Game of Kings

by Michael Weinreb

  “But did you notice,” one public-school teacher says, “that it’s mainly these private school kids who are running around like lunatics?”

  On Sunday morning, the day Murrow will defend its run of three consecutive city championships, the participants begin showing up at the New Yorker at a little past nine, an hour before the first round is scheduled to start. Teams are arriving from the suburban wilds of Long Island and New Jersey and Connecticut (while this is technically the “city championship,” it is open to regional teams as well), and they’re staking out their territory, engulfing the mezzanine on the second floor with massive piles of down jackets and rectangular carrying cases with the pliable foam boards rolled up inside like yoga mats.

  Ilya and Willy are already here, in the third-floor Skittles Room, and they’ve commandeered a table by the time Mr. Weiss arrives, his wife and children in tow. There is no money in Weiss’s budget for him to reserve his own team room; he wouldn’t dare ask Rita to spring for such an extravagance.

  Nothing at a chess tournament ever starts precisely on time, and so the first-round pairings don’t go up until 10:15, on the bulletin board in the hallway near the elevators, while kids are still straggling through the revolving doors of the New Yorker from the subway. Shawn Martinez, Murrow’s No. 3 board, still isn’t here, and nobody knows where he is. This news is not entirely surprising, given Shawn’s penchant for flaking out. He lives according to his own timetable. He does his own thing. “I was on the phone with him last night, and then he put me on hold for ten minutes,” Oscar says. “I have no idea where he went.”

  “He did the same thing to me,” Nile says.

  Nile and Dalphe Morantus, Murrow’s No. 7 and No. 8 boards, are playing in the junior-varsity section, which is downstairs in the Crystal Ballroom, while Murrow’s top six are up on the third floor, in the Gramercy Park Conference Room. Or, at least, this is where they’re supposed to be. Except somebody’s sitting at Oscar’s board and nobody can track down Shawn, and Willy and Ilya aren’t here yet, either, and Sal’s sitting at one of the front tables (reserved for the top players), near the window overlooking McDonald’s, wondering where the hell everyone is.

  They begin to straggle in one by one, Oscar in an oversized gray T-shirt and work boots and cuffed jeans, Willy in a Sean John T-shirt, carrying a Discman loaded with the latest CD by a rapper called The Game, Ilya in slacks and a pullover, Alex in a sweatshirt three sizes too large. Willy forgot to bring a pencil. And Shawn? Well, Shawn ain’t here, Willy says. Shawn woke up late, and he’s stuck on the train somewhere in lower Manhattan, and the first round will go on without him.

  Most American chess tournaments are contested using a format called the Swiss system. In the Swiss, every player competes in the same number of games; no one is eliminated. As players continue to win games, the level of competition gets progressively stronger. Those who lose in the early rounds drop toward the bottom, and no one is paired against another player more than once (in team competitions, teammates are paired only when it’s absolutely necessary), and the color of the pieces each player draws usually alternates from round to round. In the first round, the top player in the upper half of the field is paired against the top player in the lower half, which means that the highest-rated contestants, like Sal and Alex, often have it easy for the first couple of rounds. This, of course, is the way it should work out, but even in chess, even in a game where ratings take on so much meaning, no one is immune to being surprised.

  So there are thirty-five players in the high-school varsity section, and in the first round, Sal faces Michael Zletz of Hunter High School. Zletz’s rating is 1713, and Sal’s rating is 2419, which means Sal should hardly even have to think in order to win this game, that he can coast through these first couple of rounds and conserve his energy for later in the afternoon. The games at the city championship are relatively short; each player gets thirty minutes on his clock (as opposed to two hours per side at Supernationals), with a five-second delay each time a move is made and the button is depressed, a factor that can become crucial late in an endgame. (In “sudden-death” tournaments like these, if your opponent’s time runs out, you win your game, although this is partly dependent on technology: The newer digital clocks allow for the time-delay feature, but since most tournament officials don’t provide them, and since they cost a hundred dollars or more, some games are still played with analog clocks. In these cases, if you’re down to your final two minutes but feel you could win the game if you had ample time, you can make an appeal to a tournament director to rule the game a draw based on “insufficient losing chances.”)

  In games like these, known as Game/30, the action tends to unfold quickly, and most of the heavy thinking comes in the early moments. So Sal decides to sacrifice his queen to gain an early advantage in position. In the hands of a lesser player, this would be a reckless decision, but in Sal’s world, at Sal’s level, such sacrifices—defined in Pandolfini’s Ultimate Guide to Chess as “the voluntary offer of material for the purpose of gaining a greater or more useful advantage in either material, attack on the enemy king, or some other factor”—comprise the fundamental beauty of this game. An innovative sacrifice of a queen, of a piece worth nearly twice as much as a rook, and nine times as much as a single pawn, is what elevates chess to the quality of art. In skilled hands, a devastating queen sacrifice, like the one Sal has just made, or an early gambit, which usually involves giving up a pawn in the opening in order to gain position, can render an opponent impotent.

  And so with just ten seconds remaining on his clock, with the position in Sal’s favor, Zletz resigns.

  Sal is not the highest-rated player in this tournament. That distinction belongs to Dmytro Kedyk, a Ukrainian boy who was recruited to Murrow by Eliot Weiss but instead chose to attend Environmental Studies, a small high school on the west side of Manhattan (“I think he realizes he made a mistake,” Weiss says). Kedyk, whose rating is 2512, is already done by the time Sal finishes his game, and he’s been watching this one, and when Zletz resigns, Kedyk gets up and starts reshuffling the pieces to shift the position back to what it once was, to demonstrate what might have happened. He’s going too fast for anyone else to catch it, but it’s clear that Zletz missed something, and when Sal sees it, he starts to giggle, and Dmytro starts to giggle with him, and they stumble out of the room caught up in paroxysms of laughter while a tournament official hushes them and shoos them away from the games that are still active.

  “How did he not see it?”

  See what?

  “A stalemate,” Sal says. “He had a stalemate and he missed it.”

  A stalemate is something a player of Sal’s caliber should have foreseen; this is what happens when someone’s king is not in check, but they cannot make a legal move without landing in check. Like the diagram at the top of page 129, for instance, if it were black’s move.

  The lure of a stalemate is often the last desperate gambit of an overmatched player; it is a way to turn what appears like a certain loss into a half-point draw. If Zletz had seen it, if he had forced Sal into that position and then called the tournament director over and declared

  the game a draw, Sal’s path to the city championship would have been severely crippled. A stalemate, and Sal would have shed ratings points, and both his reputation and Murrow’s streak would have been at stake. And now that it’s over, now that the threat has been averted, Sal cannot stop laughing, all the way down the hall and into the Skittles Room, where he recounts the story for Mr. Weiss, where he says, over and over again, to anyone who will listen, what a beautiful way that was to start his morning.

  Back in the Gramercy Park Room, Willy, playing at a furious pace and drawing his opponent into sloppy mistakes, is about to pull off an improbable upset over a 2218 named Adam Maltese. Ilya is losing to Stuyvesant’s No. 1 board, Josh Weinstein, a 2111 (“I’m not upset, losing to him,” Ilya says), and Oscar, who’s also playing fast and loose after engaging in a series of b
litz games before the start of the tournament, manages to stave off one of the lowest-rated players in the section, Jacob Ehrlich, an 1172.

  Downstairs, in the high-school novice section, the newbies are playing their first competitive games, and fighting against the clock, an impediment that renders the game into something else entirely. It’s one thing to go against each other during chess club after school, but to be here in a ballroom, shrouded in silence, with an analog clock tick, tick, ticking next to your elbow—that, Renwick says, is pressure. “The guy I was playing, his opening wasn’t that good,” Renwick says. “But then he brought out his queen and took over the board.”

  “I was playing well,” Adalberto says. “I was up three pieces. I just didn’t see the checkmate.”

  Shortly before eleven, Shawn finally shows, bleary-eyed and monosyllabic, wearing an oversized T-shirt and a Yankee cap turned backward on his head. He’s blaming the train for his tardiness, and this excuse doesn’t pacify Mr. Weiss, who wants to ensure that it doesn’t happen again, not when it matters, not when they’re on their way to the state tournament, or to the nationals. This tournament should be easy enough, even with the looming presence of teams from Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Tech, but it gets progressively more difficult from here. “I’ll come to your house if I have to,” Mr. Weiss says.

  But then, it’s hard to tell Shawn much of anything and make it stick. The kid’s been an enigma since junior high school. He has a gift, this much is clear, and he’s managed to discover it amid a life that has been fraught, like so many in the city, with disappointment. Ask Shawn about his family, and he’ll tell you the bare minimum: His father died when he was two. How? Heart attack. He has three siblings, including an older brother who lives in Erie. What does he do in Erie? He lives there. Where does he work? I dunno. And that’s pretty much it. End of story. What else is there to say? To tell you anything more would be to let his guard down, and this is one thing Shawn has learned never to do.

  Out in the hallway, out near the board where the second-round pairings are about to be posted, Shawn finds Willy, who’s still listening to The Game, and passing his headphones around to Nile and to Oscar. They’re jawing about the rap business, about Kanye and Eminem and Cam’ron, and attempting to build a consensus on what’s the real thing and what’s record-industry fluff. “A lot of West Coast rappers are garbage,” Shawn says. “It’s easy to get a deal out there, you know?”

  “Not really,” Willy says. “If you look at it, there’s not a lot of rappers from the West Coast.”

  Ilya has no idea what any of this means. He’s standing around waiting for the pairings to be posted, and listening to a Russian pop song on his MP3 player. A few minutes earlier, Mr. Weiss and Sal and Ilya were talking about visiting Red Square in Moscow, and Sal was telling the story about how he tried to wear shorts into a church and how they wouldn’t let him inside. Now Willy and Nile and Shawn are deconstructing the oratorical skills of Marshall Mathers, the cultural phenomenon known as Eminem, the white rapper from Detroit, the square peg of hip-hop. And in the midst of all this, a photographer from the one of the local newspapers, The Bay Ridge Courier, shows up to take a team picture, so they crowd into the frame together, all of these boys with so little in common except this one thing.

  “Yo,” Shawn is saying. “Eminem is hot. You hear that last song off the new album? That’s hot.”

  All goes according to plan in Round Two: Those who are supposed to win (Sal, Alex, Shawn, Ilya) take care of business, and those who are paired against higher-rated players (Oscar, Willy) lose their games. Oscar, playing with white and facing Lenderman’s old I.S. 228 middle-school teammate Alexander Pelekhaty, a 2238 who attends Bronx Science, tries to throw him off by playing the orangutan opening, and it nearly works. Pelekhaty, who has a blond brush cut and lively dark eyes, sits perfectly still and considers that lone ivory pawn on b4 for close to five minutes before responding by pushing a black pawn to c6. For a while, Oscar still looks good, and he’s way ahead on time, but after a series of exchanges, he’s down to only a king and pawn, and then he’s left with just a king, and with thirty-four seconds on his clock, he resigns.

  “I didn’t play too bad, right?” Oscar says to Pelekhaty, on their way out of the room.

  “You had me down there early.”

  “I think he sucks,” says a boy named Boris, walking in the other direction.

  “Nah,” Pelekhaty says. “He played good.”

  “I had time, man,” Oscar says. “I was up.”

  Four or five hours into a chess tournament, the room begins to take on an organic stench, redolent of an unkempt high-school locker room. One of the competitors has torn off his sweater and is wearing only a sleeveless undershirt, his armpits exposed to the world, and the smell is fast degenerating from overripe to horrifying.

  Before Round Three, the tournament organizers discover that the pairings in the high-school varsity section have been sabotaged by a boy who came in during the first round and “just sat down wherever he wanted to sit.” This, of course, not only violates the protocol called for IN CAPITAL LETTERS on every official tournament handout (ASK YOUR OPPONENT HIS/HER NAME—MAKE SURE IT’S THE RIGHT PERSON!), it goes against every notion of common sense, a quality which has never been synonymous with genius.

  So in the meantime, while the mess is sorted out, a few of the best youth chess players in New York City pass their time playing illicit card games, fraught with wagering and trash-talking. They have commandeered a patch of carpet in the Skittles Room, and they’re sitting on the floor cross-legged playing Stupid, the convoluted Russian card game that involves exchanges and trickery. It is a game played not to lose: the twos, threes, fours, and fives are removed, reducing the deck to thirty-six, and each person is dealt six cards. Normally, it is played in groups of four, with two teams, and the game proceeds in a series of “attacks” and “defenses,” of lay-downs and pickups revolving around a trump card of a particular suit. Eventually, the game winnows its way down to two players, and the last player with cards in his hand is the loser. In the end, luck gives way to strategy, just like chess.

  Dollars are changing hands rather rapidly at this point: Oscar is winning, and Ilya is losing. In fact, Oscar is having a better day playing cards than he is playing chess, which has become a trend lately; he’s been spending as much time on Web sites like Partypoker.com (where most of the time, he plays for fake cash, though on occasion he plays with his friend’s account) as he has on the Internet Chess Club.

  Downstairs, in the novice section, the newbies cannot find their bearings. Robert is checkmated early, and Adalberto’s opponent again pushes his queen out early and destroys him. Of the four newbies, only Rex and Renwick have won a game, both of them defeating a boy from Paramus, New Jersey, who, like them, has not played enough to carry an official USCF rating. In the end, these are the only wins they get: Rex and Renwick also land a couple of draws, and Adalberto and Robert, facing each other in the final round, decide to take a draw so as not to finish with zero points.

  “Just one bad move,” Robert says. His forehead is pale and damp and his entire face contorts into a grimace and his voice becomes a bag of marbles, a near-indecipherable mumble born of frustration and fatigue. “I was playing well, and I made one bad move.”

  After three rounds, after three relatively easy victories against lesser opponents, Sal’s rating has skyrocketed from 2419 to . . . 2421. “I’m getting two points after three games,” Sal says. “That’s like, .67 points each. Wow, what a tournament!”

  It doesn’t get any harder for Sal in Round four; after a series of minor upsets (Kedyk, Pelekhaty, and Josh Weinstein, a 2111 who’s Stuyvesant’s top board, all lose), he faces a player rated six hundred points lower, Boris Senderovich of Brooklyn Tech, and wins once more, with hardly any effort. Stuyvesant’s only hope at an upset was for Sal or Alex to falter in some way, and it doesn’t happen. Alex beats his old teammate, Alexsandr Pelekhaty, and even though Oscar hang
s a rook—just leaves it out there unprotected and able to be captured without gaining anything in return, perhaps the biggest blunder one can make—against Stuyvesant’s Anna Ginzburg and loses, and even though Shawn loses to a player rated four hundred points lower, the team championship has essentially been decided. And the only question now is what will happen when Sal plays Alex.

  It is inevitable at this point: Because Sal and Alex are the only two undefeateds remaining in the varsity section, they’ll have to face each other. Neither of them seems particularly disturbed by this turn of events. It’s happened before, and it will happen again, and as they’ve done before, they’ll conspire to take a draw. If this were a tournament based on individual performance, and based on money prizes, a premeditated draw might be frowned upon (certain players do this often in order to maximize the amount of the purse they take home—for instance, they might agree to a draw and then split both the first- and second-place awards). But not here, not at a tournament that carries no real weight for players of their caliber, not at a tournament that means more to their coach than it does to them.

  “Why play him?” Sal says. “What’s the point, really?”

  But then, today Sal has exposed another side of himself. Just a few minutes before this, he was scolding Shawn for his loss, a loss that means nothing in the grand scheme of things, but inexplicably seemed to get at Sal in a way little else had gotten to him in months. “Shawn, how dare you! To lose again!” Sal had said, and it came off like a joke, but there was a certain harshness to it, as if Sal couldn’t stand to bear witness to such an obvious lack of focus.