Game of Kings

by Michael Weinreb

  “I don’t regret it at all,” he says.

  One Thursday in November, on the eve of Animated Character T-shirt Day at Murrow, the yearbook photographer shows up to shoot the chess club. A few of the regulars wander into the room, including Sal, who has just returned from a trip to Crete for the World Youth Championships, where he competed in the under-sixteen division. He finished in forty-eighth place out of 116 competitors. For Sal, this was a terrible performance. At one point, after he lost a game, he went to the cafeteria to get something to eat. When the waitress asked what he wanted, he asked her, “Do you serve scrambled brain?”

  “I played like crap,” he says. And this is pretty much the end of the discussion.

  Next week, Sal will leave for the U.S. Championships in San Diego. Most of the field of sixty-four qualifies at various tournaments throughout the year, but because Sal is one of the best young players in America, because he’s held his own against grandmasters and international masters in and around New York City, he’s been awarded a wild-card berth.

  Because of this, Sal is more fidgety than usual. He doesn’t have time to pose for a yearbook photo; he doesn’t have time for anything or anyone except school and chess, although when a girl who’s become a regular club attendee, a girl who also does some modeling work part-time, begins to ask him about his experiences, Sal mellows a little. She asks him about his trip. She asks Sal if he’s, like, some kind of genius or something.

  “Yeah,” Sal says. “I’m a genius, all right. I’m a stupid, lazy genius.”

  Like everyone else, she just can’t figure Sal. She can’t figure if he’s ever serious with anyone, and she can’t determine if his constant wise-cracking reeks of self-importance or self-flagellation or some improbable combination of the two. (It takes time to realize that most chess players, like many artists, are constantly bounding between these opposing poles.) So while Mr. Weiss attempts to round up his group of newbies and veterans and arrange them in the hallway so that the yearbook photographer can capture them for posterity with her digital camera, it is Ilya, the closest thing Sal has to a friend on the chess team, who admits he’s grown weary of Sal’s bizarre proclamations, of a personality that is both ingratiating and recalcitrant.

  “He’s very different from the other people,” Ilya says. “He doesn’t play anyone unless he thinks they’re as good as him.”

  “Can we do this picture already?” Sal is saying.

  “Who are we missing?” Mr. Weiss says.

  “Well, now we’re missing the photographer,” Sal says.

  Ilya rolls his eyes. “Sal thinks he’s Fischer, I guess,” he says.

  There are two cliques within the Murrow chess team: There are the five boys who came up through I.S. 318 and through Chess-in-the-Schools, one Haitian (Dalphe), one Caribbean islander (Willy), two Puerto Ricans (Oscar and Shawn), and one African-American (Nile). And there are the Russians: Sal and Alex and Ilya, who is the closest thing to an ambassador between the camps. This is true despite the fact that Ilya has little in common with anyone else, that he is far more mature, far more adult in his demeanor, far more forward-thinking than any of the others. At times, his teammates mock him behind his back. They don’t understand the way he dresses, and they don’t understand why he’d prefer to sleep or study sometimes between tournament rounds rather than engage in marathon games of poker or Stupid all the time. He is not a prodigy like Sal or Alex, and he is not a product of CIS like the others. He is the odd man out, but he is also the glue, and he is the one team member Mr. Weiss trusts to remember certain basic facts that tend to traverse posthaste between the ears of teenagers: dates, times, meeting places.

  “It’s Mr. Weiss who really keeps the team together,” Ilya says. “There’s a reason why other schools fall apart and Murrow stays together. Mr. Weiss does that. He takes care of finances. He keeps our team spirit up. He finds the right players. He knows who the good players are who are going to graduate from junior high in one or two years. He even helps us out with school. He’ll go talk to teachers about our grades. He’s how the team survives.”

  But why? Why would Mr. Weiss bother to do all those things when there’s nothing in it for him?

  “I wonder about that sometimes myself,” Ilya says.

  FOUR

  AN ACADEMIC CHALLENGE

  ELIOT WEISS, THE SON OF A BOOKKEEPER AND AN AIRPORT POSTAL worker, grew up in the East New York section of Brooklyn, on a street called Pennsylvania Avenue. He was a product of public schools himself: He attended Jefferson High and studied math at Brooklyn College for free, back when city students could attend city universities without paying tuition. He used to play chess even then, with his college classmates, but this was not his first love. Back before he found himself in this classroom at Murrow, transcribing equations rife with meaty variables and posing conundrums like Find all values of x for which f(x) has any relative minimum or relative maximum points, Eliot Weiss determined his angles on the ice.

  In a filing cabinet topped with a plump stack of calculus textbooks, Weiss keeps a mimeographed program from a semiprofessional hockey game, circa 1977. Inside, there is a blurred photo of a goal-tender with pads and a crossed stick, betraying a vaguely bemused expression. The hair is swept low across his narrow forehead. The face is framed by a neatly clipped beard. Underneath the photo, it reads: Weiss bears a certain resemblance to Paul Krugman, the renowned economist and columnist at The New York Times, and the walls of his classroom are adorned with cartoon paeans to great moments in math theory (Golden Ratio, Mayan Numerals). So it is easy to cultivate a notion that the man who presides over this room, a man who chose to spend his career at a school that shuns interscholastic sports, a man who cleans his chalkboards every afternoon and leaves behind strings of quadratic equations encircled in “Do Not Erase” cartoon bubbles, a man who wears cardigan sweaters and plays chess online for fun and has a cell phone that plays the Jeopardy! theme song, should be gawky and uncoordinated.

  Eliot Weiss—Goalie—Brooklyn College, 4 yrs.; New York Rovers,

  Mid-Eastern League, 1 year; New Jersey Rockets, 1/2 year;

  Newark Sabers, Ironbound, 1/2 years.

  But in his younger days, back when he was single and unfettered, after he’d gotten his master’s degree in math from Brooklyn College, and before he’d married a social worker and moved to Long Island and settled into his place in the nuclear family (one son, one daughter), Weiss clung to more whimsical odd jobs than a Dickens character. He taught math during the day and played hockey in the evenings. He sold beer at Madison Square Garden. For nine years, he drove a taxi at night. He was a ski instructor in Vermont; he led summer tours in Europe.

  And yet what he wanted, more than anything, as the seventies came to an end, was to find steady work as a math teacher. In 1979, while living off unemployment, he decided to take a proactive approach. That August, Weiss walked through the open front doors at Murrow, prepared to beg. He’d heard about the Murrow system. He’d heard of the school’s reputation. He figured this would be a good place to work. The building was deserted, except for the man sitting in the principal’s office. So Weiss marched right in and introduced himself and offered his résumé. “I’d like to teach here,” he said.

  And Saul Bruckner, being who he was, being a man who believed in the value of chutzpah, did not consider this an odd request at all. He looked over Weiss’s résumé and told him, “This is good.” He said, “We need math teachers.” He gave Weiss a letter of recommendation, and he gave Weiss his home phone number, and he told him to take the letter to the offices of the Board of Education. Which is what Weiss did.

  Because of the politics of the era, because of the whims of a school board determined to hire minorities to teach at predominantly white schools and whites to teach at minority schools, Weiss’s request was turned down. He called Bruckner at home from the board’s office. He asked if Bruckner would speak directly to the board president. Weiss pleaded, and he begged, but nothing could b
e done. So he wound up teaching that year at Marine Park Junior High School, and the following August, he went back to Murrow, and back to Bruckner, and he asked once more.

  Another letter. Another visit to the Board of Ed. Again, the board turned it down. Weiss spent a year as trainer for fifth-grade math teachers. He went back again in August of 1981, got another letter, made another visit, and finally got approved.

  Through it all, Weiss had continued to play chess. Never competitively, never on a team, but merely for his own amusement. Eventually, his rating settled at somewhere around 2000. And since no one else at Murrow High School, home of the Chinese Cultural Club and the Game Show Club, had thought to start a chess club, he took the same sort of initiative that had brought him to Murrow in the first place. He figured he might as well start it himself.

  The Edward R. Murrow High School chess club held its first meeting in the fall of 1983, soon after Weiss gave up his nighttime cab-driving shift, around the time Diane Ravitch visited Murrow and later wrote, in her American Scholar essay, that “the school’s philosophy is that no student should be discouraged from taking on an academic challenge.” Back then, the dominant chess program in Brooklyn was the one at James Madison High School, where a young prodigy named Joel Benjamin had chosen to attend. Benjamin’s father was the coach at Madison, and in 1981, Joel became the first player to win back-to-back individual championships at the high-school nationals in Philadelphia. That year, Madison lost the team title by half a point to Stuyvesant, an exclusive public school in Manhattan that draws some of the best students in the city.

  Weiss had no intention of competing with chess programs like these, or the ones at private schools like Dalton, on the Upper East Side. He had no real intention of his little club competing at all. They were a small group, and they spent their time reviewing games from magazines and newspaper columns and studying strategies and playing against each other. But the landscape of Brooklyn began shifting in the mid-1980s, driven by the imminent fall of Communism and the mass influx of Russian and Eastern European immigrants to communities like Brighton Beach and Bay Ridge and Midwood. The best and the brightest couldn’t afford to attend private school and didn’t want to attend subpar public schools in their neighborhood. They needed a school that would both accommodate them and challenge them. By the late 1980s, many of them had found Murrow. And in turn, Weiss had found them. In 1987, the club had twenty-five members, and they began to compete against local schools like Canarsie and Midwood and Sheepshead Bay and Midwood and Westinghouse.

  Murrow won its first city championship in 1989. They’ve never finished lower than second since then.

  “You should have an idea what to do, instead of just moving the pieces randomly to get a good position,” Mr. Weiss says at the second chess club meeting of the year. He’s wearing a yellow sweater vest over a dress shirt, and every so often he’ll indulge in stale jokes that mostly go unacknowledged by his audience, which this week numbers about a dozen. (“Is that your boyfriend?” he says, after a girl’s cell phone rings.) He is gifted with a dry sense of humor and a lack of pretense, qualities honed over more than twenty years of teaching. If he’s focused on playing a game or instructing an opening, he falls into a such a thick halo of concentration that he’ll fail to acknowledge a student’s request to use the bathroom.

  “If you have a bad opening,” he says, “you can’t win the game.” He explains that opening with the wrong pawn, with a pawn toward the end of the board instead of one of the two near the center, will only muddy one’s chances, and that even a novice player must understand that control of the center of the board is crucial. This is the thesis behind nearly all of the popular openings memorized and utilized by every level of player; white most often opens by moving one of the two center pawns forward two squares, to the locations known in modern notation as d4 and e4:

  Black then counters by attempting to negate that advantage, perhaps by moving one of his pawns out in a counterattack, or by moving out one of his knights from the back row (pawns, because of their relative weakness, are merely referred to by their proper name, while the rooks, pawns, knights, and queen are called pieces—the sum of one’s army is called material). Most often, Mr. Weiss explains, knights, because of their ability to jump from place to place, are developed before bishops, even though their relative value is the same:

  Pawns are worth one unit

  Knights are worth three units

  Bishops are worth three units

  Rooks are worth five units

  Queens are worth nine units

  So it makes no sense to exchange, say, a knight for a pawn, and it makes no sense to protect a pawn from capture with a queen, and it makes much more sense to castle early in the game. “Does everyone know what castling is?” Mr. Weiss says, and everyone nods, even though it is clear from the blankness of their stares that some of them have no idea. They don’t know you can move two pieces at once, shifting the rook in one direction and shuttling the king into the corner in order

  to play offense and defense at once, to both provide a safe place for the king to hide and to bring out a rook so it can attack more effectively.

  From there, the opening gives way to the middle game, the stage of back and forths, of exchanges and tactics and positioning. This is the stage when tactics like forks (attacking two of your opponent’s pieces at once with the same piece) and pins (a straight-line attack along a rank, file, or diagonal, in which one threatens an opponent’s piece that happens to be shielding another piece, forcing it to stay in place: Imagine your rook on the same file as your opponent’s queen, with only a knight positioned in-between—that knight is pinned) become so crucial. Now is when one must determine the lines and angles of attack (from the queen’s side? From the king’s side?) while maintaining a defensive presence (is my own king shielded?). The middle game is where theory and memorization of certain lines of attack often give way to innovation and improvisation, where thought must be given to the value of every exchange of material, and where the board slowly begins to simplify, until the queens are usually off the board and there are only a few pieces left, and the middle game transitions into the endgame.

  By then, one player often has an edge, and it is this player’s job to exploit this edge, to turn an advantage in material or an advantage in position into a victory, while the player with lesser material or a less-developed position does all he can to stave off defeat. Often, beginners don’t even make it this far, as the newbies are aware, from their early flailings. Often, experts and masters and grandmasters find themselves falling into inextricably drawn positions by this point: No one can win, and only a blunder can cause defeat, and it becomes a matter of simple fortitude. But there are other times when one player or the other has the slightest edge, perhaps a single pawn in a more advantageous place, and these pawns are advanced toward the opponent’s back rank in the hope of transforming one into a queen, and using this queen to entrap the opponent’s king, once and for all, and induce checkmate.

  “Questions?” Mr. Weiss says.

  There is much hesitation among the newbies; mostly, they just want to get to playing. Before they can, Weiss tells them about the first Right Move tournament of the season, that Sunday at Brandeis. The tournaments are free; they’re an optimal starting point for unrated beginners. Win a couple of games at a Right Move tournament (as most everyone does eventually, if only by inertia), and the foundation pays for a yearly membership in the United States Chess Federation. “The fact is,” Weiss says, “you don’t have to be a great player to play tournament chess. The more you play, the more you’ll learn.”

  Murrow’s first national championship came in 1992, at a national tournament held in the unlikely hamlet of Lexington, Kentucky. In truth, it might have come earlier than that, because Weiss had already formed a stockpile of talent. What he didn’t have was the means. Back then, even Bruckner, who never played the game, wasn’t sold on the net worth of the school possessing a nationally
renowned chess team. So Weiss, who was teaching as an adjunct lecturer at Brooklyn College and working with the United Federation of Teachers in the evenings and raising two young children, had to spend a certain amount of his spare time begging.

  In 1991, he thought he’d finally found the backing to send the team to its first national tournament in Atlanta, courtesy of one of his former students, a graduate of the Class of 1983, who had financed the team’s trip to Albany, where it won the school’s first-ever state championship. The alumnus had promised to take care of everything at nationals. He had promised to put up the team in a first-class hotel, to pay for limousines, to take care of it all, and Weiss had little doubt his team, stacked with high-rated Eastern European immigrants, could win a championship. On the day of their scheduled departure, the team waited outside the school with its bags packed and ready; the alumnus never showed up. He called Weiss and told him he couldn’t book the flights on time; they weren’t going. A team from Cleveland won the championship. Weiss, who had already called for a substitute, had to slink back into his classroom and start teaching again. “I was very depressed for a long time after that,” he says. “I realized I shouldn’t rely on anybody. I should just do this myself.”

  The following year, aided by a two-thousand-dollar donation from Brooklyn Union Gas, Murrow raised enough to make it to Lexington. They finished one point ahead of Dalton, which has long had one of the strongest developmental chess programs in the country, an institution that will never be short on finances. At Dalton, students begin learning the game in the first grade and advance in skill every year toward graduation. At Murrow, however, Weiss had managed to recruit a small group of immigrants, many of whom could outplay him, and merely helped to facilitate their travel and entry fees. In truth, this is still Weiss’s primary role: He is the chief administrator, the planner, and the organizer. He procures the talent, and then wrangles the money to allow it to succeed. For his efforts, he receives no money, beyond a couple hours of overtime pay here and there.