Issue 11.2 Spring 2016

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The American Gambit

 

Robert Patrick Botchy

 

 

My profession is similar to other quasi-famous positions where you’re only well-known if you’re eccentric. Few magazine journalists are recognizable, but one writes about doing an insane amount of drugs in Vegas and boom – you’ve got Hunter S. Thompson. Nobody can name a pro rock climber until one’s on TV going up a cliff without ropes. The only chess player anybody remembers is Bobby Fischer, and that’s only because he made a bunch of crazy comments and didn’t pay taxes for 30 years. No chess player will ever be more memorable than that. Unfortunately, I’m now the second-most famous US chess player. I can’t turn down the interview requests quickly enough.


Before I spazzed (as the New York Times said), all my media requests were for the same banal purpose. Interviewers wanted to know when I decided I wanted to be a pro chess player. I never decided. It’s the only thing I do. I’ve told the story countless times. Started playing at four. Expert at nine. Grandmaster at 13. Basically, my career’s the same as all the other top players. Fans asked different questions. They wanted to know how to improve. They asked how to finish off winning positions “Patience and practice,” I always said. The truth is you have to do it several thousand times until it becomes as intuitive as blinking.


Playing a pro sport (which is what I consider chess to be; I have to be in great shape to stay focused for an entire game) is roughly comparable to an addiction that nobody pities you for having. Chess prevents me from having relationships. My phone has more chess apps than contacts. I spend more time per week studying rook-and-pawn endgames than I do at church, and I’m a practicing Lutheran. I only take vacations to cities with prominent chess clubs because I can’t go a week without being in a room filled with the muffled thud of a wooden piece being set down on a board or the crunch of a clock being slammed after a move.


More than not pitying my addiction, people envy it. Most amateur chess players dream of reaching master level. I became a master so young, I never valued the title the way I imagine an average player would. But when I asked fans why they want to be a pro chess player, they said, “Because you get to play chess all day.” I asked what’s so great about that, and they told me it’s relaxing. All you do is think and you don’t have to worry about paying bills, making dinner, etc. It distracts the mind from outside stresses. Nobody seems to notice the paradox of enjoying chess as a distraction. When it becomes your profession, it becomes the source of stress you need to alleviate through a distraction.


I wonder sometimes if other athletes feel this way. Like do pro football players go home and read dense fiction because turning on ESPN will remind them of work? I love chess, but once a week I need to shut down and watch TV and relax or I’d pop a bottle of Tylenol to stop my brain from wondering whether the Scotch or the Italian Game is a better alternative to the Berlin.


Quick aside about pro chess: I used to be the number one rated player in the world. To make a good living, you’ve got to be in the top 50. To get as high-rated as I was, chess has to be to your life what religion was to Jesus’s. I would wake up and play blitz chess online. I played games in my head in the shower. I watched tournaments online while I was cooking. To be a pro chess player – hell to be one of the best in the world at anything – there’s no time for hobbies, save an occasional evening of TV.


The guys rated outside the top 50 in the world are poor. They make money through private lessons and tournament winnings, but those rarely cover travel expenses. So they do odd jobs with flexible hours to finance chess. Once you’re in the top 50, you get sponsorships and appearance fees, and tournament prize funds balloon. When I cracked the top 50, I got more money than I could conceivably spend. That much cash can corrupt you. I saw other players nervously walk into brothels, hands in pockets, sweat dripping from their armpits down their torsos. I met more alcoholic chess players than lawyers. Comparatively, watching a lot of TV isn’t that bad.


When money starts flowing in, and you start playing tournaments in foreign countries, you can either play more chess or start blowing dough on hookers, drugs, and drinks. It’s not uncommon to see players wash out after getting into the top 50 because they can’t handle success. The game starts requiring better opening prep, tactics training, and endgame study. Unless chess is your life, its demands aren’t fun. The people who wash out don’t have the stomach for constant chess.


Michael Coorolopoulis is the most famous example. Canadian grandmaster. Broke into the top 20 in the world four years ago. I met him at his first super-grandmaster tournament, which was in Armenia. We all got appearance fees for the pre-tournament meet-and-greet, plus he got a few Toronto tech companies to pay him for advertising space on his blazer. All us players met at the bar the first night. We grabbed a corner booth in a well-lit bar. Our table filled with empty glasses, white foam in lines along the inside of each glass. Coorolopoulis was 18. He’d never been drunk before. He asked the other players what was fun to do in Armenia. They sent him to a brothel. That was a sight. Coorolopoulis was 6’5’’, 130 pounds. He had out-of-style horn-rimmed glasses, greasy black hair, and a recessed chin. He’d never be on the cover of People.


The next afternoon (which was the day before the tournament started), he spent the afternoon and night at the brothel. The next day, he brought two hookers to the playing hall at the hotel. He gave them all-access passes and told them to stay in the lounge, which was separated from the general admission area by three ceiling-high blue curtains against the wall. The lounge had bathrooms in the corner, muffins, tea, coffee, water, and fruit on folding tables against the wall, and puffy red-cushioned armchairs around a coffee table in the center of the room. Players, their guests, and arbiters had access to the lounge. Coorolopoulis hid the hookers back there, and only the other players in the tournament knew. The games started in the playing hall. I was at the board to the right of Coorolopoulis’s game. He’d play a move, get up, stroke his chin, and pretend he was thinking about the game position, then walk back to the lounge. When I went to get a cup of tea halfway through the round, I could hear slurping noises coming from one of the curtained-off bathroom stalls.


Well so he spent more time in the lounge than he did at the board, and he lost his first round game on time, which is rare in a classical game. The next day, Coorolopoulis brought the hookers, and he got into time trouble again, blundered, and resigned. This went on for a week. He was in last place at the tournament and didn’t even manage to draw a game. Finally, the Canadian media members at the event wondered why Coorolopoulis spent so much time in the lounge. Since this was Coorolopoulis’s first big tournament, it was getting good media coverage back in Toronto. Some of the press members ducked under the velvet rope that lined the walkway to the lounge and pulled back the blue curtains. They found Cooroloupolis in one of the curtained-off bathrooms. The picture they got is the Flag-Raising at Iwo Jima of the chess world. There was Coorolopoulis, pants-down, mouth open, eyes rolled back, high-watt smile directed at the camera, and his two topless hookers, brunette heads at his waist covering his cock, bare backs facing the camera. Nothing in the photo was prima facie profane, so it ran in newspapers, websites, magazines, and TV newscasts for the next week. I felt bad for Coorolopoulis – after all, he was just a wet-behind-the-ears 18-year-old from suburban Ontario – but I laughed at the headlines. “Coorolopoulis Blows Shot at Prestigious Tournament,” “Coorolopoulis Drops Pants, Title Hopes,” and – my favorite – “Coorolopoulis Creates Sticky Situation at Chess Tournament.”


I reached out to Coorolopoulis for advice after my meltdown. It wasn’t helpful. He quit chess out of embarrassment, went back to school, and now helps manage his dad’s restaurant in Oshawa. I don’t blame him. That’s a better alternative than trying to be a pro ranked 50-300 in the world. Players in those spots will do anything to get to the top 50. Like all those cyclists who cheated because that was the only way they could win, that’s what the 50-300 lifers’ mindset is. I’ve heard of players being arrested for drugging opponents, expelled for hiding chess computers in toilets at tournaments, and rigging clocks to tick a tenth of a second quicker for their opponents. Coorolopoulis didn’t seem like he’d fit in there. Hell, I wouldn’t either. I’m happy my rating never declined that low after I forfeited all my remaining games at my last event.


That tournament was in the United States. My rating had just hit 2840, and I was starting to be talked about as the best US hope for the World Championship since Fischer. We were playing in Manhattan and drawing way bigger crowds than I had ever seen at a tournament in America. All these big news outlets interviewed me. I was on the New York Times, ESPN, and Sports Illustrated. The week before the tournament I realized how many people were following the event and I got stressed and started losing weight and couldn’t sleep and the skin under my eyes turned black and I lost a centimeter off my hairline and I vomited a few times every day. The few times I did sleep, I had nightmares I hung a piece on move three and had to resign and my sponsors wanted their money back and I would take a drive and have to stop at a yellow light while a bus carrying all the other players in the tournament made it through the intersection before the light turned red. I didn’t need a psychologist to interpret this.


But so anyway on the tournament’s start date, I did not feel well. I went to the lounge before the opening round, which was laid out like the lounge at Coorolopoulis’s last tournament in Armenia, and I got some coffee and a muffin, and I saw my opponent Yan Kharabov sitting at the round wooden table across the room. He stood up, ran a hand through his hair, and walked toward me.


“Hi,” he said.

 

Pre-round chats with your day’s opponent are atypical and kinda rude, the equivalent of a hushed discussion in church while the preacher gives a sermon.

 

“You look tired,” he said.

 

That was no compliment, and I’m sure he was trying to piss me off. He knew what I was going through since his town hosted the qualifying tournament for the last World Championship. He probably wanted to tell me I looked knuckle-bitingly bad.

 

“I’ve been a bit stressed,” I said.

 

“I figured. I haven’t seen you at the bar this week.”

 

“Yeah, I’ve been in my room prepping for the games. I’m feeling some pressure to do well here.”


A pause. I sipped my coffee from its flexible recycled cardboard cup, and Yan crunched his plastic water bottle as he gulped down its contents. And the silence continued past our drinks. I drummed on my left thigh with my free hand and my eyes panned the room. Yan looked at me. I couldn’t take the silence, but I wasn’t sure what to say. I didn’t want to mention chess-specific topics since we were about to play, and nothing else came to mind except our hotel. Yan still looked at me.


“I’ve actually been so stressed that I haven’t left my room in almost a week,” I said. “It’s a mess of towels and room service scraps and chess boards. I don’t want the maids coming in and moving the boards and pieces, so I haven’t let anybody else in. The room’s gross, which sucks ‘cause I’m a major germophobe.”


“Yeah I see how that could be problematic.”


Yan picked up a muffin from the table and licked it. He tried to rub the muffin against my face. I smacked it away and it went to the floor. Yan laughed and walked away, leaving the muffin on the ground. I threw it away. 20 minutes later, we sat opposite each other at the chess board in the playing hall when he started my clock and our game began. I had a novelty prepared for Yan, so I blitzed out my moves.


I don’t notice much outside the game when I’m playing tournament chess. I like tournaments because they always get gorgeous wooden boards and pieces that cost about $1000 total. The way they look, reflecting a glare from chandelier light, every piece facing forward, evokes the word ‘art’ in my head more than any landscape portrait ever has. I always feel a sadness when I have to make a move, knowing I’m altering something I consider beautiful. To mitigate any damage to the tableau, I never slam a piece on the board or place it off-center in its new square. I firmly grasp the top of the piece with my thumb and index finger and don’t remove them until the piece is forward-facing and centralized on its new space. I clean off any hair or dust I see on the board. I try to keep the scene flawless.


Most other grandmasters do the same thing. Yan was an exception. I hated playing him. He slammed his moves and he let his knights face backward and he set his pawns on the edge of squares. Since he had a reputation as a slob, I still don’t know if his behavior was intentional in our games that tournament. It started the move before I was going to play my novelty. He captured my rook, which I expected. But before he grabbed his rook, he picked his nose and took out a small booger on the corner of his index finger. He didn’t wipe it off on the table or his chair. He didn’t get a tissue or hanky. Yan picked up my rook from its square and left his rook in its place with the booger stuck to the top. Snot seeped through the carved edges on the top of the piece and slowly creeped down onto its sides. I had to pick up his rook to recapture it. If I didn’t recapture, I could have resigned because it would have been impossible to beat Yan down a rook. But I had a mental block about touching the piece and feeling his snot on my fingers. Yan sniffled.


The longer I waited to recapture, the worse the situation got. The snot trickled off the rook, past its base, and into a circle on the board. My novelty required my king to run to that square in five moves. So I sat at the board, with only one move possible, and I kept debating whether or not to play it and continue my novelty, as gross as it would be. 10 minutes passed. Yan walked to the lounge. I noticed a crowd around my board, as spectators whispered to their friends theories about why I hadn’t yet recaptured. I called over the tournament’s chief arbiter and complained about the snot, but I couldn’t prove Yan had intentionally done anything to distract me, so the arbiter couldn’t do anything. He told me it would be impractical to clean every piece and part of the board after each of Yan’s moves, and I’d have to play on.


I spent another 10 minutes taking deep breaths and playing mental tennis about whether to touch the rook. Finally I recaptured, through cold snot and all, and wrote my move on my scoresheet before I got up to go to the bathroom and wash my hands. When I returned, Yan had played his next move. I wrote it on my scoresheet and I started thinking about playing my prepared novelty since my king needed to walk through Yan’s snot. While I was thinking, I realized I hadn’t cleaned my pen, which I’d touched before washing my hands and again when I got back from the bathroom. All my tics at the board involved my hands. I massaged my temples, stroked my jaw, and rubbed a finger on my upper lip. I’d done all these since returning to the board. I had spread traces of Yan’s snot all over my head, basically. So I called the arbiter over again and got permission to head to the bathroom while it was still my turn to move. I rinsed my face, pen, and hands.


I came back and played my novelty. Yan instantly replied and captured my knight with his bishop, which was the move I figured he would play. He didn’t leave snot this time, rather a glob of shining red-brown earwax on the tip of the bishop. Again, he jumped up from the board and walked away. Out of pride, I wouldn’t call the arbiter over again. The earwax paralyzed me like the snot. Another 20 minutes passed. I had about 15 minutes left to make 30 moves before additional time would be added to my clock. Fortunately, I’d found a forced draw in this position, which didn’t require me to touch Yan’s earwax, so we split the point. But after the game, reporters asked me about my two long thinks and my discussion with the arbiter. I screwed up and told the truth. So everybody found out I was a germophobe.


My next game, my opponent had a tan liquid glazed over his right palm. He wouldn’t tell me what it was. I knew the guy and felt like he probably was joking with me, but I couldn’t convince myself that he hadn’t rubbed his hand in a combination of toilet water and shower curtain scum or something equally disgusting. When the arbiter started the round, the guy held out his hand, which shined as the glaze reflected various lights, and I wouldn’t shake it. My opponent claimed a victory since apparently there was a rule that you forfeited if you wouldn’t shake your opponent’s hand. The arbiter confirmed this and I lost. My third-round opponent sneezed on the board and all the pieces, and I lost on time. The morning of my fourth-round game, I took a few Xanax pills to ease my anxiety about contacting germs. I fell asleep at the board and lost because nobody woke me up. The media did stories about how I disappointed American fans, couldn’t compare to Fischer, and wouldn’t start a chess boom like the one in the 70s.


My fifth game was against Yan. I looked terrible. Crooked red lines ran through my eyes like rivers on a map. Patches of stubble darkened my cheeks and outlined pale circles where my facial hair wouldn’t grow. Wrinkles creased the chest of my Oxford shirt. I forgot to wear a belt. I think I decided to not tolerate any more uncleanliness when I saw Yan. He got to the board early. He leaned back in his cushioned chair, argyle sock showing at his right ankle, which rested on his opposite knee next to the chair’s wooden armrest. A manicured hand tapped the table. He smiled and his shaved cheeks recessed to show coffee-stained teeth. I hated him. He had no responsibility to do well at this tournament. No Russian journalists attended. Yan had no stress compared to me. And he’d caused all my problems by exposing me as a germophobe. When the arbiter announced the start of the round, Yan reached his right hand down and scratched his bottom for a few seconds and held out his hand for me to shake. I picked up my king and threw it at his face. He blocked it, as my wind-up was hardly inconspicuous, but I jumped over the table and tackled him while his hands were up. The arbiters quickly grabbed me off of Yan. I remember an infinite number of clicks and flashes and people yelling questions at me as the media ran over and fans pulled out their cameras. The velvet rope that separated the players from the spectators and media had been knocked over. The arbiters yelled at me that I was out of the tournament. One stood on each side of me, holding my arms at the triceps, walking me out of the playing hall. I wanted to scream at the cameras that I was good at chess and this tournament was not representative of my ability in the sport, but I felt like there was no way to scream this over the noise of the hall and adequately communicate. I took a deep breath and let myself be taken away.

 

 

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