatigue, depending upon the individual. “The key thing you can do before a game is silence your brain,” says Maurice Ashley, at a lecture between rounds. “Sit, relax, turn the TV off, get into a nice, clear space. It’s a bit like meditation.”

  Of course, these are teenagers, and mostly teenaged boys, which means their idea of a nice, clear space involves something much less spiritual than that. It involves pizza, poker, and innocuous daytime television talk shows. For Dalphe, after a win in Round One against Ahmet Erciyas, a 1460 from Minnesota, relaxation entails several trips to the biosphere’s all-you-can-eat buffet. (So much for the turkey-and-potato-bread method instigated by his mother.) And now this little boy, barely five feet tall, is clenching his stomach and trying to keep it all from making a return visit before the start of the second round, at seven in the evening. Not to mention he’s playing up in rating this round, a 1586 facing an 1817.

  But Dalphe is not needed at this point. He is not among Murrow’s top-four-rated boards, and the top four are all that matter when it comes to the actual score. With Sal, Alex, and Shawn as the clear top three, one of the others has to score well enough to put Murrow over the top. It doesn’t look like that’s going to be Oscar, after he blunders into a draw against Jonathan Bowerman, a 1413 from Florida; the kid opens with a pawn to d5, and Oscar knows how to respond to this, knows he should play pawn to b5, but it’s just instinct, that force he’s always fighting, that kills him again, and he plays his knight to f6 and can’t quite recover from there. Two games, and he’s got a total of half a point, but really, Oscar’s having other successes: He’s up from twenty bucks to a hundred and ten bucks in liquid funds; when this week started, he had a single bill in his wallet, and now he can hardly keep the thing shut.

  So who’s left? Ilya? He can’t seem to keep his energy going, and he loses to Chris Claassen, a 1663 from Kansas, in Round Two. Nile? A draw in the first round negated his efforts, and he’s rated only around 1500, which is asking a lot. Same for Dalphe. This leaves Willy, the quixotic one, the boy who is a
bsolutely certain he could have scored four points at nationals last year if that kid hadn’t puked right next to him and thrown off his mojo in the last round, the boy who gets distracted by funny faces, the boy who can never quite seem to find himself when it matters. But Willy’s playing Christopher Williams, a 2049 from Massachusetts, in Round Two. What could Willy possibly do against a 2000?

  For once, Willy gets lucky. Willy happens to be playing a 2000 who allegedly lost his first-round game to a boy he hates, and because of that, this particular 2000 has allegedly ceased caring, and has figured he might as well take a dive in this game as well. So he plays fast, and shifts all his pieces to the queen’s side of the board, and Willy, playing an opening called the closed Sicilian (a 2000 should know how to counter this), attacks from the king’s side, and before you know it, in under an hour, the game’s over. Two games, and Willy has two points. “To me,” Willy says, “I think he wanted to lose.”

  A couple of hours later, Alex queens one of his two remaining pawns and finishes off Matthew Fouts, a 1950 from Indiana, and three minutes afterward, as if he were just waiting for the proper moment, Sal beats Jeremy Volkmann, a 1968 from Missouri. When Shawn, playing over his head against a 2099 (Erik Santarius, Wisconsin), pulls out a victory forty-five minutes after that (“An outstanding attack,” Sal declares upon examining the board), the first day’s tally is as strong as it could get: Sal, Alex, Willy, and Shawn all have two points, giving Murrow eight points, two more than any other high-school team in the field. So maybe, Mr. Weiss is thinking, this will be just like last year. Maybe there’s simply no one in America who can keep up with them.

  There is too much to do here in the biosphere, too many games, too many distractions, too much real estate to cover, and even facing the longest Saturday of the year, Shawn and Oscar cannot resist. They blow off curfew and they play cards and they stumble into the room sometime past one in the morning, and when they wake up seven hours later and rush into the elevator, flit past the artificial river, swing behind the Chick-fil-A, bound down the stairs, and burst into the airplane hangar in time for the start of Round Three, they are bleary-eyed and unstable, and the only solace for Shawn is that he’s facing weak competition. He offers up his queen, and his opponent, Marc Reichardt, a 1200 from Wisconsin, clenches his forehead and considers and looks away and then he looks at Shawn, this boy who is built like a nightclub bouncer, whose face is squinched like a sponge under an all-black Yankees cap, whose eyelids are trembling amid a desperate battle to maintain consciousness, and he refuses the sacrifice.

  But it doesn’t matter, because Shawn is not going to lose here. He has played so much chess in the past few years that in a game like this, against a weak opponent, he can operate almost entirely without consideration. All those games of speed chess he plays online force him to make split-second decisions, so that when he has time to think it can be like when a baseball player in the on-deck circle warms up by swinging two bats, and when he gets to the plate, his lone bat seems that much lighter. It can also backfire, of course, when he moves without thinking things through completely, but in this case, the next play just comes to him. So he wins easily, and when it’s over he goes upstairs to the team room provided for the students and alumni of the Chess-in-the-Schools program, and Sarah Pitari is there, the academic advisor, the woman who’s been trying so damned hard to get these kids to realize what they’re facing in the future, when school and chess are no longer their buffers. She’s tried to set up a meeting with Mr. Weiss, but he doesn’t really have much regard for CIS in the first place, for the bureaucracy of the CIS system, and so nothing has come of it. It’s not like he’s oblivious to Shawn’s plight; he’s been on the phone almost every week with Shawn’s stepmother, trying to explain to her that he’s simply not showing up at class. He even thought about leaving him behind when they came here, but he didn’t want to crush the kid’s spirit.

  Sarah Pitari is a small woman with long dark hair and a serious countenance, and while she watches Shawn play a game of blitz she chides him for his sporadic attendance at the academic sessions she’s been running for CIS alumni. And Shawn gives her that face he reserves for situations when he either doesn’t understand what they’re talking about or doesn’t want to understand what they’re talking about, the one where his eyebrows dart straight upward and his pupils roll back into his head and his forehead compresses and you start to think maybe it’s your fault, maybe you’ve just addressed him in Mandarin by mistake.

  “What’s sporadic?” Shawn says.

  So Sarah defines sporadic. It is a word that could aptly describe Shawn Martinez’s entire academic existence, after all, so he might as well know what it means. “And what’s your attendance going to be like next year?” Sarah says.

  “Uh, unsporadic?”

  By lunchtime that Saturday, the situation remains comfortable. Sal and Alex have both won again against inferior opponents, and the only one who is truly struggling is Ilya, who is at 1756 coming in but drops a game in the morning session to Russell Scott, a 1373 from Virginia, after touching a piece he didn’t really want to move (at most tournaments, the “touch-move” rule is in effect, meaning once you’ve grasped a piece, you have no choice but to play it). This drops Ilya into one of his temporary states of depression, but he doesn’t have much time to snap out of it, because the fourth round starts at two, and the matchups are not all that great. Of Murrow’s four undefeated players, Sal and Alex are both facing opponents rated over 2000 (there are about thirty players with ratings above 2000 in the varsity section), good enough to at least keep up with them and force them into difficult situations, and Shawn is facing a 2092 (Eric Rodriguez, Florida) and Willy is facing Jouaquin Banawa, a kid from Los Angeles who, at 2446, is one of the highest-rated players in the entire tournament.

  This is where Murrow’s depth comes into play: If Willy loses and starts to struggle in subsequent rounds, it’s important for the others to keep up, so they can potentially take his place among the top four. Mr. Weiss has tried to help Willy out, logging on to the Web and looking up past games of his opponent, trying to discern what opening he might unveil, but Willy goes in fighting the voices in his head, the ones that keep telling him that he’s not good enough to beat a master-level player, that he can’t possibly do this. This kid is rated higher than Lenderman, after all, and Willy can’t beat Lenderman, and he fingers the gold chain he wears around his neck, the one with the studded W attached to it, and it feels like its grip is tightening with every move he makes.

  For eighteen minutes, at board number 202, Alex Lenderman faces an empty chair and a running clock. Where is Landon Brownell? What could he be doing? Was he afraid, as Sal had joked a few minutes earlier? Was he sick? Was he asleep? Was he lost somewhere within the catacombs of the biosphere? There is nothing for Alex to do but sit there and watch the clock and watch the games going on all around him. When Brownell finally does show and settles into his seat after offering his hand to Alex for a limp pregame handshake, he does not hesitate. He pushes a pawn straight ahead, formulating an opening that seems too perfectly calibrated to be spur-of-the-moment.

  It’s clear now: Landon Brownell, a rangy kid with glasses and a 2007 rating, from a high school called Catalina Foothills in Arizona, has been preparing. He’s been studying Lenderman’s games online with his coach Robby Adamson, a 2400-rated player and a former junior-high national champion, and they’ve discovered Lenderman’s weakness: When playing with black, he really knows only one opening; he knows it extremely well, knows every intricacy of it, but he is incapable of adjusting his method. (“He never varies, ever,” Adamson would later say.) So Brownell opens by pushing a pawn to e4, and Lenderman counters with a pawn to e5, and his strategy, known as the Two Knights Defense, plays out, with Lenderman taking Brownell’s pawn on the d4 square on his third move:

  This is not good at all for Alex. He knows that Brownell has him figured, and Brownell knows he knows, and Alex is playing defense. His hands ar
e folded over his cheeks, enveloping his face, and he’s sinking deeper into his chair as his teammates begin to sink with him. Brownell makes a small mistake with his ninth move, losing track of the line Adamson had been teaching him up in the room. But then, with the pressure and the circumstances bearing down on him and his father pacing up and down the aisle, Alex takes a chance: With his twelfth move, he plays his knight to the c4 square, and with his thirteenth move, he shifts it again, to take one of Brownell’s pawns on e5. This goes against the book and against every logical unfolding of the defense Alex is playing.

  Now it’s too late. He’s made a mistake, and he knows it, and he can’t disguise his consternation, which only compounds things. When you’re playing at this level, and you sabotage yourself like this, your only hope is that your opponent doesn’t notice, that he doesn’t see the path to an easy victory, twenty or twenty-five moves ahead.

  While all of this unfolds, Oscar loses to Marcus Williams, a 1513 from Michigan (afterward, he goes in search of payoffs from last night’s bets), and Shawn loses, and Willy hangs in for more than three hours against the kid from L.A., but then concedes. Nile loses, playing five hundred points up. Of the bottom six on Murrow’s roster, only Ilya (against Marjorie Heinemann, a 1391 from Minnesota) and Dalphe (against Chris Bechis, an 1827 from Pennsylvania) manage victories, Dalphe by sacrificing a bishop on the c2 square to facilitate an attack from both sides, a move he figured out by playing speed chess with Shawn.

  And Alex is sinking deeper and deeper. “White gradually develops a kingside attack and brings the point home in an elegant, almost effortless manner,” writes Alex Betaneli, annotating the game several months later, in an issue of Chess Life magazine.