Game of Kings

by Michael Weinreb

  August in the city is unbearable, and in the snake pit of Washington Square there is no respite from the heat. It slices straight on through the shade trees and chars the asphalt and beats down upon the chessboards and then just lies there. A man saunters past tugging a listless mutt tethered to a makeshift leash and a cooler full of cold drinks stacked on a dolly. “Water one dollar, Snapple a buck fifty,” he is saying, and on a day like this it seems like as good a deal as you’ll find in the entire city. So the hustlers, some shirtless, some homeless, get up from their tables, clutching wrinkled dollar bills, while Shawn Martinez, bored by the lack of action, keeps letting go with a whistle. It is a soft warble that escapes from between his teeth with a sound like a malfunctioning smoke alarm.

  The whistle is Shawn’s feeble attempt to attract attention to his chessboard without actually moving, his way of reeling in a fish and getting a game going and making some money. But it’s Wednesday afternoon, and most of the people wandering through the park are either curious tourists more interested in gawking at games in progress or NYU coeds, who provide the scenery but present no real revenue potential. The boards are arranged in a circle broken by a series of footpaths, and a college-aged kid wearing sneakers and blue shorts wanders through the radius of the circle chirping, “Che-essss, che-esss, che-esss,” his voice rising and falling on largely deaf ears.

  “You ain’t gonna make money doing that, just repeating that over and over again,” says Angel Lopez. Angel’s here to visit Shawn, and he’s here because he just took a lesson from a master at the Marshall Chess Club for sixty bucks, money that Shawn doesn’t have.

  “Che-ess, che-ess,” the college kid says.

  Angel would like to go home. It’s hotter than hell and he’s hungry and he sees no reason to stick around here, but Shawn’s got himself a board within the circle (something that takes a little resourcefulness, since the regulars “reserve” certain boards) and he’d like to make some money today, and a lot of the best players come out here in the evening after work. So he ain’t going nowhere. He’s rooted on the bench at his spot, wearing a pair of denim shorts that fall below his massive knees, his plastic chess pieces and his game clock all set up and ready to go.

  “I ain’t staying till nine o’clock,” Angel says.

  “Why not?” Shawn says.

  “Because it’s whack, dude. Because you retah-ded to do that.”

  “You retah-ded. Go get me a McChicken. You staying over at my place tonight?”

  “I dunno,” Angel says.

  Because there’s nothing else to do, they start playing blitz against each other. They’re rated nearly the same, in the 1900s, and they’re laughing and calling each other ducks and patzes, short for “patzer,” the nickname for a novice player made famous in the outdoor scenes in Searching for Bobby Fischer, which were filmed in this same section of the park and have made it perhaps the best-known outdoor chess space in the world. It has become both a tourist attraction and a place of business for the regulars, who claim their tables within the circle and sit there all day, smoking blunts and staring at the sky and listening to Kind of Blue on a boom box and living for those moments when they can show some poor fish just how the game is played out in the streets. The game is cutthroat out here: The trash talk comes in a steady stream, and cheating is common, if not expected (it isn’t so hard, in a speed game, to nudge a piece to another square when no one’s looking, or to slide your bishop down the wrong diagonal to capture a piece). And just as street basketball has its sad and cautionary tales of great talents who never lived up to their potential, so does Washington Square Park have its share of brilliant head cases who can break down complex lines of attack but can’t hold down a full-time job.

  “Who’s the best player here?” Shawn says. “In blitz, right now, it’s me.” But in longer games, over-the-board games, it’s the Russian guy over at the far end of the circle. Nobody here would dispute this. The man is the prototype of a hobo; he has a flea-bitten gray beard and his belongings are stacked on a pushcart next to his seat, and there is an empty carton of orange juice at his side. He’s sitting alone for the moment, jotting notes on a scrap of paper and muttering to himself like a Dostoevsky character. “Dude comes with crazy stuff,” Shawn says. “He’s homeless. He, like, basically lives here. He sleeps here. That’s why he gets the same table every day. And he don’t play for money. He charges you to play him.”

  Shawn’s learned all of this because he’s spent his entire summer playing outdoors. Until a couple of weeks ago, his regular spot was in Brooklyn, at Mount Olympus, but the action got tired there. Not enough competition. Not enough money changing hands. The games would go on late into the night, the scene eventually shifting to the back tables at the Wendy’s down the street, but Shawn craved something more. He wanted to make some money, since this is the only financial conduit he has. The past few weeks, he’s been coming here at ten or eleven each morning, depending on whether his mom lets him go, and then staying through the evening, surrounded by questionable characters with questionable motives and questionable ethics. “My mom don’t mind,” he says. “She minds me playing for money, but what’s she gonna do?”

  Beyond the question of whether this is the best atmosphere for any impressionable teenager, there is a split among chess teachers as to whether speed games and blitz games, the kind of lightning-round chess you see on ICC and in the park, are good for a burgeoning child’s development. The countervailing argument, of course, is that speed chess prepares you in all the wrong ways, that it’s the equivalent of running sprints to train for a marathon. But then, isn’t running sprints, or playing in a pickup basketball game, better than doing nothing at all?

  “The fact is, if you want to be a good player, you’ve got to be a fighter,” says Josh Waitzkin, who spent a large part of his formative years playing in Washington Square. “Playing at the park can really toughen you up. You have to deal with all the banter, figure out how not to get hustled; it’s good for concentration too.”

  Josh Weinstein—who, like Waitzkin, learned to play chess at Dalton, and then grew disenchanted with the private-school atmosphere—has been coming here since his dad brought him in the sixth grade. Soon after, his father started bankrolling a few of the regulars, buying them meals in order to keep his son safe. One guy in particular, named Earl, has been looking out for this little Jewish kid for years now. He still lets Weinstein use his table, and now that he’s on his way to Princeton, as an aspiring congressman, he thought he’d do something . . . well . . . diplomatic with his last summer. He’s got a flyer he’s giving out to the fish who approach him:

  Welcome to my table!

  My name is Josh Weinstein, recent graduate of Stuyvesant High School and I will be attending Princeton in the fall. At Stuy, I was captain of the chess team, one-time state high-school co-champion and one-time national speed chess (5-minute) high school champion.

  I have come up with a crazy idea to give out free chess lessons to any and all passerby and accept donations on behalf of a charity of my choice. At the end of the summer, I will give all the money I have earned to New York Cares. . . . My acts of volunteerism and community service stem primarily from boredom, a desire to teach/expose chess, and raise money for a needy cause.

  According to his tally, Shawn, who’s his own needy cause, made over three hundred dollars last week. He plans on giving a cut of that to his mom, if she’ll take it. Last Friday and Saturday—the weekends are the best time, obviously—he fended off a steady stream of challengers. He beat a couple of masters, some Filipino IM yesterday and another guy the day before who said his rating was 2250. He beat a few Irish tourists. He beat some Wall Street suit, a CPA or something, taking in ninety dollars from him in the course of an hour. Afterward, the dude mentioned something about sponsoring Shawn so he could take lessons. But now, a few days later, Shawn can’t even remember the guy’s name.

  It takes a couple of idle hours, but at seven-thirty, with the sun
falling and the heat loosening its grip, Shawn hooks a fish. Dude—get this—is wearing a Day-Glo orange ensemble, the hat turned backward and paired up with the oversized T-shirt. They play blitz, three minutes to a side on the clock; it takes Shawn one minute four seconds to checkmate him. The Day-Glo man asks for a rematch, this time with no clock. Shawn mates him once more. They play blitz again; this time, Shawn puts one minute on his clock and gives Day-Glo man three minutes. Shawn queens a pair of pawns and mates him again. The after-work crowd threads through the radius of the circle, carrying their briefcases and their book bags, folding pizza crusts into their mouths, shrugging off the come-ons from the regulars in the snake pit. At the next table, three men are smoking Newports and finishing off a contentious game of dominoes.

  Right then, Nile wanders into the circle, looking for Shawn. He’s got a summer job working for his dad’s friend at a real-estate office in downtown Brooklyn, but he’s been playing in some adult tournaments in Brooklyn Heights with Shawn (ten dollars, ten-minute games, and Nile and Shawn have each taken home about forty bucks for a first-place finish), and he’s already elevated his game, and by the end of the summer he’ll be up above 1700 and on his way above 1800. Nile can’t stay too long out here, anyway; he’s got a curfew, and he’s far too introspective to really fit into this scene. He’s here because Shawn’s here, because Shawn’s his mouthpiece.

  When it’s over, when the Day-Glo man finally concedes and moves out of the circle, Shawn has won ten dollars in the course of fifteen minutes.

  “Certified chess hustler,” he says. “That’s me.”

  Nobody’s seen Willy for most of the summer because Willy’s been in Martinique visiting his father and his aunts and uncles. It’s the first time he’s seen his dad in twelve years, since they left the island to come to New York. He kept saying he’d make it up there one year around Christmastime, but he never did, so Willy’s mom has sent him down there alone (his sister was supposed to go, too, now that she’s back living at home, but her green card doesn’t arrive until a week after Willy departs). He’d never traveled anywhere by himself; he’d always been with a chess team. He’d always spend the whole flight playing cards with Oscar, but this time, he watches the in-flight movie and he watches cartoons and he sleeps, and when he wakes up everyone is yammering away in French. And because Willy has a French passport, all the flight attendants start speaking French to him too. For the first time in his life, he’s on his own, lost in a strange new world.

  That same week, in the town of Belfort, France, Alex Lenderman, playing at the same World Youth Championship event that had torn down Sal’s ego the year before, in the under-sixteen division against the best young players in the world, becomes the first American in recent memory to win a gold medal. The achievement lands him on the cover of Chess Life, the U.S. Chess Federation’s monthly magazine, and wins Alex a new level of renown. “. . . Lenderman’s victory is a real cause for celebration, a long-awaited sign that Nakamura may have some company in his ascent up the ratings charts,” writes David R. Sands, the chess columnist for The Washington Times.

  When Sal hears of this, he is appalled. He is indignant. He refuses to accept that such a thing could have occurred without certain improprieties. “The year I played,” he says, “it was much tougher.”

  A short time later, Alex delivers a lecture about his victory at the Marshall Chess Club. When Sal shows up with a friend of his to watch, Alex says, “I guess this means you respect me.” And this only inflames things further. Respect is not something you get, Sal wants to tell him. Respect is something you earn. And Alex keeps inflaming his anger, keeps saying that Sal is badmouthing him to his friends, that Sal is conspiring against him, and Sal says Alex keeps insulting his friends, that in the wake of his victory he’s the one who’s gotten too cocky and overconfident. “He’s done a lot of stuff,” Sal says. “I can’t even remember how much stuff he did.”

  In the months to come, Ilya will take regular lessons from an SAT tutor, and he will apply to several of his dream schools, including Georgetown and MIT. He will appeal to both George W. Bush and Michael Bloomberg, the New York mayor, for letters of recommendation. He will improve his board scores to 1890 (710 math, 600 verbal, and 580 on the writing exam) and he will write several application essays about his experiences as the captain of the best chess team in the nation. He will travel to Vermont with Willy to play in the Green Mountain Open, which will turn out to be a “complete disaster.” He will go to Boston for a second interview with MIT and get just as far along with Georgetown, and then in March of 2006, after all those months of waiting, of hoping like hell that he’s finally found his ticket out of Brooklyn, he will receive a pair of thin envelopes in the mail thanking him for his application, but the numbers were overwhelming, more applications every year, etc., etc. One of his friends at Murrow, whose grades are not as good, will wind up with scholarship offers at both Columbia and NYU’s Stern Business School, and another of his classmates, a social misfit who goes around licking the floor—“Really,” Ilya says. “He literally licks the floor”—will get accepted at Brown. But Ilya will get only one offer, a full scholarship at Baruch College in Manhattan, part of the City University system. It is a well-respected school, but it is not MIT, and it is not Georgetown. For many of the kids who wind up at Baruch, it is a safety school, and this is what bothers Ilya the most: Here he is, intelligent, hardworking, meticulously prepared, and willing to do whatever it takes to succeed in this nation, and he’ll wind up in class next to some kid who slunk through a mediocre high school withaC average and somehow got accepted to Baruch as well.

  As always, Ilya will take a pragmatic approach to his failure. In a year or two, as soon as he can, he figures he’ll try to transfer. Until then, he’ll have to deal with his disappointment by making self-deprecating and (and vaguely morbid) jokes about his plight. From his time working amid the daily drudgery at Washington Mutual Bank, he will say, he has learned that there are two types of people in this world—the annoying customer and the disgruntled employee who must deal with the annoying customer. So he’ll study business, even though he hates business, because he still can’t see any way to make money by studying physics, and maybe someday, if all goes right, if everything works out perfectly . . . well, then he’ll become the disgruntled employee. After he says this, he will laugh, presumably at the starkness of his own vision. All these years immersed in the game, all these ups and downs, and he is just now learning to come to terms with defeat. “None of the colleges that I wanted have accepted me,” he’ll say. “But that’s life, I guess.”

  And just as it does at Edward R. Murrow High School, one cycle leads directly into the next. Soon enough, someone else will become the captain of this team, and someone else will be charged with holding together this disparate band of eccentrics, and amid the shifting environment at Murrow High School, Eliot Weiss’s quiet little club will soldier on through its third decade of existence. In the fall, another group of newbies will gather in Room 446 for the first of the Thursday-afternoon meetings, and Eliot Weiss will assure them that they are in the right place, that yes, this is chess, and if they give themselves over to it, this game will change their lives.

  EPILOGUE

  The 2006 National High School Chess Championships were held in late April in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, sharing space in the city’s downtown convention center with a Harley-Davidson executive training session, a concurrence of events that led to some surreal interminglings in the elevators of the adjacent Hilton. Once again, Eliot Weiss treated his team the day before the tournament by exposing them to the vagaries of the alcohol-fermentation process, this time at the Miller Brewery, where Sal would later claim to have nearly suffocated on yeast fumes. Once again, the tournament came down to the final moments of the seventh and final round, and once again, it came down to Edward R. Murrow High School of Brooklyn, New York, and Catalina Foothills High School of Tucson, Arizona. And once again, Eliot Weiss found himself watc
hing a boy he had never met play a game of chess against another boy he had never met, with his program’s reputation dependent upon the result.

  Twice in five minutes, a pair of overly fastidious tournament officials had come along and ordered Mr. Weiss to move his feet back several inches, behind the line of masking tape demarcating the rows of chess tables from the area reserved for spectators. (It happened so often that weekend that some of the parents in the room took to calling the tournament director, the same copper-haired woman who had policed the room the year before at Supernationals, by the nickname of “Mrs. Hitler.”) But Mr. Weiss did not oblige them by moving back. Instead, like the New Yorker that he was and had always been, he leaned in farther, to get a better look at the clock. Sixteen seconds remained on the side of Vaishnav Aradhyula, a sophomore in an Arizona Diamondbacks cap who was the last of the Catalina Foothills players to finish his game. Because Murrow led by one point, the only way for Catalina Foothills to salvage a tie in the team competition, and to win once again on tiebreakers, would have been for Aradhyula to somehow keep on making moves within the five-second delay on his clock and salvage a victory from a game that appeared, by all accounts, to be a dead draw.