Game of Kings

by Michael Weinreb

  Murrow (current top four):

  Sal, 5.5

  Alex, 4.5

  Shawn, 4.5

  Dalphe, 4.0

  Willy, 3.5

  Oscar, 3.5

  Ilya, 3.0

  Nile, 2.5

  Catalina Foothills (current top four):

  Landon Brownell (2007), 5.5

  Sean Higgins (1940), 5.0

  Christopher De Sa (1912), 4.5

  Pavel Savine (1796), 4.5

  Vaishnav Aradhyula (2071), 4.0

  Bryant Brownell (1826), 4.0

  “I’m playing Weinstein?” Shawn says. He hadn’t looked at the pairings when Ilya pulled them up on his computer back in the room. He’s seeing only them now, and he’s seeing his name listed across from Josh Weinstein, Stuyvesant, and he’s thinking, Christ, why couldn’t I be playing a stranger (and preferably a stranger who isn’t rated a hundred and fifty points higher)?

  “Yo, you can beat him, dawg,” Oscar says. “Willy beat him.” Which isn’t true, of course, although it’s almost true, since Willy should have beaten Weinstein at states before he didn’t beat Weinstein. And Ilya did beat him, after all, so maybe Weinstein is merely the roadblock each member of this team has to defeat in order to break through. Maybe this is Shawn’s moment. Except he can’t help but be scared half to death; after all, here’s this handsome and articulate and gregarious and popular and well-connected kid sitting across from him in his Princeton hoodie, representing everything that Shawn is not and probably never will be, and if that’s not a mindfuck, then nothing is.

  It’s not pretty, what transpires over the next hour. Shawn is overwhelmed from the beginning. He’ll be fifteen years old in a couple of weeks and nothing in his life has ever felt like this; never before has he been counted on in this way. Weinstein’s playing loose and free, because he’s a senior, because this is his last game, because Stuyvesant’s on its way to finishing somewhere in the top ten but nowhere near Murrow. He’s eating saltines and drinking Powerade and kibitzing with Sal between moves. By 3:15, Shawn has lost his queen, and he’s up and walking around and shaking his head and covering his eyes with the black baseball cap he’s been wearing all week. It’s a lost game. And Dalphe, playing Brian Kostrinsky, an 1884 from Georgia, has a losing game as well.

  “Go win your championship,” Weinstein whispers at Sal, when they both get up to stretch their legs and pass each other in the aisle.

  “We can’t win,” Sal says. “Our third and fourth boards are losing. We can’t win.”

  “What about the individual championship?”

  “I don’t care about that,” Sal hisses back. “That title sucks.”

  Within fifteen minutes, Shawn has resigned, and Dalphe’s in trouble, way down on material, his arms crossed in front of his face, his head down on the table, and those huge eyes staring straight through the board. No chance. It’s over. “This sucks,” Sal says. “We are done.”

  It would seem not to matter that Oscar is going to win, and is going to break his own record for best performance at nationals by finishing with 4.5 points. And it would seem not to matter that Willy, while playing for the draw, has wound up losing. And it would seem not to matter that the kids from Arizona are just as tight as the kids from Murrow, that one of them, Christopher De Sa, is chewing on a voluminous wad of toilet paper to calm his nerves, and another, Sean Higgins, has masticated his pen cap to shreds. It’s over, as far as Sal is concerned. Murrow is done. At 5:00 P.M., with his game hopelessly entangled and his mind beginning to wander, Sal does the unthinkable: He offers a draw. His opponent, who is much more concerned with the material notion of an individual national championship, has to stop his clock and leave the table and attempt to find a tournament director, who can explain exactly how the tiebreak system works, and whether if, by drawing this game, he can still finish tied for first place.

  “I had a dream like this,” Sal says. “That we’d go to nationals and place second.”

  He sighs. What he does not realize—what he cannot possibly realize—is that just by dreaming of such a moment, just by caring enough for such angst to creep into his subconscious, he has left behind the old Sal, the overconfident Sal, the Sal who, with his inscrutability and his self-regard, could not help but evoke the image of a young Bobby Fischer.

  “Now,” Sal says, “my dream is coming true.”

  Ten odd and anticlimactic minutes later, Sal’s opponent agrees to the draw. And now, it would seem, there is no hope. After Alex defeats Rory Wasiolek, a 1984 from Pennsylvania, Murrow’s top four now looks like this: Sal 6.0, Alex 5.5, Shawn 4.5, and Oscar 4.5, for a total of 20 points. After De Sa takes a draw and Aradhyula wins, Arizona already has 20 points, with two games still remaining, at adjacent boards: Landon Brownell is playing up against Kazim Gulami, a 2203 from Georgia, and Sean Higgins is playing up as well. If either of them wins—if either of them even manages a draw—then it’s truly and completely over.

  As an educator, this is a repellent situation to find yourself in, actively rooting for children to lose. But at this point, there is nothing else for Mr. Weiss to do. All the Murrow kids are upstairs, drowning their sorrows in poker wagers and bad television, and their coach sits in a plastic folding chair at the end of the aisle, watching the action on boards 203 and 204. When Brownell resigns, Weiss shakes his head. He says, “This is the same feeling I had those years when we lost by half a point.”

  There is one game remaining now, and it is all on Sean Higgins, a ruddy-faced sophomore in a T-shirt and cargo shorts, rated 1940, playing black against Thomas Gossell, a junior from Missouri with a blond brushcut, rated 2189. Time pressure is digging into Higgins, and that pen cap he’s been chewing looks like its been set upon by a pack of rabid Dobermans. He’s down under ten minutes, and the position is still complex enough that Higgins cannot ask for relief through the principle of insufficient losing chances.

  Gossell plays queen from b2 to b7, taking a pawn and threatening Higgins’s knight. (See diagram on the following page.)

  This is it: If Higgins moves the knight, Gossell can move in for checkmate. And Weiss sits there in his chair and watches the clock run down, and he watches this poor frantic boy from Arizona and tries not to think of anything, all while he’s thinking: Move the knight. Move the knight.

  Higgins moves a rook.

  And yet it’s enough to set off a chain reaction. Higgins takes a knight, Gossell takes a rook. Higgins’s clock is under two minutes. “That should be it,” Weiss says. It’s 5:50 in the afternoon and Sean Higgins has a losing position, and he offers his hand . . . he’s resigning!!! The national high-school championship will come down to . . . tiebreakers. But nobody seems to know what the tiebreakers are, or how they work. There’s nothing in the program about this. There’s no one in the room who has the answers to these questions.

  So Eliot Weiss bursts out the doors, skips up the stairs, and heads straight to the office of Chess Control, the tournament’s nerve center, which is where he asks a man behind the desk if, by any chance, he would happen to know what the tiebreakers might be for the high-school section. The man says he believes the first tiebreakers are cumulative, which, according to a clause in one tournament manual, means something like this:

  Cumulative

  In the event of a tie, compute each tied player’s cumulative tiebreaker by adding together the player’s total score at the end of each round. This should be easy for you to do, since you have already written this information down on the player’s pairing card. A player who scored 3 points by winning the first 3 rounds and losing the final game will have a cumulative tiebreaker of 1+2+3+3=9. A player who scored 3 points by losing in the first round and then winning the remaining three games will have a cumulative tiebreaker of 0+1+2+3=6. The player with the higher tiebreaker number wins the tiebreaker.

  After all that mental labor, all those hours of preparation, this whole season comes down to a math problem: Accumulate the cumulatives of your top four. It is silly,
and it is anticlimactic, but this is the problem with chess, and one of the reasons why it’s never found a more widespread audience: Its entire existence is grounded in an understanding of minutiae. The only other way to settle this would be for the teams to play a series of speed matches, and while that might be more exciting, it would raise a whole other set of concerns, like whether it’s fair for a tournament based on endurance and longevity to be decided with a series of split-second decisions, and so on.

  Instead, it comes down to math. And because Eliot Weiss has spent the last twenty years of his life doing math problems in his head, he thinks he has this one figured out. He thinks his team has won. He does not say this to the man behind the desk, when the man, in a pleasant voice, asks him what’s happening with the high-school section. He simply says that it’s come down to a pair of teams, one from New York, and the other from Arizona.

  “Catalina Foothills,” the man says. “That’s my son’s team.”

  For the first time, Eliot Weiss looks at the tag on the man’s lapel.

  His name is Roger Brownell.

  Up in the room, Shawn is trying to purge from his mind any memory of the past few hours. All he wants, at this moment, is to somehow be vindicated, to hear Mr. Weiss knock on the door to their room and walk in and tell them that they’ve won first place.

  And then it happens, just like that: Mr. Weiss knocks five times, and is let in, and tells them that, as far as he can figure it, they’ve won.

  “We what?” Sal says. “How is that possible?”

  The reaction in the room is subdued, almost incredulous. Some handshakes, a couple of muffled cheers, and then back to the card games. There is still one hour to go until the awards ceremony, until the results are made official, and no one can quite believe, after a performance as ragged as this one, that this championship truly belongs to them.

  He had done the math once, and he had done it again in the hour between six and seven, while he waited for the official numbers to come down. But even math teachers miscalculate, and what Mr. Weiss had neglected to take into account was the fact that in the final round, his top four players, the four whose scores counted toward the cumulative results, had changed. Oscar was now in his top four, and because Oscar had struggled early on, his cumulative scores are not as high as Dalphe’s or Willy’s, and because of that the numbers have undergone a seismic change.

  The awards ceremony for the K-12 section is held in Presidential Ballroom D, in an overcrowded corner of the biosphere. The room is full, but the standings still haven’t been posted. Nobody knows what’s going on for ten minutes, for fifteen minutes, and when the numbers go up, the people gather round and box each other out and no one can see anything and finally Mr. Weiss gets his head in there and feels the bile creeping up in the back of his throat. It’s not quite like 2000 all over again, not quite like 2001 all over again. This is altogether different: This time, Murrow has lost on the “cumulative” tiebreaker. The margin is four points, 88 to 84.

  “Officially,” Mr. Weiss says, “we’re cochampions.”

  But no one’s buying it. Especially Sal. He knows how this works. He’s been on the short end before. He knows there’s no such thing as a “cochampion” in chess. You win or you lose, and you abide by the tiebreakers, however esoteric they may be. Downstairs in the K-8 section, the same thing happened to I.S. 318; after several of their top boards accidentally slept through this morning’s round, they lost on tiebreakers, by two and a half points, to a team from Middle School 118, in the Bronx.

  So officially, both I.S. 318 and Murrow may declare themselves cochampions, yet according to the hard numbers, they’ve failed. It may sound cruel, but this game is rife with unkind possibilities, and coming to terms with one’s identity as a chess player involves coming to terms with one’s own shortcomings, not to mention the shortcomings of society itself. “I see parents all the time whose kids will lose and they’ll say, ‘You played really well,’ ” says Bruce Pandolfini. “But if you have a lot of ability and you know you didn’t play well, then you’re going to see right through that.”

  So they pose for photos, and they force smiles, and Robby Adamson, the coach at Catalina Foothills, says of Murrow, “The toughest thing we’ve had to do in our lives is beat that team.” He says, “As far as I’m concerned, the national championship shouldn’t be determined on tiebreakers, so we are cochampions,” and it’s all very cordial, but inside, they’re dying. “I can’t believe we make it this far,” Shawn says, “and then we lose on tiebreaks.” All they want is to get as far away from this room as possible and break the seal on the biosphere and taste fresh air once more.

  While there are not many long-held traditions on this team, there is one that has continued unbroken for more than a decade now at the conclusion of every national tournament in every city, whether it ends in a win, or in a loss, or in a muddled haze of numbers. Already, the calls have been made and reservations at the restaurant have been confirmed, and eight boys pile back into the white Econoline van with their coach and his family. They crack open the windows and gulp unfiltered oxygen for the first time in days, and then they make a bee-line to the nearest Chuck E. Cheese, so they can act like children for a little while longer.

  FIFTEEN

  SUMMERTIME

  THOSE LAST FEW WEEKS OF SCHOOL DRAG ON AND ON AND ON, AS THEY always do when the weather completes its slow turn to spring, and the students imprisoned in Room 446 for Eliot Weiss’s last cycle of math classes stare out the window and daydream of hitching a ride on the B train to Coney Island. Once his advanced class has taken the AP exam, Mr. Weiss holds their attention by reviewing casino-game odds and teaching them rudimentary card-counting techniques. Attendance at the Thursday after-school chess club meetings dwindles to a level somewhere between sparse and nonexistent and the flyers taped to the walls carry reminders of graduation and spring theater productions. And in his office on the first floor, one of the last members of the Murrow administration’s old guard is contemplating retirement. Four thousand students roam the hallways this spring, so many that the school has run out of lockers, and after twenty-eight years at this school, the last twenty-four as an assistant principal, Ron Weiss just can’t see things getting any easier.

  “In a school like this, with this type of environment, we cannot function with four thousand kids,” he says. “It’s not beneficial.”

  In the meantime, Murrow remains hopelessly overcrowded. The transfer policy, now stringently controlled by the Board of Education, has made it difficult for Eliot Weiss to keep recruiting good chess players with questionable report cards. (At one point, Willy and Shawn confronted their coach with a rumor that metal detectors were being installed near the front doors. For the moment, at least, it wasn’t true.) What’s happening at Murrow is endemic to American society in the early twenty-first century: How do you curtail certain freedoms and keep others in place? “At a certain juncture, the concept of Murrow would no longer be Murrow in its current philosophy,” Ron Weiss says. “We may have changed the whole structure of what Murrow is about and what it represents.”

  And these things that Murrow represents—that you can succeed in granting civil liberties to a large student body, that you can emphasize creativity and individuality without sacrificing self-discipline, that you can produce a national championship chess team in a school that is not a private academy and is not bounded by exclusivity like Stuyvesant or Bronx Science or Hunter—are the embodiment of Ron Weiss’s career as an educator. They’re the reasons he’s stayed all these years. And now what? Numbers, numbers, numbers. Where is Saul Bruckner’s vision headed today, in an era when education is defined quantitatively, by test scores and classroom hours and pass/fail percentages? With all this emphasis on small schools, on specialized schools, isn’t there something to be said for a place like Murrow, which has nine art teachers, all with a separate area of expertise?

  “It may continue, but it won’t be the same caliber, and it won’t be
the same quality,” Weiss says. Maybe some of this is lingering bitterness because, despite widespread support from the school’s teachers, he was passed over for the principal’s job when Bruckner retired (Lodico, an outsider, was hired instead), but there are times when he feels like a useless appendage. Sometimes, when people ask him what he does for a living these days, he tells them he’s the city’s highest-paid doorman. A few weeks after this school year ends, he will finalize his plans to retire and leave Murrow to the members of the new regime, who may do with it as they wish. “As people like Eliot and myself and Saul Bruckner move toward retirement, you can replace people, but when you lose that genre of thinking and that belief in education, you can never replace it. What does Eliot get for all his work with chess? Nothing. He does it for the kids. He’s so happy to get these kids some notoriety; you see his face, and he lights up with this stuff. For someone in private industry who had accomplishments like this, he’d be getting massive bonuses. But that feeling, that belief, is something you have to create. One of the things I prided myself on was never saying no to the kids. And I’m sure it will go on, but it won’t be the same.”

  The newspapers and the politicians know nothing of such things as cumulative tiebreaks. The newspapers and the politicians recognize yet another feel-good story when they see one, and when Eliot Weiss calls them up to say that his little public-school dynamo had won another national championship—if only, technically speaking, through a tie (never mind telling them that the tie was broken through numbers)—this was good enough for them. So the photo cutline in the “Your Neighborhood” section of the Daily News declared that Murrow “won the 2005 National High School Championship” and the story in the Brooklyn Skyline began, “They did it again,” and in late May, they make another of their regular visits to City Hall to be honored by their local congressman and the City Council. Along with a few of the newbies—including the foursome of Rex, Renwick, Robert, and Adalberto, who had begun this year with a vision of making the traveling team—only four of the regulars bother to show up: Dalphe (who brings a turkey sandwich with him), Willy (who is trying to finish Angela’s Ashes so he can pass one of his classes), Ilya (who has taken the SAT once, and done well enough, but wants to take it again), and Oscar, who insists that he has given up on gambling altogether.