Game of Kings

by Michael Weinreb

  Alex’s father is scanning the board and shaking his head and sighing. “It’s a losing game. There’s no way to win.” Alex knows this now too, and he’s shaking his head, and Brownell is squirming in his seat because he knows he’s almost there, he’s going to beat a kid who’s on the verge of becoming an International Master, so how is he supposed to sit still? And all of this movement infuriates Alex’s father, who is already upset, who cannot believe the lack of respect here. “He stands up, he’s laying on the table,” he says. “It’s unbelievable.”

  At ten minutes after four, Alex resigns. Off he goes with his father in tow, the two of them stewing and chattering in hushed Russian. And with that, the whole tenor of the 2005 Supernationals has changed, because suddenly there is a threat to Murrow, a grave and serious one at that, and it comes from Landon Brownell’s own school, Catalina Foothills in Tucson, which has fielded five players rated over 1800 this week, most of them trained by Robby Adamson himself. And now it has stood in the face of the beast, just as Adamson assured them they could do. He had told them this before they even got on the plane to come here. He had said, Don’t bother getting on this plane if you don’t think we can win a national championship. And while Catalina lacks a one-two punch like Sal and Alex, it has another weapon: It has depth that Murrow cannot match. “Lenderman played a bad line,” Adamson says later. “On his part, that’s a huge mistake. He should have played his normal stuff instead of trying to confuse Landon.”

  Just like it did at the state championships, the situation deteriorates fast for Murrow, their entire foundation crumbling in a single catastrophic round. Ninety minutes after declaring, “I think you can mark me for a win in about an hour,” in the midst of a convoluted series of exchanges with a boy from Texas (Deepyaman Datta, 2058), Sal has no choice but to accept a draw. The team score now reads like this: Catalina Foothills 13, Murrow 12.5.

  “OK,” Sal says. “I’m thinking this is our worst round ever.”

  And on this, the longest Saturday of the year, there is still one more round to go.

  This cannot be good for anyone, this container of cream cheese splayed open and congealing right there on the dresser, next to the television set, where, in the bowels of the Delta Wing, a college hockey game is playing on low volume. But then, no one is paying much attention to the proliferation of rancid dairy products, or to the hockey game, or to the do-rags and towels and backpacks lying on the floor, or to the empty pizza boxes left on the cot that’s been set up next to the window. There is a card game going on (a four-person round of Stupid involving Oscar, Shawn, Sal, and Willy), and there is a blitz game going on between Nile and Ilya when Alex comes in from the room down the hall he’s sharing with his father and says, “I’m sorry.” It is a general apology, and it is tinged with self-pity, and when someone asks Alex why he’s apologizing, he says, “I don’t know any openings. I’m just a thirty-minute player.” Then he says, “I hope no one else prepares for my opening. I’m not bad, but I’m not twenty-four-hundred strength.”

  This burst of sincerity is enough to halt the card game for a moment. “Alex,” Oscar says, “we have to talk. Just because you lost the game doesn’t mean you’re not twenty-four-hundred strength.”

  Sal says nothing.

  It’s 6:37, twenty-three minutes until the start of Round Five, and Alex wants to get downstairs early, wants to get back to business, but no one is willing to go with him and sit in that dreary and overly air-conditioned airplane hangar a moment longer than they have to. Ilya has finished playing and is taking a catnap now, lying back on the bed in a supremely uncomfortable position, his feet planted firmly on the floor. And Oscar can’t find his shoe. He’s lost his shoe. Guys, guys, this isn’t funny, where’s my shoe? But nobody has Oscar’s shoe, and even if they do, they’re not telling. He sweeps up the bedspread and peers underneath it, and he lifts up the pizza boxes, and he pushes the cream cheese aside—ecch!—and peeks behind the dresser and pokes his head underneath the television set. Still no shoe. How can he play chess with one shoe? “Guys, where’s my shoe?” he says. It’s ten minutes to seven and everyone else is on their way downstairs and Oscar is starting to think that maybe he’ll have to hop all the way down there. “Maybe Dalphe ate your shoe,” Sal says. “He ate everything else.” They’re all watching the last few minutes of this college hockey game, not that they could care less who wins or loses, but this is their method of preparation: vegetation meditation. Numb your mind before you actually use it. And when the clock runs out on the game, Oscar sweeps an arm under the bed one last time and finally extracts . . . his other shoe! And they make the long trip downstairs, through the halls, past the river—

  “There’s ducks in that pond,” Oscar says.

  “Ducks?” Shawn says. “Where the ducks? You crazy. Ain’t no ducks in there.”

  “Right there,” Oscar says. He points toward an amorphous blob underneath a brackish patch of vegetation. Shawn squints at it. Nuhuh. No way. Ducks? In a hotel?

  “Yo, ducks ain’t down there.”

  “Yeah, they are.”

  “Ducks are mad retarded, yo. They were down there, they’d get hit by one of them boats.”

  “You’re retarded.”

  “Whatever.”

  Catalina Foothills High School, founded in 1992, is set on forty-six acres on the outskirts of Tucson in the midst of what was once a sparse desert and has become yet another thriving suburban American community. In 2003, Robby Adamson, a FIDE Master who also works full-time as a lawyer, took over the school’s chess program—or what there was of it—and began recruiting the best young talent in the area. Many of his top players came from Orange Grove, a nearby middle school with a venerable chess program started by a master named Will Wharton, who won multiple national championships in the mid- 1980s. But just as Eliot Weiss was bequeathed the gift of Sal Bercys, Adamson also had a minor miracle drop into his district: A few years earlier, Landon Brownell and his brother, Bryant, both of whom are home-schooled, moved to Tucson. They live there during the school year and spend their summers in Oregon. (Their father, Roger, is also working as an official at this tournament.) So Adamson brought in the Brownells, and he found Sean Higgins, a brilliant student whose mother happened to be a teacher at Catalina Foothills (she has since quit and taken a job at Raytheon, a defense contractor and one of the area’s major employers), and he found Christopher De Sa, a math and engineering whiz who took to the game like a natural, and he found Pavel Savine, another brilliant student, and he found Vaishnav Aradhyula, who had been playing since kindergarten. And then he began to drill them, once a week after he got through with work, and in private lessons on the weekends, and whenever he could, all on his own. The school pays him twelve hundred dollars a year for his efforts; the money to pay for this trip came from the kids’ own families. So he spends all this time essentially doing pro bono work, analyzing championship scenarios and going over games and building up their mental toughness and their self-assuredness. “The school doesn’t get it,” Adamson says. “They just don’t care. They want the chess club to be just like the sewing club. But I’m competitive, man. I want to win.”

  The students at Murrow refer to their out-of-state competition at these tournaments in the vaguest of terms: One year the threat came from Texas, another year from Philadelphia. Often, it is the same schools who are up at the top with Murrow, over and over again, but this Arizona team—this is a new one.

  “We beat Arizona,” Mr. Weiss says, “and we’ll beat everyone else.”

  “I think he’s preparing for me,” Sal whispers.

  Not that it would make much of a difference at this point. That Sal’s opponent is twenty minutes late to the board won’t mean a thing because now that he’s drawn a game (How did that happen? Carelessness! A moment of overconfidence slipping in, perhaps . . . ) and Lenderman has lost a game and the outcome is in doubt, Sal has a purpose. He’s the coolest kid in the room, strolling back and forth from board to board,
kibitzing with officials, chatting up Hikaru Nakamura (who’s strutting between the aisles looking in on the games), and continuing to upset the woman whose job it is to enforce order in this room. It seems likely that Sal is largely responsible for the signs that have gone up around the hangar, growing more restrictive by the hour: NO WALKING IN THE AISLES, NO SPECTATORS IN THE FRONT OF THE ROOM, NO TALKING TO PLAYERS DURING GAMES. But if Sal can’t talk, he’ll mime. He’ll empty his pockets and dig out a reminder card for his last orthodontist appointment and then crumple it up in his fist as a display of strength. And he’ll wait, and he’ll wait, tightening his grip like the dentist does every month with that goddamn hardware in his mouth, and when the moment is right, poor Arturo Garcia, an 1883 from Texas, won’t even know what hit him.

  Round Five is something of a return to form: Sal and Alex both win easily, and Nile, Oscar, and Ilya all win too, and although Willy can’t pull off another upset over Blake Phillips, an apple-cheeked 2001 from Oregon, Dalphe upsets Jason Kalivas, an 1829 from Oklahoma who insists on wearing Ray-Bans from start to finish. All of a sudden it’s Dalphe, with four points, who’s taking on a crucial role in the scoring, who seems to have rediscovered the promise that carried him through middle school. He set a trap, let the kid with the sunglasses fork his queen and his rook, then sacrificed his rook and attacked hard with his queen.

  Problem is, Arizona keeps winning too. They’re up by a point, 16.5 to 15.5, as Shawn’s game drags on deep into the evening. He’s playing a girl, a cute girl from Oklahoma, with long blond hair and narrow cheekbones, and no doubt this is distracting, because when you’re a teenaged boy and you’ve been playing competitive chess for twelve hours how can it not be distracting? They exchange queens, and at twenty minutes past nine, the girl offers a draw. Shawn doesn’t want a draw, because this girl (named Destiny Sawyer) is only a 1661, three hundred points lower than him, but a couple of minutes later he realizes he has no choice. And he accepts. And heading into the last day, Murrow finds itself half a point short, and Eliot Weiss cannot help but go to sleep thinking of 2000 and 2001, of those two consecutive years when a half point stood between his team and first place.

  Sunday morning the hangar suddenly seems much smaller, and the oxygen in the biosphere feels more stale, and the atmosphere is tighter and quieter. Round Six begins at 9:00 A.M., and the players are greeted by yet another new restriction: PLAYERS TALKING TO COACHES OR TEAMMATES WITHOUT PERMISSION WILL LOSE CLOCK TIME AT THE DISCRETION OF THE TOURNAMENT DIRECTOR. There have been anonymous accusations of cheating, as there always are, and now that they are in the final rounds, there is no more kibitzing, no more hovering over others’ boards, no more bullshit permitted. Today, Hikaru Nakamura has been denied special access to walk among the top boards. Today, even Sal is muted. Today is different. The silence is overbearing. The paranoia is heightened. Today is as much about one’s own fortitude and inner peace and self-discipline as it is about hard knowledge. It is, as Robby Adamson has told his players, an endurance test.

  “The thing about being a good player is you can’t be hypocritical,” says Josh Waitzkin, who won a national high-school championship in 1991. “Under the pressure, if you have some psychological bubble, something you haven’t dealt with, it’s going to come up. If you’re addicted to comfort in any way, you can’t be a good chess player. You have to be at peace with chaos.”

  Some, like Sal, who dispatches Kazim Gulamali, a 2203 from Georgia, without much trouble, seem to embrace this disorder. Others, like Alex, who can manage only a draw against Robert Brady, a 1911 from Virginia, have lost their way temporarily. It happens, in the way a golfer can lose his swing on the final day of a major tournament. It’s happened with Willy, too, who draws with Ran-De Rogers, a 1334 from New York’s Hunter High School, the kind of kid he could crush at a Right Move event but can’t seem to find a way to beat here, on the last day of the nationals, with the pressure bearing down on him.

  As usual, when Shawn stares at the board, his face is blank, even here, even now, on the last day of the national tournament, having extracted himself from a position that seemed hopelessly lost. No way he could win this game. But this kid, Nathaniel Boggs, a 1635 from Indiana with a flannel shirt and a preternatural beard . . . well, let’s just say he missed his chance. He missed several chances. He was crushing Shawn and he blew it, and now that this game has generated into something entirely unpredictable, something chaotic, Shawn has discovered a way back.

  By half past noon, it’s becoming clear that if Shawn loses, Murrow’s deficit heading into the final round will be almost insurmountable, at least one and a half points. There is no room to play for the draw, even, which means Shawn must go straight at this kid. And he does. Playing with white, Shawn flanks his queen and traps his king in a corner and the kid’s time dwindles down under a minute, down under thirty seconds, down under fifteen, down to eight seconds. That’s when Shawn unveils a wicked combination, and in a matter of seconds, he takes a queen, takes a bishop, takes both rooks, and forces his opponent to resign. It is 12:59 in the afternoon and Murrow is still alive, and so is Shawn, who’s wobbling a little but trying to play it cool. Up the stairs he ambles, keeping an eye out for ducks in the artificial river. He rides up a couple more floors in the elevator and bursts into the room where his teammates (who, instead of watching the final hour of his game, went upstairs to continue their latest round of Stupid) are assuming that he’s brought bad news with him.

  “I won,” he says, nearly swallowing the words.

  “What?” Sal says. “You won?”

  “How did you win?” Oscar says.

  And Shawn tells them. The kid fucked up, he says, and then he fucked up again, and finally he fucked up one too many times. Into the room comes Mr. Weiss, who, moments before, according to Oscar, had been “mad tight,” who now sees a glimmer of hope for one more national championship.

  Sal puts down his cards. He shakes Shawn’s hand. “You’re a hero,” he says.

  “A fat hero,” Oscar says.

  “A meatball hero,” Mr. Weiss says.

  It’s Shawn who laughs hardest of all at that one. They can call him anything they want right now. At this moment, maybe for the first time in his life, he has realized his own capabilities.

  The cream cheese is gone by now, and in its place is a half-eaten sliver of overpriced cheesecake, covered in plastic wrap and left to its own devices. There are practice SAT tests strewn across the floor (Ilya—who else?) and there are several dozen empty cups, a case of Coca-Cola, an open bottle of Scope, and a half-eaten bag of doughnuts on the nightstand. There are boxes of congealed cold pizza on the bed, and Oscar is indulging in one of these pieces, even though it has sat out all night, because what’s the difference, really? Pizza is pizza. And into this chaos comes Alex, who apologizes once more, this time because he’s “the only one who’s not playing well.”

  Sal says nothing. No doubt, part of him enjoys seeing a little humility from Alex, but a bigger part of him does not want to lose here. A couple of minutes earlier, Sal had turned to Shawn and, after dealing him in for the next round of Stupid, said, “Shawn, please don’t play bad this round. You know we need a solid game.”

  “There’s nothing better to prepare for a game than playing Stupid,” Shawn replied.

  “Yep,” Sal said. “Nothing like losing your money.”

  Something’s happening here. In the past twenty-four hours, this has become Sal’s team. The petulant superstar who didn’t want to waste his time meeting the president, who seemed entirely disinterested in the concept of chess as a team sport, is now in charge. And why? Because he remembers what it was like, all those times he should have won, back in Lithuania, and didn’t win. Because there’s no excuse for bad play, and there’s no reason this team should lose to a bunch of nobodies from a remote desert in a state Sal couldn’t begin to locate on a map. “We’re leaving here at fifteen minutes to two,” he declares. “Because by the time we get down there it’s gonn
a take, like, ten more minutes.”

  His last game had not been as easy as he made it look; his opponent is an expert at Bughouse chess, and it took quite some time for Sal to figure out a way to dispatch him. He’s tired, but that doesn’t matter right now, and though he’ll be playing at the top table this round, he doesn’t seem concerned about this anymore either. When Ilya looks up the Round Seven pairings on his laptop and Sal sees he’s playing Ruixin Yang, a 2152 from Virginia, he can hardly contain himself.

  “I’m going to crush him,” Sal says. “When I go for the win, I go for the win.”

  A housekeeper knocks on the door at 1:45. This is their cue. They leave, and she takes their place within this petri dish, trying to stifle her horror. On the way down, the elevator stops at every single floor. The last time this happened, Willy says, everybody won their game. So maybe it’s a sign.

  They exit, and walk past the river. No ducks. Even if there were, Shawn is too preoccupied to look for them. “My head is spinning, man,” he says. “This is, like, too much. Last round of Supernationals.”

  “I haven’t been this nervous since, like, the first round,” Willy says.

  The deficit is a single point, the difference between one victory and one loss: Catalina Foothills has 19.5, Murrow 18.5. The good news for Murrow is that they have easier matchups: Four of Arizona’s six team members are facing higher-rated players. “We got nailed on those pairings,” Robby Adamson would say later. Sal and Alex are both playing down, and while Shawn and Dalphe are playing up, Willy (facing Deepyman Datta, the 2058 from Texas who drew Sal) and Oscar (playing down against Daniel Pflughoeft, a 1521 from Wisconsin) are the wildcards. The individual scores look like this: