Game of Kings Read online

  Steadroy shakes his head.

  “Why aren’t you playing?” Oscar says.

  “Saving myself up for New Year’s,” Steadroy says. In a couple of nights, Steadroy explains, there will be an all-night New Year’s tournament at the Marshall club, the last of the city’s major private chess establishments. The way Steadroy figures it, his youth will serve to his advantage in an all-nighter; the old men will be snoozing in their seats sometime past midnight, and he’ll be going strong.

  Oscar fishes a deck of cards from his jacket. Everywhere he goes, Oscar carries a deck with him. He has become a devotee of online poker Web sites, an inveterate small-time hustler. In the school cafeteria, he and his friends bet their dollars on a Russian card game called Stupid. Most of the time, Oscar comes out ahead.

  Behind him, Ilya bursts out of the elevator, carrying a Starbucks coffee and a sandwich in a paper bag. “I could have won that game,” he says, and then he disappears into the Skittles Room. A short time later, Willy emerges, defeated, making excuses for himself.

  “Yo, I’m hungry, man,” Oscar says. “You should have resigned.”

  Two flights down on the elevator, and then Willy and Oscar hurtle past clumps of disoriented European tourists and clatter through the revolving doors. A few weeks earlier, they’d stood in the Oval Office for a photo op with the president, served up as shining examples of what a public-school system can produce when it nurtures its minority and immigrant youth, and so on, and so on. But all those plaudits were based on their accomplishments within the game, within an artificial hierarchy contained to nondescript hotel conference rooms and debated on Web sites and online message boards. Out here on the streets, where no one gives a goddamn about the silence and order contained within those sixty-four squares, where most people on Eighth Avenue can’t even begin to comprehend the strange beauty of what Oscar has just accomplished, he’s scratching together his cash to pay for a Quarter Pounder.

  PART ONE

  OPENING

  ONE

  DO THE MATH

  ON A DRAB SEPTEMBER AFTERNOON IN BROOKLYN, ON THE FOURTH floor of a sprawling red-brick school building set tight against the elevated subway line, the best fifteen-year-old chess player in the United States struts into a classroom and falls into a litany of complaint. His name is Salvijus Bercys, though he goes by the Americanized truncation of Sal, and he has braces and cowlicked blond hair and a devastatingly thin frame. Sal drops his backpack on a desk with a hollow thud, considers the strangers in his midst, and then turns to Eliot Weiss, the teacher who presides over this room, the teacher who recruited him to this high school, and he says, “How long is this going to take?”

  The way Sal figures it, he has no compelling reason still to be in school on this afternoon, in a roomful of clueless neophytes who could not begin to comprehend the complexity of the strategies gestating within his head. This is the introductory Thursday meeting for underclassmen interested in joining the chess team at Edward R. Murrow High School, and Sal is not a beginner, and if you want to know the truth, Sal doesn’t have much patience for beginners. Sal is far beyond that phase of his life. Sal has been playing chess for seven years, starting in his native country of Lithuania. In the summer of 2003, he showed up at a tournament called the U.S. Junior Open, held at SUNY-MARITIME, a small college in the Bronx. He had arrived in America with his family four weeks earlier, emerging on the New York chess scene virtually out of thin air. Sal scored five out of a possible six points—in chess tournaments, one point is awarded for a victory, half a point for a draw, and no points for a defeat—and finished first in the under-twenty-one division, earning a full scholarship to the University of Texas at Dallas, which he has no intention of using. Sal has been a regular at local tournaments ever since then, his U.S. Chess Federation rating ballooning to above 2400, ascending toward the ranks of masters and grandmasters, nearly eight hundred points ahead of most of his teammates.

  “I can’t stay,” Sal says. “I have to go soon.”

  Sal is the defending state high-school champion, the number-one ranked player in the country under the age of sixteen, and the best scholastic player on the best scholastic chess team in America. He led Murrow to the national high-school championship last season, and since then his English has improved to the point where he speaks in a sort of boxy slang. He tends toward trendy clothing brands like Diesel and Nike. He is both self-deprecating and arrogant, gregarious and prickly, as the best chess players can be, and the reason he’s in a hurry is because he’s on his way to a tournament tonight at the Marshall Chess Club. The entry fee is twenty-five dollars instead of the usual twenty, which means Sal could walk away with more money at the end of the evening. A couple of weeks earlier, Sal had come home with a hundred and ten dollars.

  And so Sal delivers perfunctory answers to certain questions about his past—he’s been playing for seven years, and age doesn’t really matter in chess, the way he chooses an opening series of moves is based upon a matter of feel, blah, blah, blah—and then he slips out the door. “Man,” he says, “I’m getting old.” You see things when your mind is developing that you don’t see when you get older, Sal has said, and chess is all about seeing things that no one else sees, which is why it’s a sport that’s always produced its share of prodigies: another petulant boy from Brooklyn, Bobby Fischer, was fourteen when he won his first national championship.

  Within the rubric of the U.S. Chess Federation, Sal is competing at a master level, although it is a monstrous leap from what Sal can do to what the elite grandmasters (the Fischers and the Karpovs and the Kasparovs) can do, which is why even the top echelon of players often maintain a base of humility beneath their bluster. Still, in November, Sal will play at the World Youth Championships in Greece, and a couple of weeks after that, he’ll be at the U.S. Championships in San Diego. He’ll miss almost a month of school in order to play chess. He’s an elite youth player in a sport so often defined by its youth, and while he’d like to think he’s too old to be a prodigy, he is the primary reason why Murrow should win another high-school national championship in Nashville next April. This is the goal at Murrow every year. It’s been the goal almost every year for the past decade, when, through a combination of geographic fortune and resourcefulness and outright salesmanship, Eliot Weiss began to construct an unlikely and unconventional sort of dynasty.

  One by one, the veteran players at Murrow enter and then go their separate ways: Willy and Oscar and a sophomore named Nile Smith have to attend an after-school chess tutoring program in Manhattan, through a nonprofit organization called Chess-in-the-Schools; Ilya has to study for his SATs; Alex Lenderman has to meet his father at home; and the two incoming recruits, the freshmen Dalphe Morantus and Shawn Martinez, are nowhere to be found. Over the course of the year, each will miss significant amounts of class time because of chess, a fact that will confuse and frustrate certain teachers, who simply cannot fathom the notion of this game as a competitive enterprise. They hear about Murrow’s chess championships—everyone in school knows of them, even if they can’t always understand why anyone would bother with such a thing—but it does not earn the team members any special privileges. It is up to Mr. Weiss to serve as their apologist, and he does all he can, even if he cannot always save them from themselves.

  After the veterans are gone, after they’ve all made their brief cameos and bolted out the door, there are only the newbies, lined up in a pair of tidy little rows in the back of the room, playing against each other. There are fourteen altogether, nine boys and five girls, a surprisingly egalitarian mix, and they’re fidgeting in their chairs and gnawing at their cuticles and nearly withering their cheap plastic pawns with angst. This is how chess club begins each season: with a fumbling in the dark, with a reliance upon the vague notions of the sport passed on by fathers and brothers and uncles, with all these fresh faces stumbling toward checkmate.

  Eliot Weiss has seen this before. He sees the same mistakes from the newbies every
fall, and it’s his hope that a few of them, perhaps one or two, perhaps three or four, will take it seriously enough to wend their way through the fog to a greater understanding. But for now, it’s just the first meeting of a long year. And for now, Mr. Weiss keeps quiet, and he keeps his hands behind his back, and he hovers above the row of boards like a test proctor. He already has his team, his top boards, his core of talent; what might emerge from this room, perhaps a late bloomer who takes to the game the way he once did, is merely a bonus.

  Primarily for reasons of neighborhood preservation and economics, Edward R. Murrow High School was built on a swatch of real estate next to the subway line at Avenue M in Midwood, Brooklyn. The school opened in 1974 with a nontraditional curriculum and a selective admissions process. Before that, the land was occupied by a city sanitation dump and a parking lot for an Oldsmobile dealership. Today, the neighborhood surrounding the school is diverse, multilingual, and primarily middle-class. It serves as a sort of ethnic and geographic centerpoint of Brooklyn, and is home to a large enclave of Orthodox Jews and Russian immigrants and blacks and Hispanics and Middle Easterners. On Avenue M, a drugstore advertises Russian Orthopedic Comfort Shoes, and Pete’s Pizza Parlor stands across the street from the remains of the Shalom Hunan, a defunct kosher Chinese restaurant. A block away on Avenue L, surrounded by a towering chain-link fence, is the artificial-turf athletic facility for nearby Midwood High, where the city football championship is played each fall. In the park across the street, students from the local yeshiva play games of pickup basketball, shirts untucked, hair bobbing in the wind.

  The easiest way to reach the entrance to Murrow from the subway platform at Avenue M is a shortcut through a narrow produce-market parking lot littered with trash and graffiti. You can also walk a block to Avenue L, then turn left and walk two blocks to the main entrance, threading your way through clusters of disabled students and punk-rock revivalists (pink hair, Sex Pistols T-shirts) hanging out near the school parking lot on Fourteenth Street. Inside the main entrance, as is the case at every New York City public school, a security guard sits at a cramped desk signing in visitors and refusing reentry to teenagers who claim to have forgotten their ID cards.

  By 2:45 in the afternoon, when the school day officially ends, students at both neighborhood high schools, Midwood and Murrow, overwhelm the streets and flood toward the subway entrance. Midwood’s football field stands on an entire city block no more than fifty feet from Murrow’s front entrance, a rectangle of turf bounded on one side by metal bleachers and on the other by that twenty-foot-tall chain-link fence, set almost as a line of demarcation between two disparate institutions.

  “Visiting Midwood [High School] is like stepping into a school in the early 1950s,” wrote author and education historian Diane Ravitch in a 1984 essay. “It is quiet and orderly, and the students seem serious and purposeful.”

  At Midwood, classes are crowded and competition can be cutthroat; the school also has more than two dozen varsity sports programs. Midwood has lacrosse teams and soccer teams and volleyball teams and swim teams. So if you live in the neighborhood and you want a traditional high-school experience, if you want to play football or soccer or baseball or tennis, you go to Midwood. “There are just so many resources and energy you can have,” says Saul Bruckner, the principal at Murrow for the first thirty years of its existence. “Maybe this is an excuse, but to field a football team, you need thirty thousand dollars a year. So the teams we have tend to be in the academic arena. Or as I used to tell the kids who would bug me about it, the principal’s a lousy athlete.”

  Inside, Murrow looks and feels and smells like a typical American high school entering its third decade of life. The walls are painted in unfathomably hideous shades of yellow and orange, and the white tile floors in the hallway are stained gray, and the sinks in the bathroom are clogged with a thick brown detritus of paper towels. The building is a labyrinth of hallways and annexes; Weiss’s classroom is on the fourth floor, number 446, a rectangular space near the art department with a pea-green linoleum floor. On the far side of the room, a wall of windows directly overlooks the elevated train; the Q express line rattles desks each time it shimmies past.

  The newbies were lured here by the announcement that morning over the school’s loudspeaker—Come join the Edward R. Murrow chess team, the best of its kind in the nation—but most of them had known about Murrow’s team long before the announcement. It has become a signature of the school, a notation in the guidebooks and on the “best-of ” lists, a shining example of how Murrow’s unique educational system, one that values expansive personal freedoms, allows its students to thrive. There are children in Russia who have yet to set foot on American soil who have heard of Murrow High School in missives from their relatives in Brighton Beach and Sheepshead Bay and Coney Island, in the articles that appear every spring in Newsday and the Daily News and the Post.

  There are essentially two chess teams at Murrow: There is the “traveling” team, consisting of the players that Weiss has recruited and helped gain entrance to the school; and there are the club members, who come and go as they please on Thursday afternoons. The club members, if they are serious, are encouraged to attend weekend tournaments in Brooklyn and Manhattan, sponsored by a foundation known as The Right Move. If they show enough dedication, Weiss will, essentially, promote them to the traveling team. At most chess tournaments, only the top four scorers on each team count; therefore, a team can bring sixty or seventy players to a tournament or a team can bring five, and the results could still match up evenly. One year, Weiss brought more than twenty players to the national high-school championship. In other years, he’s brought half a dozen or fewer. Much of it depends upon his budget, which used to depend upon public kindness and now depends on a single private donor who wishes to remain anonymous.

  And so these fourteen had heard stories in the hallways, and they studied the photographs and the news clippings on the bulletin board as they entered Eliot Weiss’s classroom, the one with the JUST DO THE MATH sign on the door. There are photos of past teams with mayors (Bloomberg and Giuliani), with senators (Clinton and Schumer), and with vice president Al Gore. There is a Daily News clipping from the previous spring headlined CHESS CHAMPS DO IT AGAIN.

  Outside, save the periodic grumbles of the rush-hour trains, there is quiet. Afternoons at Murrow are placid and forgiving. The expansive hallways, a gathering spot for students during the school day, have emptied out. The math club is meeting next door, and a college prep group is gathering down the hall in a science room named after Galileo. Every couple of minutes, someone else knocks on the door to Weiss’s room, pokes their head inside, and bears witness to the conga line of chess games being played in the back of the room, on school desks lined with boards made of xeroxed paper sheets and outlined in masking tape. Is this the College Now program? Is this the Arabic Club?

  “This is chess,” Eliot Weiss says, and most often he invites them to stay, and this either draws them in or pushes them right back out the door.

  Twenty-one years earlier, when Weiss initiated the chess club at Murrow, this was all he had in mind. It was a school club like any other school club in any other neighborhood in any other city in America, a safe way to eat up an afternoon and indulge a passion Weiss had fostered since childhood. That’s all it is for the fourteen newbies, as well, who are well beyond the age at which serious chess players take up the game. Among them, there is a girl in a pink T-shirt that says DON’T HOLD BACK, DON’T GIVE UP, and another girl with a half-dozen hemp bracelets looped around her wrists. There are four sophomores, one black, one white, one Asian, and one Hispanic, who decided to join this club together, despite having never played chess before. There was a time, shortly after the fall of Communism, when Weiss’s club mostly drew Russian and Eastern European immigrants, but that’s changed over the years. So he stands today in front of this tossed salad of city ethnicities, all eyes on a Jew from Long Island with a long face and a gray-speckle
d beard and a crooked necktie knotted over a rust-hued corduroy shirt.

  “All right,” he says. “Now that you’ve played each other, I’m going to play all of you at one time.”

  In chess, this is called a simul, short for simultaneous exhibition. It is something of a lark, a display of ego and showmanship by superior players. A year later, in a blatant attempt to attract publicity for her sport, a female grandmaster named Susan Polgar will set the world record by playing a simul against 326 opponents in a Florida shopping mall. In this case, a simul gives Weiss an opportunity to see what the newbies can do, to gauge the skill levels he’s dealing with. Weiss is an expert-level player, his skills far above that of the newbies but well below that of his top two players. For the most part, he cannot teach his team members anything they don’t already know; he is more of a facilitator than an educator. The club, however, is an entirely different story.

  “Now,” he says, “who’s going to be the first victim?”

  And so it goes exactly how you’d expect it to go: The newbies handcuff their attacking pieces and they lock themselves into corners and they fail to protect their kings. Chess is a sport of actions and reactions, and without a rudimentary knowledge of strategy and tactics, the two primary elements of the game, it is virtually impossible to extend the game beyond a couple of dozen moves. There is no such thing as dumb luck. So a girl named Elizabeth chews on her copper hair and attacks too early with her queen and loses it in an instant. And an Asian boy named Rex, one of the four sophomores, who is attending this club on a whim he can’t quite articulate, sputters, “I know what you’re doing,” and Weiss says, “I don’t even know what I’m doing,” and then he finishes the game. A girl named Emily gives away her rook and tucks her head into her chin and stifles a nervous giggle. And Weiss continues to walk up and down the row, snatching away pieces and making harmless little quips and offering postcheckmate handshakes.