Game of Kings

by Michael Weinreb

  So when Sal says he’s fine with this, taking a draw with the one player he’d like to beat more than any of the other thirty-four in this room, it is difficult to believe him.

  According to statute 14B6 of the U.S. Chess Federation’s Official Rules of Chess (fifth edition), premature or prearranged draws are “unethical,” and they are “unsporting,” and in cases “of clear violations of the moral principles of the game, penalties should be imposed at the director’s discretion.” But this is such a vague prohibition that it essentially means nothing, and since it is often impossible to discern one’s intentions, it becomes unenforceable. So players conspire: They do it so they can split a larger amount of prize money, they do it so they can achieve more prestigious titles, they do it to improve their ratings, and they do it because they simply don’t have the will or the reason to truly compete against each other, statute 14B6 and its companion, number 20L (which declares illegal any attempt to “fix or throw games”) be damned.

  Perhaps in the case of Sal and Alex, it can be defended, since there is nothing to gain from their actually playing this game out, since it will mean nothing to the team’s overall score (Murrow will get a total of one point, regardless of outcome) and it will mean nothing to their ratings (since they are nearly identical) and it will mean nothing monetarily (since there are no cash prizes). But if this is an ethical issue, shouldn’t it matter in every case? At the moment, this is one of those great existential debates that rage among competitive chess players; but on this day, all the hand-wringing will not change anything.

  In eighteen moves, and in less than three minutes, the city championship is decided. Sal starts by pushing a pawn to d4 and Alex responds with pawn to d5, and then they move their c-pawns and their knights and it’s all one big charade, they’re smiling through the whole thing, until Alex pushes his bishop to d6 and they declare this an intractable position, and they shake hands, and they agree to a draw. In the end, even though they’ve both finished with four and a half points out of five, by virtue of a more difficult slate of opponents, Alex will officially be declared the city champion, and will take home the larger trophy, which means nothing to either of them. A larger trophy is just something more to lug home on the subway or in the backseat of your father’s car. A larger trophy can’t replace the real reward of this tournament: The top players in each section get free entries for four months to the tournaments held at the Marshall Chess Club, where real competition can be found, and real money can be won. And it’s the money, even the opportunity to make money—so rare and precious in this game—that matters, isn’t it?

  For a while, Sal and Alex disappear from the proceedings. In the Gramercy Park Room, Ilya refuses a draw from Boris Senderovich and beats him to finish with three and a half points, in a tie for sixth place, and Willy defeats Evan Rabin, a 1788 who goes to the Dwight School, a private academy on the Upper West Side, to finish in twelfth place with three points.

  Back in the Skittles Room, as if driven by the emptiness of their premeditated draw, Sal and Alex have settled into a furious round of five-minute blitz games, slapping the clock so hard that the entire table rattles, moving their pieces so fast that it’s virtually impossible to keep track of what belongs where.

  “Shit,” Alex says. He’s giggling, and he’s sitting on his knees, reaching his entire arm across the table to slide his queen to d8.

  “Yes, that is shit,” Sal says, and Alex giggles again.

  “Shit!” Alex says. “Shit!”

  “Should I play b-four?” Sal says. “Should I? I should.”

  “So what? You think I should resign?”

  “Yeah. You should. Ooh, ooh, you missed this.”

  Back and forth it goes, until the clock is down to single digits, and they’re slapping at it and moving without thinking and the pawns they’ve captured are rolling onto the floor. Soon they’ll leave the pieces in disarray and get up and tiptoe back into the Gramercy Park room to check on their teammates, and a short time after that, they’ll troop downstairs to the Grand Ballroom and accept their trophies, first place and second place, and then Mr. Weiss will rush out of the room with his family and a team trophy the size of a German shepherd, in order to catch the eight o’clock train from Penn Station back to Long Island. And Alex’s father will drive him home to Ninth Avenue and Sal will take the subway back to his home on Avenue U, and they will continue to insist that two people could not possibly have less in common than they do. But for a moment, at least, all is even between them, and this is just a game.

  “Check,” Alex says.

  “Whooooo!” Sal says. He moves out of check, pummels the clock, and throws a hand to his forehead, swooning like a bad actress. “Oh my God. I almost died there.”

  TEN

  THE WOMEN IN THE ROOM

  HER MOTHER MOVED TO ENGLAND TO BECOME A STAGE ACTRESS, AND wound up becoming a nurse instead. Her father was a doctor. They met in London, and they fell head over heels, so much so that on their first date, at the intermission of a play, she leaned into him and whispered, “I want to sleep with you and never see you again.” Which didn’t make much sense, not on a practical level, because they worked in the same office.

  Whatever. They were young and impulsive and prone to silliness and impetuous behavior. Practicality was the last thing on their minds. After they’d been dating for a couple of months, they enlisted in the Salvation Army and went to Zambia as volunteers. One problem: The Salvation Army was a Christian organization, and so naturally frowned upon premarital cohabitation. They asked Elizabeth Vicary’s mother and father to either produce a ring, or go home. So right then and there, in the middle of Africa, they decided to get married. And during a layover on the way home, swollen with the hormonal glow of the enviably youthful and pretty, they conceived their first child.

  “My father was a doctor,” Elizabeth says, “but they still believed if you were breast-feeding, you couldn’t get pregnant.” Hence, a year after her sister emerged on this earth as an unintended bounty of a hasty marriage, Elizabeth emerged upon this earth, and another year after that, she and her sister were both children of divorce.

  Her father got engaged five more times before he settled down in London. Her mother went back to America, and Elizabeth went with her, wherever she decided to go. She was restless. She liked to shift jobs and locations approximately every eighteen months. They lived in Minnesota, and then they moved to North Carolina, where Elizabeth went to high school, and her mother got a job summarizing research papers, and eventually took work running trials for medical research. Her sister was a wayward soul, and Elizabeth became the closest thing to a voice of reason within an unhinged household.

  It helped that she showed sparks of brilliance. When she was eleven, she learned how to play chess through a program at her junior high school, and her first rating was 1223, three hundred points higher than her instructor’s. She stopped playing chess in high school, because, well, “that’s what girls do—they stop playing in high school.” She went to Duke for a year, couldn’t put up with the preppiness of it, the packs of frat boys and bulimic girls, and she moved to New York and transferred to Columbia. She started out majoring in math, and then once she realized she didn’t know what she wanted to do, she defaulted by majoring in English literature.

  She’d played in her first major chess tournament in 1993, at the U.S. Open in Philadelphia. At the time, she was fresh out of high school, and it was her first real trip far from home. Her rating was up to about 1800, and in the first round, she faced a grandmaster named Alex Shabalov, who would later become a close friend. That tournament changed her attitude toward competitive chess; there were a ton of men and not very many women, and even fewer women who could actually play well enough to earn a measure of respect, and Lizzie, as the men started to call her—tall, impossibly thin, and pretty, with soft features and a delicate nose and long brown hair—was treated like a rock and roll queen.

  Her first job out of Columbia was as
a writer of encyclopedia articles for the Oxford University Press. She did it for eight months, and the series she worked on got published, and she was out of a job. She started dating a man whose mother was a hairdresser, and whose regular clients included a Jordanian princess who was in the market for a new personal assistant. The princess had enrolled as a student at Columbia, for reasons based more on aesthetics than education, and she needed someone to help with her homework and papers and type up her class notes so she could digest them more easily. The princess either didn’t want to or didn’t know how to do any of these things herself. Elizabeth became her surrogate. She made forty dollars an hour, running errands and taking care of all the mundane tasks that would otherwise serve to complicate the daily life of a princess. In one two-month period, the princess spent fifteen thousand dollars on dry cleaning. She owned more outfits than there were days of the year. She had a closetful of shoes that would have made Imelda Marcos blush. At one point, because she didn’t need everything, she decided to sell a painting, which turned out to be a portrait. Of the princess herself. Painted by Pablo Picasso.

  For two years, Elizabeth endured these things. She kind of enjoyed the job, to tell the truth, because it afforded her a measure of freedom in her own daily life. But in 1999, the princess graduated, and Elizabeth was on the market once again. That’s when she applied to become a teacher at Chess-in-the-Schools. She had no teaching experience at all, but she was bright and personable and she knew the game and they hired her anyway, and assigned her to rotate between four different schools. One was a progressive elementary school in upper Manhattan, and another was I.S. 318, which happened to be in the neighborhood where she lived.

  Intermediate School 318 is a squat rectangular building set on a city block between Walton and Lorimer Streets, in the southern quadrant of Williamsburg, a nebulous neighborhood on the outer edges of gentrified Brooklyn, an uneven pastiche of brownstones and auto repair shops and bodegas and warehouses, bisected horizontally by the elevated J/M/Z train and vertically by the G train. Two thirds of the students at 318 (which is officially named after Eugenio María de Hostos, a Puerto Rican educator and independence advocate) are Hispanic, and most of the rest are either black or Asian; fewer than ten percent are white. The Lindsay Park Houses, a cluster of red-brick towers on the opposite side of the elevated train tracks, are a federally subsidized middle-income co-op populated largely by Chinese immigrants, and the Marcy Houses, once regarded as one of the most dangerous projects in the city, are a few blocks to the south. Two decades earlier, long before much of Williamsburg became an outpost for young white hipsters looking for cheaper living space, a boy named Sean Carter, from the Marcy projects, attended I.S. 318, and later found fame as a rapper named Jay-Z.

  Today, 318 is regarded as the best public middle school in the district, which also includes the neighborhood of Greenpoint, north of Williamsburg. That wasn’t necessarily the case before Chess-in-the-Schools first brought its resources to 318 back in 1998. But the school’s longtime principal,Alan Fierstein, much like Saul Bruckner at Murrow, was willing to take chances on experimental programs and, after attending a meeting with CIS officials, presumed that bringing chess to his school would be in keeping with the eclectic atmosphere he’d fostered. Under Fierstein, who spent thirty-seven years at the school and took over as principal in the late 1980s, 318 took on an innovative bent: It may be the only school in New York City that offers after-school programs in guitar and dance and photography and gymnastics and botany and Web design. (How many middle schools have their own marching bands?) “Other schools are focusing so hard on English and math test scores,” says the current principal, Fortunato (Fred) Rubino, a genial man with spiky hair and a bushy mustache. “Our test scores are just fine.”

  That first year, a social studies teacher named John Galvin oversaw the chess program, along with a rotating series of CIS instructors, and it was a small notion, like every other after-school club, with no real direction and no grand aspirations. The next year, Elizabeth Vicary arrived, and Galvin continued to oversee it, and almost immediately, the scope of the program changed; everything changed, really. The change was forged out of convenience (it was simply easier for Elizabeth to spend more of her time here, so close to her apartment, than to travel to the other schools where she taught), but the change also came because Elizabeth met Oscar Santana.

  She didn’t know at the time that you weren’t supposed to play favorites; that first day, she showed up at the school to teach and was so nervous that she somehow lost the first game she played, to one of her students. So she was still trying to live that down, above everything else, including the fact that she had no idea how to go about actually teaching anybody. And despite all of that, here was this boy welcoming her to school every afternoon, as if he couldn’t wait to see her, as if a few simple chess lessons had illuminated his psyche in a way that no school subject could ever do. So she kept coming back to 318 because she wanted to see Oscar, and she gave him more attention than she gave anyone else. She tried to teach him to memorize certain lines of attack; it seemed like too much work, so he studied tactics instead.

  Later that year, Chess-in-the-Schools helped to pay to send some of the kids from 318 to Tucson, Arizona, for the national championships. They competed in the under-750 section, and when her team took a lead in the early rounds, one of her colleagues at CIS told Elizabeth to snatch the score sheet off the wall and save it, that if nothing else, this would prove these kids had held on to first place in something, if only for a while. Elizabeth didn’t bother taking the score sheet. She’d already done the calculations; they were going to win, and she knew it, and it didn’t matter that Oscar (who, at that point, still considered his primary strategy the four-move checkmate) played a miserable tournament, because all the others played far above their heads, and when Elizabeth went over their games between rounds, she could hardly believe how much of what she’d taught had actually sunk in.

  Alan Fierstein couldn’t believe it either. Maybe this was beginner’s luck, but it was also an inner-city administrator’s dream, the sort of saccharin-sweet tale that no media outlet can resist, of the same sort that Maurice Ashley had once exploited in order to advance the lives of the children he coached in Harlem: POOR MINORITY CHILDREN MAKE GOOD IN SPORT OF GENIUSES. Fierstein’s little school had won a national championship, and it didn’t matter that they’d done it in one of the lower-rated sections, and it didn’t matter that, in certain haughty circles of tournament chess, a victory in a lower-rated section was hardly even considered a championship. Fierstein bragged to every newspaper reporter he could reach, and he called the Board of Education, and a picture appeared in one of the papers of Oscar playing chess against the schools chancellor (he checkmated him in twenty seconds). The school threw more money and more resources into chess; eventually, a grandmaster named Miron Sher was hired to help Elizabeth teach. Soon after that, Greg Shahade, a former national high-school champion from the Masterman School in Philadelphia, and his sister Jennifer, one of the top women’s chess players in the country, started teaching at 318 as well.

  The summer after Tucson, Elizabeth held a chess camp at the school, and Willy Edgard was one of the attendees. He had already applied to 318 once and been rejected because his grades weren’t good enough. Elizabeth told Willy to apply again, and the second time around, Willy was accepted.

  Elizabeth began finding chess players in all sorts of places after that. Nile Smith used to hide in the back of the room, shrouded in his down winter coat; one day, during a lesson with a grandmaster, he solved a puzzle, a checkmate in five moves, and Elizabeth declared him a genius, and in the eighth grade, buoyed by her proclamations, he found his rating jumping four hundred points in two months.

  Another time, while one of her students was in the midst of a game, his friend, a heavyset sixth-grader whom Elizabeth recognized only vaguely, suggested a move to him that he said would guarantee checkmate. Elizabeth didn’t believe him, so the
y played it out, and whether guided by luck or by intuition or by some higher understanding, the boy was right. Elizabeth wouldn’t allow him to leave until he agreed to join the chess club. “You’re amazing,” she said. “You’re a genius,” she assured him, and it was as if Shawn Martinez, long ago dismissed as a hopeless case by his teachers, had been waiting his entire life for someone to tell him these things. Given the benefit of a single gesture of kindness, Shawn developed an obsession akin to Bobby Fischer’s. He spent the next couple of years playing for almost twelve hours a day. He played online, he played out games against himself, he played at home, and he played at school. His attendance remained spotty; he even failed the chess class that 318 had instituted as part of its curriculum. Sometimes he’d hide out in Elizabeth’s third-floor classroom and she would find him in there, with the lights out, squinting at the pages of some book on esoteric opening theory or pawn-king endgames. Elizabeth tried to trick him into learning, assigning him to write book reports and administering tests on the books she saw him reading. He failed those too. And yet when he played, it was clear that he’d read the books, and he’d not only understood the books, but had incorporated the theory into his game. He just didn’t want to be told what to do. (Earlier this year, when Shawn had stopped by a CIS- SPONSORED tournament at 318 to say hi to Elizabeth, he was thrown out for refusing to take off his hat.)

  Shawn’s best friend was another stocky boy named Angel Lopez, who wore glasses and had a big, goofy grin, and the two of them went everywhere together. The teachers starting calling them Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Angel played chess, too, at about the same level as Shawn, and went with him to Murrow, then transferred out after a few months. By this time, championships at 318 had become the expectation, and Fierstein’s vision of the program had expanded; every sixth-grade student who enters 318 is now required to take a ten-week chess class. Those who enjoy it can take it as an elective, and those who want to compete at the major tournaments are invited show up at the chess club after school. Elizabeth teaches exclusively at 318, showing up every day and handling a full load of classes while working part-time toward a graduate degree in teaching, and John Galvin, the social studies teacher, continues to oversee the team’s trips and outings and its expense budget.