Game of Kings

by Michael Weinreb

  A few weeks earlier, Oscar had been outed. A Daily News reporter had called Mr. Weiss, looking to see if he knew any kids who were into online gambling, and so Mr. Weiss passed them along to Oscar. A reporter from the paper interviewed Oscar and his family and then ran an in-depth front-page story, headlined, ONLINE AND HOOKED:

  When Oscar Santana gets home from school everyday [sic], the Brooklyn teenager dutifully does his homework, then boots up his computer for an evening of Texas Hold ’em.

  For Oscar, and a growing number of students, playing the popular poker game online is swiftly becoming a new American pastime—with potentially dangerous consequences.

  “I could spend a good two hours playing poker on the computer,” said Santana. . . .

  But the soft-spoken member of Edward R. Murrow High School’s national championship chess team insists he’s got his game-playing under control.

  “I can tell myself when to stop,” he said. “Since I have been playing, I haven’t lost. I really don’t worry about getting addicted. I just love playing.” . . .

  The story included five “warning signs” to detect if your child is gambling, and a number for a twenty-four-hour gambling hotline. It quoted Oscar’s mother, saying she didn’t mind as long as he wasn’t playing for money, and later quoted the chairman of a gaming commission in Montreal, who said most underage gamblers are “sanctioned by their parents,” and that “parents still rule their children—supposedly.”

  It wasn’t just the ambush of the article that led Oscar to cut back on his gambling. It was the fact that in six months he would be eighteen years old, and he wanted to graduate high school by then. He didn’t want to be stuck at Murrow forever. He wanted to live up to his father’s expectations. By December, he was hoping, he could make up enough schoolwork to take the GED exam and then he could, finally, channel his considerable brainpower and his endless curiosity into something both legal and moral.

  And what about Willy? He turned nineteen in March and he still isn’t sure what he’s doing with his life. He’s trying to make it through the last cycle at Murrow without failing another class, and he’s thinking that he’ll be able to make up the rest of his classes in the fall and get his diploma and figure it out from there. “I’ve been lazy,” he will admit several months later. “I didn’t do the work.” And then, in the next breath, he will admit that he skipped class the week before because it was raining outside.

  But right now he’s thinking of other things. Right now, in the catacombs of City Hall, he’s jawing with Oscar about the NBA playoffs. He likes Miami to beat favored Detroit that night. Not only that, he’s thinking the Heat’s Dwyane Wade will score forty points. “You’re crazy,” Oscar says, but this is Willy, always pulling for the underdog, living life according to his own unique and complex rhythms. So, yeah, maybe it’s true—maybe Willy’s a little, shall we say, out there. Maybe it’ll take him a few years to get his head straight. But every time you underestimate him, every time you think that maybe this kid is lost in the stratosphere and ain’t never coming back, he surprises the hell out of you.

  That night, the Heat beat the Pistons. And after making a layup in the final seconds, Dwyane Wade finishes with exactly forty points.

  After all that has transpired this year, after all they’ve been through, it’s hard for anyone to muster much enthusiasm for the Brooklyn borough championships, which are conducted in a dimly lit gymnasium on the campus of the New York City College of Technology in downtown Brooklyn. Neither Sal nor Alex shows up, and Shawn is not supposed to be there either; Mr. Weiss has grown weary of his antics, of his refusal to show up at class and put in an effort. He didn’t register Shawn for the tournament and didn’t include him in the orders for the boxed lunches the tournament directors are giving away. But Shawn comes anyway, wearing his black Yankee cap and an Oak-land Raiders jersey, and since the tournament is free and sponsored by the Chess-in-the-Schools program, he signs himself up. “You’re on your own for lunch,” Mr. Weiss tells him.

  That’s fine with Shawn. He’s not here for the free food. He’s here because this is the one place where he feels like he belongs, where he can mingle with the only people his own age who can relate to his addiction, and who can understand why he values this game more than he could ever imagine valuing an hour in an algebra class. Here, among chess players, his opinion matters. He can express himself. He can be wry and he can be cynical. He can tell Dalphe that the new Batman movie is going to be garbage, and when Dalphe says, “You think everything is garbage,” and then picks up one of his black pawns and says, “You probably think this piece is garbage,” Shawn can say, “That’s racist. You a little racist.” And everyone will laugh.

  Nobody knows what to do with a kid like Shawn, who can unveil such brilliant combinations over the board but can’t seem to muster any energy away from it. Yet here’s the question his teachers keep asking themselves: Where would Shawn be without chess? What would his life be like then? Would he be just another confused kid roaming the streets without purpose? “Without chess, Shawn wouldn’t have either chess or school,” says Jennifer Shahade, who worked with him at I.S. 318. “It’s not like it’s chess that’s keeping him from going to school.”

  “I keep saying I’m going to study,” Dalphe says. “But I never do.”

  “If I studied, I’d be a twenty-two hundred, easy,” Shawn is saying.

  “I’d be a senior master. Bercys, if he really studied, would be a GM. Or at least an IM.”

  “If I studied, I’d be past seventeen hundred by now,” Dalphe says.

  “But that’s the thing about studying. It’s hard. Anyway, you play on the Internet all the time, and that’s like studying. But I don’t play on the Internet to study. I play on the Internet for fun.”

  “I don’t even play on the Internet anymore,” Shawn says. “I play outside. I play in the park. That’s where it’s at now.”

  The newbies show up at City Tech as well, although they can hardly be called newbies anymore. They have come a long way (Rex wins three of four of his matches in the novice section this afternoon), but they have started to hit a wall. They are discovering the infinite possibilities of this game, and they are realizing that unless you are willing to give over a great deal of your identity to it, there is only so far you can go.

  “You have to be serious about it,” says Bruce Pandolfini. “Not serious in a debilitating way, but wanting to give it your all. If you approach it with a halfhearted effort, you’re not going to be a champion.”

  Over the summer, Adalberto will move away to South Carolina, and the whole notion of playing competitive chess will begin to seem more daunting than enlightening. The three who remain will stop showing up regularly for the Thursday club meetings, and when Mr. Weiss is asked what became of his quartet of promising newcomers, to the kids he had hoped to shape into traveling players, he will shrug and admit that he has no idea. (“For me it was a combination of having a really busy junior year, and just not having as much interest as I did last year,” Robert would write in an e-mail the following spring. “Mainly I just had other more important things like the college process going on that I needed to take care of, and even though I was still interested in chess, I just wasn’t as interested as last year.”)

  Anyway, it’s not Mr. Weiss’s job to keep track of anyone, or to force them into anything. You either fall in love with this game, usually early in life and with an almost inexplicable passion, or you find that you cannot, or do not want to, deal with the burden it exacts upon your synapses. Life goes on. Maybe someday, Robert says, when he has more time, he’ll pick up chess again. Until then, there are other things to take care of if he wants to become a functioning adult.

  “I hate that word,” Josh Waitzkin is saying. “Prodigy.”

  It’s been six years now since Waitzkin has played competitive chess, since he found himself fighting off an unbearable sadness while trying to scratch out a living by playing chess tournaments in Europe, wh
ere the money is far better. He went back to the temporary home he’d taken in Slovenia and he sat for two weeks and pondered these essential questions: What if I did this for another six or seven years? What if everything went perfectly? What if I became one of the best players in the world? Would I be happy?

  And the answer was no.

  A couple of decades earlier, his father had written a memoir about Josh, and the memoir had been turned into a movie, Searching for Bobby Fischer, and the success of the movie and the subsequent movement of thousands of American children toward chess had rendered Waitzkin into something he never could have imagined he’d become: He was the closest thing the game would ever have to a rock star. And this wasn’t such a bad thing, because Waitzkin had always been remarkably mature, because the publicity guaranteed him a certain financial freedom that most chess players—especially those in the United States—are not privy to. He lent his name to a computer game called Chessmaster, and he found a place on the European circuit, which is not always an easy thing for an American to break into, and he tried to become an ambassador for the game.

  But after a while, as so often happens with those labeled as prodigies, the game ceased to make him happy. He had taken courses in Buddhism and Taoism at Columbia, and he found himself pondering things on an existential level. To Waitzkin, chess is a mirror of the psyche : If you’re quiet and introverted, you can play the game like an Abstract Expressionist. If you’re aggressive and excitable, you can play like a rattlesnake. If you’re dealing with emotional issues, those issues will carry over into your chess game. It is all about surviving amid struggle, about subsisting within a cerebral bubble, about being able to withstand all the noise that this eternal struggle creates inside one’s head. “When I think back on my career,” Waitzkin says, “I just remember the losses. Every big loss is crystal clear to me. The lifestyle is one of getting constantly bludgeoned over the head. And I reached a moment where I realized external success had nothing to do with happiness.”

  So Josh Waitzkin, child prodigy, eight-time national chess champion, and arguably the most famous American-born chess player since Bobby Fischer, quit playing competitive chess. As a substitute, he took up the Chinese martial art of Tai Chi, and in 2004, he became a world champion.

  He is fast approaching thirty years old, and he insists he has never been happier.

  So what’s the point, really? What possible reason could there be to keep playing this excruciating and exacting and infuriating game, when the only financial rewards to be gained are at exclusive tournaments in faraway places, when no one in your own country could give a damn about it, when spelling bees and hot-dog-eating competitions get nationwide television exposure but chess tournaments never do? What hope is there for chess in America when the greatest player in the world, perhaps the greatest player of all time, can walk the streets of New York City and go completely unrecognized?

  This is Garry Kasparov, of course, the exception to every rule, the highest-rated player of all time, according to Arpad Elo’s near-foolproof system. For two decades, Kasparov, born in Azerbaijan in 1963, a prodigy who won the Soviet Junior Championship at age twelve and the World Championship at age twenty-two, has been the number-one-ranked chess player in the world, his rating approaching 2900. He has taken on computers (his match against IBM’s Deep Blue, in 1996, was one of those rare and fleeting moments when chess penetrated mainstream American culture) and he has written books and delivered lectures and started his own chess foundation, based in New Jersey, whose mission is to expand in-school and after-school chess programs. He is outspoken and charismatic and he is the most universally respected chess player in the world, almost too good for his own good at times. “He lacks the artistic purity,” Pandolfini says. “You don’t know what he’s doing. You just know it works.”

  But in the spring of 2005, even Kasparov threw up his hands, frustrated with the bureaucracy of the international chess federation and with the lack of challenges, and announced his retirement from competition in order to reform the Russian political system.

  So why bother with chess when even Kasparov himself doesn’t see the point anymore? Why bother with chess when you can do what an ex-chess player named Howard Lederer did—namely, make a small fortune riding the trend of Texas Hold ’Em poker? Lederer dropped out of Columbia to play chess, discovered a poker room in the back of a chess club, and by 2005 had won nearly three million dollars. The same revelation struck Jennifer Shahade’s brother Greg, an International Master who taught at 318, took up online poker a few years back, recently moved home to Philadelphia to play poker full-time, and is doing better financially than he ever has before.

  Compared to chess, the calculations involved in poker look like remedial math. By the spring of 2005, the game was constantly televised, and its best players, like Howard Lederer, had become minor celebrities, and the money . . . well, compared to chess, the money was a goddamned windfall. Poker is less of an emotional investment, a more shallow mental investment, and a far better financial investment. Anyone (even the underaged like Oscar, with the proper front) can join an online service and start playing. You learn the basics, you learn when to bluff and when to fold, you use a brain that’s already been wired for such skills through years of chess training, and you can make easy money. You don’t spend hours studying a single opening that might never come into play. “You don’t feel bad about yourself as much when you make a mistake,” says Jennifer Shahade, who traveled with her brother to the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas in the summer of 2005. “If I do something bad in chess, I feel really bad about myself. But poker, it’s not the same psychological depth. Of the chess players I know, almost every one of them plays poker.”

  And why wouldn’t they? The top prize in the main event at the 2005 World Series of Poker was $7.5 million dollars, with $4.25 million for second place and $2.5 million for third. And what is the top prize at this year’s World Open of chess, held in Philadelphia in early July? Eleven thousand dollars, with $10,500 for second place (the loser in a tiebreaker), and $1,825 for third.

  By chess standards, of course, this is a monstrous payoff, which is why the World Open consistently draws the nation’s top talent, and which is why Sal makes the trip there in early July, and Alex goes too, and even Ilya makes the two-hour trip, trying to make a run at the $10,000 first prize in the under-1800-rated section. And while Ilya finishes out of the money, both Sal and Alex wind up winning $900, which might seem like a good amount for a couple of high-school juniors-to-be, but consider the entry fee, and the cost of the hotel, and the cost of food, and the cost of transportation, and what are you left with?

  Already this summer, Hikaru Nakamura, the best young player in America and the defending U.S. champion (who winds up tying for third place at the World Open), is hinting that he might take a break to attend college instead of continuing to play chess. And why shouldn’t he? If a kid like this can’t get anyone to sponsor him, and can muster only a small measure of national publicity, then what point is there in trying to make a living of it? And Alex and Sal have both come to understand this; it’s the price they pay for leaving their home countries and coming to America. In fact, the more he thinks about it, the more Sal starts to consider taking that chess scholarship he won from the University of Texas at Dallas, one of the only colleges in the country to offer such a thing. At least then, the game will have given him something tangible.

  “But you know what? They’ve already gotten the value,” says Bruce Pandolfini. “Their lives have already been made much better. They’re already better problem-solvers. They’re already tougher mentally. They’re already more creative. They have more things to draw on to get them through the difficulties in life. The benefit will last for the rest of their lives.”

  Besides, it’s not always easy to let this game go. It is a cerebral parasite; it burrows inside you and stays there.

  Shawn is an unexpected visitor at the World Open as well. He and his friend Angel—Tw
eedledum and Tweedledee, as the teachers at I.S. 318 used to call them—caught a ride with one of the guys they’ve gotten to know by playing in the parks this summer. On Thursday night they sleep on chairs in the lobby. Shawn says one of the park guys volunteered to pay his $280 entry fee (presumably, anticipating he’d get a cut of Shawn’s winnings), but Shawn’s stepmother wouldn’t allow it to happen. So now he’s here, with no money, and only vague intimations of where he might stay (a friend from Chess-in-the-Schools eventually allows him and Angel to crash on his floor), and he spends the next couple of days in the Skittles Room, where an entire subculture of park players have camped out with no intention of entering the actual tournament. They’re here for one reason, and one reason only: They’re here to hustle. They’ll play blitz. They’ll play cards (exhibiting blatant disregard for a sign on the wall, prohibiting, in order, Smoking, Drinking, and Card Playing). They’ll play backgammon. They’ll roll dice. Whatever it takes to hook a fish, they’ll do it. And because Shawn has no summer job (he filed his working papers too late, he says), and because he has nothing else to do, he’s become fascinated with the lifestyle. That week at the World Open, when Elizabeth Vicary asks him what went wrong at school this year, he says, “I’ve been hanging out with the wrong crowd.” For Shawn, that doesn’t mean what you think it might. That doesn’t mean drinking, smoking, doing drugs, or macking on girls. For Shawn, hanging out with the wrong crowd means hustling chess games in the park with young and middle-aged men of indeterminate backgrounds who do this for a living. They do it at a park called Mount Olympus, near the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and they do it in Harlem at St. Nicholas Park on 145th Street, and of course they do it in the Village, in the southwest corner of Washington Square Park, where two decades earlier, Josh Waitzkin discovered the game of chess.