Sal and his sister and his mother and father once lived in a big apartment in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania; they live in a much smaller one now, on Avenue U in Bensonhurst. Here are some other basic facts about Sal’s existence: His father works as a financial trader in Manhattan. His mother is a nurse. Neither of them speaks particularly good English, according to Sal, but they make a living, and they support their children’s avocations. He has always been good at math, and his dad (whose name is Raimundas, which means “King of the World”) taught him certain equations before he sent Sal to school, and on his first day, when his teacher asked him to add two plus three, Sal came up with four, and when he came home and told his dad, his dad said, “You know it’s five! I’ve told you that a hundred times!” And Sal still doesn’t know why he got it wrong; all he knows is that two plus three equals four got stuck in his head for a long time after that. “It’s not something that I would do,” he says. “Such a simple mistake.”
When he was seven and still living in Vilnius, Sal went to visit his aunt for the hundredth time (bo-ring) and her son had a chessboard on top of his wardrobe. Sal asked what it was, and his aunt showed him, and like the main character in Nabokov’s novel The Defense, a terminally obsessed young man named Luzhin, it was “as if someone had thrown a switch, and in the darkness only one thing remained brilliantly lit, a newborn wonder, a dazzling islet on which his whole life was destined to be concentrated.”
When he was eight, Sal’s parents hired his first chess coach. And then . . . well, then nothing. He was talented, yes, and he knew it, and his teachers knew it, and his parents knew it. But he would go to the major youth tournaments and finish third, or finish fourth, or finish fifth. This was no good for Sal. Maybe for some other kids, but not for Sal. It wasn’t just the losing that bothered him; it was that he knew he was better than the kids he was losing to, and yet he still kept losing. Two plus three equals four. He was tired of doing all this studying and not getting anything to come of it. He was thinking maybe he’d just quit. And then came the country’s national junior championships, in 2002, the year before he came to America. That’s when something changed.
The previous year at this same tournament, Sal was in second place through the eighth round. In the ninth and final round, he was paired against one of the weakest players in the field. All he had to do was win. And what happens? Time trouble. A draw. He takes third place. Horrible.
What exactly it was that changed, or how it changed, Sal has no idea. Here’s how he tries to explain it: “Let’s just say that they were wolves, and I was like a new wolf. . . .” No. That’s no good. How about: “Let’s just say I was like a country kid who comes to the city. From the small environment of chess, I came to the big tournaments. They were used to that environment so they knew the pressure. But I was better than them. I lost so many stupid games because I was, like, I don’t know, down on time. Time was a really big problem. And then the last year . . . I beat my main rival from the past, and I knew he was not my main opponent in that particular tournament, because there was someone stronger—but he was the one who tied with me for first place.”
So Sal went on to play in the junior championship of the Soviet Union, and to play in the world junior championships, and around that time his parents decided to make the move to America. They came to America in May of 2003 and in June, in the Bronx, Sal won the U.S. Junior Championship. He was a bored teenage boy in a strange new land, but his confidence over the board was unshakable. That first summer in America, he played chess and he played chess some more; the computer was his only outlet. At one point, he was so bored he decided to read the Bible. Then he read it again. And then he read it once more. Three times? The Bible? “Seriously,” he says. “No joke. I was that bored.”
He went to Murrow because he’d heard of the chess team (why else?), and Mr. Weiss helped to get him admitted. Freshman year, he was still getting a grasp of English (his mother and father still have trouble with the language after nearly two years in America), but he had chess to carry him. This was his thing, and he did it better than anyone else, even Lenderman. Especially Lenderman. Sal was cocky, but he’s always been cocky. That’s his way. That’s just Sal. He’s easily misunderstood. “When I insult someone, I half-joke,” he says. “ ‘You suck!’ I say, and then they laugh. That’s not—that’s like half-sarcasm, half-friendship. I’m not a mean person. They’re my friends, and they’re still my friends.”
In late March, two weeks before the Supernationals, Alex Lenderman finishes with six points out of a possible nine at a tournament held at Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut, earning $803 and, more important, the second of the three “norms” (a designation awarded by tournament directors, based upon a convoluted combination of victories over top opponents and ratings points) he needs to gain the title of International Master. Sal finishes with five points and no norms and a certain amount of resignation. For the first time, he opens up to Ilya, telling him all about Foxwoods, all about his complex feelings toward Lenderman. Ilya was so taken aback by this confession that he didn’t know what to think. But this was the new Sal; he had come to witness his own vulnerability. In the back of his mind, he knew Lenderman would realize the same thing eventually.
Everything had come so easily the year before. Sal was on a roll, and despite a draw in the final round he still finished third at the nationals in Dallas, and Murrow dominated at the high-school section, finishing a full point and a half ahead of both the University School in Fort Lauderdale and Stuyvesant. Sal thought he could do anything. He was odd and engaging and he came into each and every tournament absolutely certain that he could beat anyone he faced, and at some point, he did what many of the best chess players before him have done: He crossed a line from self-assurance to overconfidence. And overconfidence, Sal is now convinced, is the one thing that will kill you.
Not long ago, a Canadian grandmaster flew to Russia on the same plane as the best young chess player in America. They were headed to a tournament together but they were seated in different rows, and when they got off the plane the Canadian glanced at the boy’s wrist and complimented him on his watch. Then the Canadian said that the man next to him had been wearing the same one. The boy said, “Oh? And how did he look?” How did he look? Normal, the Canadian said. Fashionable. He mentioned that the man was also wearing Prada sunglasses. And the boy replied, “Well, that man must be rich. Because only rich people would own a watch like this.”
That boy, Hikaru Nakamura, who makes Sal appear reticent by comparison, will not lower himself to play against his lesser-rated peers at the Supernationals. Why would he bother, really? Even before he won the national championship the previous December at age seventeen, even before he became the youngest winner of that tournament since Bobby Fischer himself, Nakamura has been groomed for something bigger than high-school chess: A master at age ten, a grandmaster at age fifteen, Nakamura is the brightest hope for American chess in more than three decades.
So instead of wasting his time by playing at Supernationals, Nakamura will give a guest lecture, and he will hang around and watch games, and he will play a few blitz matches on the side, thereby assuring all those who weren’t already aware of it that he is better than they are. All of this winning has made Nakamura a curiosity, a fascination, and a talent of the kind this country hasn’t produced since Fischer himself. That he lives by his ego and yearns to crush his opponents and exact revenge upon them, that he refuses to accept draws and often makes enemies—well, that’s just something most people have gotten used to by now. It’s a commonly assumed persona that existed long before Fischer came along to personify its every twist and quirk. It’s the terrain of the idiosyncratic genius. “A lot of the Russian players are also kind of crazy,” says Irina Krush. “If you’re involved in an academic endeavor, there’s something appealing about building yourself up to be so weird and so unreachable, you know? It’s like Einstein: You want to differentiate yourself. You want to become a legend, so
you make up something like how you don’t remember where your own house is, you have to ask someone on the street. And you take on a life larger than yourself. It’s easy to do if you’re doing something difficult. If you’re a garbage collector, it’s not so easy to mystify yourself.
“That’s not to say chess players aren’t naturally eccentric,” she says. “But chess makes them weirder as they go along.”
“Mr. Fischer is a very popular person today,” says Miron Sher. “He is a citizen of Iceland.”
Sher is a grandmaster and a former coach of the Russian national team, a generously apportioned and soft-spoken man with unkempt gray hair who teaches the Thursday afternoon alumni sessions at the Chess-in-the-Schools offices in Manhattan. This is a busy session, the last one before the Supernationals, and Nile and Willy and Dalphe are all there along with nine or ten others, and in a small conference room facing West Thirty-sixth Street, Sher expounds about something known as the Carlsbad structure, only to segue into a reminiscence of the time an opponent used the French Defense to defeat Fischer, and then into a discussion of time control at nationals. “Do not play quickly at the beginning of the game,” he says. “It’s very important to have a good position. Don’t play for time. Two hours per side, it’s a serious game. And you have to play open and slowly.”
Anna Ginzburg asks about avoiding time trouble in the middle game, and Sher tells her that maybe she shouldn’t get up to use the bathroom during her game, that maybe she’s better off staying seated instead of getting up and wandering off to check out other boards between moves.
“I’m using my clock, I ain’t using nobody else’s clock,” Willy says. “ ’Cause they be cheating down there.”
The lesson goes past six in the evening, and just as things are breaking up, Oscar walks in the front door of the Chess-in-the-Schools loft. He’s glassy-eyed and disoriented, and he insists it’s because he’s been up studying all night, because Mr. Weiss threatened to not take him to nationals unless he can find a way to catch up on the schoolwork he’s been ignoring for months now. All of that neglect has started to catch up with Oscar, and even Sarah Pitari, the academic advisor for Chess-in-the-Schools, has essentially given up on the notion of Oscar graduating this spring. But Oscar insists that he’s really trying this time, that he’s going to class and he’s being diligent but he’s getting a new mattress for his bed and he’s been sleeping on a futon in the meantime and his hip is killing him.
He doesn’t want to miss nationals, because this will be his last one, and the reality of it all is starting to set in, that he has to do something with his life once school is over. All those things his father told him, those little speeches that sounded as if they’d been lifted from a movie, about school being a one-way ticket out of the ghetto life, about how in this country, if you’re poor, your education is your passport out of poverty? Now, Oscar is starting to see there’s something to it. He can do this. He’s smart, he’s curious, he’s personable, and if nothing else, he’s enterprising. “At times,” Oscar’s father says, “I don’t think high school is hard enough for him. He doesn’t get that interest or challenge from it. Like sometimes, he’ll stay up all night and read books. Personally, I think if he were in college, he wouldn’t have any problems.”
Reality has begun to set in for Willy as well. He’s in trouble because he failed a history class, and it looks like he’s going to have to come back to Murrow and take it in the fall before he can graduate, and everyone around him is blaming this whole No Child Left Behind Act for all the ills of the educational system and of students like Willy. This was, of course, George Bush’s policy. But part of the reason Willy failed the class is because he missed a test while he was in Washington. Visiting George Bush. (Oh, Willy! The irony!) But Willy, too, says he’s tired of making excuses. Then again, he’s also tired of school, and he’s tired of Sarah at Chess-in-the-Schools always riding him about coming to SAT prep classes when all he wants to focus on right now is edging closer to graduation. He’s been going there every day for four years and now he misses a few weeks and Sarah won’t stop riding him—what does she want from him?
So he’s going to night school two days a week in Prospect Heights to try to make up for all the ground he’s lost, but that history class looks like it’s going to keep him around for at least another semester. Then maybe in the spring he can take the test and get his GED. All that talk of Paris, of studying music production—it’s all on hold. Right now, on a Sunday morning on the Upper West Side, at the last Right Move tournament before nationals, Willy’s not sure what he wants to do. “I shouldn’t have failed the class in the first place,” he says.
He looks tired. He’s done with his game early and he’s standing outside the glass doors to the cafeteria and looking in on his friends, waiting for them to finish, and he’s thinking about nationals. He’s thinking that this will be his last one ever, and he wants to take it seriously, wants to improve on his previous performances, like a couple of years ago when, with time running out, he thought he had a dead draw in one game, thought he had “insufficient losing chances” (a subjective rule in which a player who is short on time but in an advantageous position can attempt to claim a draw), and the tournament director came over to look at the board and wouldn’t give it to him, for reasons Willy couldn’t quite understand within the moment. But this year, no excuses. This year, no messing around. This year, he’ll be prepared, and he’ll be in bed by eight o’clock every night.
“Well, all right,” he says. “Probably I’m exaggerating with the eight o’clock thing. But midnight. Definitely midnight.”
PART THREE
ENDGAME
FOURTEEN
SUPERNATIONALS III
Nashville,Tennessee
The Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center, on the outskirts of Nashville, Tennessee, is a paean to American excess, a self-contained biosphere of overpriced gift shops and “authentic” Irish pubs (“Best Irish Food in Nashvegas!”) and steakhouses and sports bars and saloons and swimming pools. It claims to be the largest hotel in the continental United States without a casino connected to it, and this means that it is an easy place to lose yourself, both in a physical and an existential manner. The biosphere is composed of a dense and convoluted web of catacombs and elevators leading to guest rooms and convention ballrooms and conference centers and hair salons and florists and a Kinko’s copy center and a post office. In fact, there is no reason to leave the hotel to sustain one’s existence, not even for fresh air, because at its center is a massive windowed atrium that does its best to mimic the feel of the outside world without ever actually leading you anywhere near the outside world. Why bother with fresh air when you can ride a fiberglass flatboat along a narrow river, winding beneath the carpeted footbridges and amid the antebellum architecture reminiscent of a cheap period movie, floating past the Chick-fil-A outlet and the Godiva Chocolatier and around a small forest’s worth of banana trees and ficuses and miniature orange trees and ginger bushes, all imported directly from Florida?
During the three days of competition at the Supernationals III Chess Championships (Tagline: “Battle of the Minds”), most of the participants never left the building. In that sense, the Opryland is the perfect location for the nation’s largest chess tournament, both literally and metaphorically: It is a world contained unto itself. Except having it all in one place apparently does not come cheap. On his first night in the hotel, groggy and parched, Ilya sees a bottle of water sitting next to the coffeemaker in the bathroom. What he doesn’t see until the next morning, a Thursday, is that this bottle of water he drank in three or four long gulps will cost him two dollars and ninety-five cents.
Mr. Weiss has warned them in advance about the prices, but what could they do, really, as prisoners trapped within the biosphere? Dalphe’s mother tried; she went to the grocery store and bought her son a pound of turkey and a loaf of potato bread and put it all in a cooler, hoping that would tide him over for much of
the week, but even Dalphe seems skeptical about this plan. Oscar’s scheme for survival is somewhat less conservative: He’s brought with him a single twenty-dollar bill, figuring that as long as the card games went his way, he could survive four full days in this alternate universe of four-dollar Cokes and eight-dollar baked potatoes that makes even New York prices seem reasonable.
A hotel of this size and complexity cannot possess merely a single lobby, so Mr. Weiss has to specify what lobby the team will meet in on Thursday morning, on their first full day in Tennessee. By eight-thirty, they are all gathered on a trio of couches in the Cascades Lobby, near a piano and a snack bar and a rental-car station and some sort of garish statue ringed by snow-white pillars, and Mr. Weiss is informing them of the excursion he has planned for them this morning, one day before the tournament begins. It involves a twelve-person Econoline van and a two-hour drive to a small town in the middle of nowhere called Whitwell, where some students at a middle school have taken the extraordinary step of building a Holocaust memorial by placing eleven million paper clips, each representing one person killed by the Nazis, into a German railcar once used to transport Jews. Their efforts had been chronicled in a documentary film called Paper Clips, and Mr. Weiss had screened the movie for his kids and set up a tour of the railcar and a meeting with the teachers who had been profiled in the film. From there, they’ll load back into the van and drive east to Dayton to visit the Rhea County Courthouse, the site of the Scopes Monkey Trial.
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