Game of Kings Read online

  Bobby Fischer vanished into the ether in the mid-1970s and then reemerged as a paranoid xenophobe (he reportedly had the fillings in his teeth removed in fear that his enemies might be using them as antennas to beam messages) and a raging anti-Semite. He won more than three million dollars in a bland 1992 rematch against Spassky in Yugoslavia in the midst of its civil war—in direct defiance of an executive order from the U.S. Treasury Department—and then vanished again as a wanted man, only to surface to tell a Filipino radio station that the events of September 11, 2001, were “wonderful news.” And yet, for all of his follies, it is nearly impossible to discuss American chess (and, it could be argued, chess in general) without referencing the looming presence of Fischer. It is impossible not to attach Fischer’s personal life to his chess, but it is his chess that remains seminal: Grandmasters still marvel at the history, and the theory, the brashness of his tactics; his book, My 60 Memorable Games, is considered a classic. “There was a clarity to what he was doing on the board,” Pandolfini says. “You could see it happening, but you were helpless to stop it.”

  To compare a young player to Fischer is to compare a CYO basketball star to Michael Jordan. It is both impossible and entirely unfair, and it occurs without fail every few years, when some prepubescent talent, almost always male, emerges at a precocious age. It is easy to get caught up in such hope.

  And so it was easy to read Talese’s story and study the accompanying picture of a boy with a long face and a blond military cut hunched over a chessboard and make the connection to another fourteen-year-old ranked No. 1 in his age group in the United States, and to the odd admission he had made a few months earlier.

  “I’m getting old,” Sal had said.

  In December, in the month before the New York City Scholastic Championships, Salvijus Bercys (with a U.S. Chess Federation rating of 2419) remains the top-ranked fifteen-year-old chess player in America, by a margin of seventy-one points. This is according to the system that determines the numerical (and in turn, social) hierarchy in American chess, a system so convoluted that to attempt to explain it would require that one obtain an advanced degree in mathematics from an Ivy League institution, as well as the assistance of several Austrian quantum physicists and a small battalion of robots. Here, for instance, is an excerpt from a USCF press release that attempts to describe recent innovations in the ratings system:

  To approximate one’s rating using the standard formulas, a player needs to know (or approximate) the number of games played in tournaments, only if less than 50. Let N be the number of previous games, but set N to 50 if the number of games is 50 or more. Then, if the player has a pre-tournament rating less than 2200, the player computes:

  So even though many of the top players in this country couldn’t even begin to explain the precise rationale behind their own ratings, these numbers dictate the tenor of virtually every important game. They are both signifiers of one’s identity, and the game’s equivalent of Las Vegas point spreads. And even though Sal is currently struggling through his sophomore-year math classes at Murrow, he knows this much: He maintains a seventy-one-point margin over the closest competitor in his age group, who also happens to be his teammate, Alex Lenderman. By all accounts, Sal and Alex dislike each other immensely, although this does not stop them from carpooling to major tournaments and sharing hotel rooms when they’re on the road and playing endless blitz matches between rounds.

  Sal and Alex look nothing alike, and they play nothing alike, and they act nothing alike. Sal is an inimitable personality, blond and brash and given to absurdist statements and odd proclamations. Alex has disheveled black hair and an overbite. He is small in every possible way: He is short and thin and narrow-waisted, and he often wears baggy sweatshirts and oversized boots that make him look like he’s drowning in fabric, and sometimes when he tucks in his shirt, his pants can’t help but take a slow ride toward his collarbone. And yet when Alex speaks, which is not particularly often, he does it in a cracked bass familiar to every boy who has ever struggled through the uneven onset of puberty. Sometimes, the things he says, shrouded in that husky voice and a vestigial Russian accent, are very strange indeed, almost savantlike in their precision. “Thirteen percent of my life is spent on ICC (the Internet Chess Club),” he says one day. Granted, the ICC software calculates this number for each member, but even if it didn’t, Alex would have figured it out for himself. He likes math and he imagines himself becoming a statistician someday. At home, he plays along with Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! and The Price Is Right and he watches Yankee games with his father. Sometimes, just for fun, he will calculate the probability of, say, the Yankees winning a game after losing three straight. He enjoys probabilities, far more than most boys his age enjoy baseball. He is also a member of the math club at Murrow. But most of the time, when he is not eating or sleeping or studying, he is playing chess. This much can be quantified.

  Alex was an Eliot Weiss recruit coming out of Intermediate School 228 in Gravesend, where, along with a classmate named Aleksandr Pelekhaty (who wound up at Brooklyn Tech), he led the school to a junior-high national championship. Around that time, Mr. Weiss first made contact with him. “They wanted me at Murrow,” Alex says. “I felt Stuyvesant was too hard for me to get in. In Stuyvesant, I might have screwed up with my grades. It’s too hard. I didn’t want to overwhelm myself.”

  Alex’s mother is from St. Petersburg, and his father is from the Ukraine, and they came here together when Alex was five years old, in part, Alex says, so that he wouldn’t have to go into the army. Which, when you watch Alex wandering around a chess tournament like a lost child in a shopping mall, carrying his pieces in a worn plastic bag from a Spanish department store, is a scenario that is almost impossible to imagine.

  Every summer, Alex spends a few weeks at his grandfather’s house in Germany, in a town called Sollingen, not far from Düsseldorf. When he was ten, his grandfather, Iosif Katz, a decent chess player with a rating of about 1600, taught him the game. Alex started playing against a computer, beating the lowest level, then a higher level, then the highest level. “It was addictive,” he says. “It was fun, even when I lost. Although I used to cry when I lost.”

  When he was eleven, Alex played in his first money tournament at the now-defunct Manhattan Chess Club. He beat several higher-rated players, and he won (he remembers the number precisely, of course) fifty-three dollars. His father sent him to a chess school in Brighton Beach, and Alex’s rating jumped to 1800, and under the tutelage of a coach named Mikhail Trossman, he reached 2300. Now he’s at such a high level that he can no longer afford one of the few coaches who could handle him; the best ones charge at least sixty dollars an hour, and the Lendermans, who live in Borough Park and also have a younger son, can’t afford to pay that much. Alex’s father works at a document-scanning company in Manhattan. His mother is a computer programmer. “Lessons might be worth it for rich people,” Alex says. “Most people who take lessons are billionaires.”

  Together, Sal and Alex—neither of whom takes private lessons—led Murrow to the national championship in 2004, with Sal scoring six points out of a possible seven and Alex scoring five and a half out of seven, and Murrow’s top four players accounting for 20.5 points, a full point and a half ahead of both the University School, a private academy in Fort Lauderdale with a yearly tuition of more than ten thousand dollars, and Stuyvesant High School, which produces as many National Merit Scholars as any school in the nation. And it is Sal and Alex who are the two top boards on the best high-school chess team in the nation, and who are both on their way to becoming International Masters, one of the highest titles in the sport. Together, Sal and Alex could very well lead Murrow to four consecutive national championships, and they have managed to turn schools like Stuyvesant, with an entire roster bound for highbrow universities, into intellectual underdogs.

  Still, this is not something they celebrate particularly often.

  Once you graduate into the small community of
elite American chess players, as Alex and Sal have done, the game begins to change. It becomes more serious and more daunting, a thing to be revered and deconstructed and properly prepared for. Scholastic tournaments, trophy tournaments devoid of cash prizes, are nothing more than diversions from the regular circuit of higher-level events. One of the best players in Murrow’s history, Irina Krush, played so much competitive chess during her senior year of high school that she couldn’t even remember where the national scholastic tournament took place (it was in Kansas City). “Honestly,” she says, “they weren’t that important in the context of my career.”

  And so this upcoming season—the city championship in January, the state championship in early March, and the nationals in April—means something entirely different for Sal and Alex than it does for the six others on the Murrow traveling team. A trophy? What good is a trophy? Sal and Alex do this because it is an obligation. They do this because it is what their teammates expect of them, and it is what Mr. Weiss expects of them for speaking to their teachers when they flub a math quiz. “There is no money involved at nationals,” Alex says. “There is still pressure, but not as much as there is at a money tournament.”

  When Sal and Alex have gone up against each other in tournament play, Sal has won all three times. These days, they refuse to play each other in any official capacity, and on those rare occasions when a tournament director forces them into a match, they’ll conspire to take an easy draw. Neither one will say outright that he dislikes the other, but beneath the enmity, they appear to have forged a grudging respect, which is what allows them to coexist.

  Alex still thinks Sal is the better player, that Sal understands the game more completely, that he’s a more skilled positional player, that’s he’s more in control. (Alex likes to think of himself as a “wild” player, which is hard to imagine, given his persona.) Sal may not dispute Alex’s notions when you ask him, but somewhere in that cluttered mind of his, he realizes that Alex is one good tournament away from eclipsing him. He also recognizes that Alex’s father is often willing to drive him to tournaments, because Alex’s father accompanies his son to virtually every competitive event, lurking in the dark corners of the room for hours at a time, staring over Alex’s shoulder with a meaty hand clutched under his chin, and holding hushed conversations in Russian with other parents in the Skittles Room.

  It is never hard to find David Lenderman at a chess tournament, because there is nothing small about him. He is built like a professional wrestler. He is stout from neck to waist and has a bottom-heavy face and thick brown mustache, and it is hard to believe that someone as fragile-looking as Alex could have emerged from the genes of such a massive figure. Because of the physical disparities, because of his constant presence at tournaments, people who don’t know him make assumptions about Alex’s father, but Alex was never forced into playing chess. It simply seems as if, perhaps more than anyone else at Murrow, his brain has been wired for such things.

  “The best players on our team,” Ilya says one day, “are a little bit strange.”

  But then, maybe you have to veer toward the bizarre in order to play chess at this level, to spend your free time amid a gathering of idiosyncratic masters and grandmasters, in tournaments played in drab hotel ballrooms, with the winners, in many cases, earning enough money to cover their expenses and the rest of the top ten players winning barely enough cash to pay for a sirloin dinner at an Outback Steakhouse. Is it a sign of abnormality to labor so hard, to ponder so deeply, for little or nothing in return? If so, then perhaps this is the definition of strange: four days holed up at, say, a Ramada in rural Vermont for something called the Green Mountain Open, when one honest mistake, one simple blunder, could make the difference between a $450 first-place prize and a lost weekend.

  There are eighty-five billion ways to play the first four moves of a chess game, and it has been said that there are more variations in a single chess game than there are atoms in the universe. These sorts of daunting truths may lead to sharper math skills and a deeper understanding of one’s self, but they have not rendered chess a lucrative pursuit in this country. Virtually no one in America can make enough money to survive on their own simply by playing chess. There are a couple of relatively well-paying tournaments each season, but the rest are mostly played for pocket change, and the regulars at these events tend to hold down more respectable day jobs, as aspiring physicians and teachers (often of chess, which doesn’t pay much better than playing does) and professional gamblers. And Fischer, for all his bluster, for all his press clippings, for all his bottom-line capitalistic urges, did nothing to change the model. After the high drama of 1972, after the initial buzz subsided, Fischer vanished and then reappeared and then became a late-night punch-line, and chess once again won more renown as a metaphor than as a profession.

  So here in this country, in this day and age, even someone as gifted and naturally inclined toward chess as Alex Lenderman is not crazy enough to imagine that he can make a living at this thing. His winnings are not so bad for a fifteen-year-old boy, not so bad when they’re applied to the family’s bills and the grocery shopping, a hundred dollars here, a hundred dollars there. “Even when I’m sixty, I’ll still be playing chess,” he says. “But I’ll have a job too. Chess players just don’t earn enough money.”

  For his nineteenth-place finish out of sixty-four at the U.S. Chess Championship in San Diego in early December, at one of the richest tournaments in America, Sal takes home a check for $3,250. He once again contends that this is a disappointing end for him, despite the fact that all three of his losses came to players with ratings above 2600. But you get the sense he doesn’t mean it this time. Still, when a Daily News reporter interviews him at school a few days later while working on a story about the team, he is mostly recalcitrant. It is Sal being Sal, elusive and deflective and charming all at once. He has no need for interviews. They bore him.

  The News also sends a photographer, who shoots a staged photo of Sal and Alex playing each other in a game that is not really a game, but merely a stage prop, because if this were the real thing, well, then, Sal and Alex wouldn’t be doing this in the first place. “This is a photo?” Sal says. “This is hardly a photo.”

  The rain is falling in thick sheets in midtown Manhattan, and out on the sidewalk the suits are dodging lake-sized puddles, their umbrellas twisted into baroque sculptures above their heads. And in the lobby of a polished office building on Third Avenue, an officious-looking young woman in a pressed skirt and a white blouse is squinting through the glass into the late-afternoon haze and growing ever more impatient. “Who are you waiting for?” her male colleague asks.

  “My chess team,” she says, adopting the false possessive embraced by speechmakers and politicians, by important people like her boss. “They were supposed to be here fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Well,” says her male colleague. He appears to be suppressing a chuckle. “A chess team. I guess you’ll recognize them when you see them.”

  Not long after that, they watch as a dozen men, women, teenagers, and children, an odd assortment of colors and races dressed up in low-cost formalwear, in hand-me-down ties and ill-fitting sweaters, come rushing along the sidewalk and sprint directly past the building. They look nothing like the gawky stereotype the officious-looking woman’s male colleague had in mind, but they still stand out among the midtown hordes like a wayward vaudeville act. They’ve got the wrong address, and by the time they find their way inside, they’re both damp and late, and fortunately for them, the senator is running late as well. The officious-looking young woman introduces herself to Eliot Weiss and his wife and they head toward the elevators, hurtling down to a room in the basement where Hillary Clinton is preparing to pose for a few hundred early-December photo ops with local heroes, proud citizens, and, all the way from Midwood, Brooklyn, the defending national chess champions.

  In the elevator, Oscar launches into a harangue.

  “Hey,” he says. “Let�
�s say someone owes me twenty-seven dollars. Hypothetically. Let’s say I owe someone twenty-seven dollars, and Willy here”—he slaps Willy on the shoulder—“owes me fourteen dollars.”

  Willy rolls his eyes. Clearly this argument has been raging for miles, aboveground and underground, on the forty-minute ride from Midwood to midtown, on the Q train and the 6 train, over the Manhattan Bridge and through the Lower East Side and along Lexington Avenue. Clearly, this all relates to debts stemming from card games, and clearly, Oscar is not making any sense.

  “So let’s say I tell Willy here to pay this person thirteen, and this person pays me fourteen,” Oscar says.

  “That still doesn’t make any sense,” says Sal, wedging his way into the discussion, but at this point Oscar is on a roll, and when Oscar is on a roll, momentum often trumps logic.

  “Wait, wait,” Oscar says. “Yes, it does. Let me finish.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Willy says. He’s pleading now. He’s insistent. He can’t take much more of this. “I told you, Oscar, it ain’t right. It don’t make no sense.”

  Oscar is wearing a sweater vest and a skinny Wall Street-era tie and a pair of black loafers. Most of the others are have put on shirts and ties, as well, except for Sal, who’s dressed in a fleece jacket and a pair of jeans. Shawn Martinez, one of the freshmen, is not here, but the other freshman, Dalphe Morantus, has showed up wearing an oversized oxford shirt that makes him look smaller than he already is. It is easy to mistake Dalphe for someone’s little brother. Happens all the time. He has a boyish face and dimples and huge expressive eyes. One of the seniors from last year’s team, a well-dressed Ukrainian named Dmitriy Minevich, has also come along. He’s at Pace University now, in lower Manhattan, studying business, and he watches, as Willy and Oscar go back and forth and then fall into another argument about what might happen at this year’s national tournament (both in terms of results and hotel-room arrangements), and what actually did happen at last year’s nationals, which is the reason why they’re here in the first place. It wasn’t like this last year. “This team,” Dmitriy says, “is much less mature.”