new york's epicenter of chess—the west village

While searching for the Village Chess Shop's address the other day, I found this charming article by Steve Zeitlin on New York's epicenter of chess, the West Village. As much as I enjoyed reading it, though, I couldn't help but think that maybe the epicenter of New York chess is about to leave Manhattan and move east into Brooklyn. One of us should write an article on the endless [and epic] games occurring at Eat and Matchless…

Flushed with victory after the world championships in 1972 (a championship that presaged nothing less that the American victory in the Cold War) Grand Master Bobby Fischer, who many consider the greatest chess player of all time, declared that he would use his fame and celebrity to promote the art of chess. In an extravagant moment, he promised to build a house in the shape of a chess piece: a castle (rook) with a spiral staircase. Then, for reasons that every chess player speculates freely upon, but which only he himself knows, Bobby Fischer disappeared from view and never kept any of those promises. But his image of a magnificent castle in the shape of a chess piece with a winding staircase is an apt metaphor for chess in New York, where he began as a child playing in the parks. His victories made New York City an epicenter for chess in the Americas. The current epicenter of chess in the City spans a small geographic area of the West Village, beginning at the fifteen concrete tables set in the southwest corner of Washington Square Park. From there, it's a short walk to the two "warring chess clubs"—the Chess Forum and the Village Chess Shop on Thompson Street—and then up to the lofty recesses set aside for the most serious players, Marshall"s Chess Club on West 10th Street.

At the undisputed bottom of the chess world, at the tables in Washington Square Park, behind a pair of shades, J.P. makes me an offer I can't refuse: $20,000 worth of information for a mere twenty bucks. As the game begins, he looks up to flirt with a young woman who pauses to watch for a moment. "Do you want next? What's your name?" She walks away, he looks down at the board, and the trash talk begins, "You have to perform in bed, you have to perform here. Getting them in bed is checkmate—it's mate in one." The games in the park are fast: five minutes for the whole game. "Some women don't like that," he tells me. "They're disappointed." Then he looks disparagingly down at the board, where I have just protected my king by castling. "Real men don't castle," he says.

After losing miserably, I walk just a block away and a step up to the next level of the chess world. At the Village Chess Shop on Thompson, no one is openly hustling, but the trash talk continues. A Mexican player urges his opponent to give up. "He thinks he's a Master, a Chess Master." Then adds, "a master-bator."

A few blocks north, where a sign on a quiet brownstone marks the pinnacle of the New York chess world, Marshall's Chess Club, the trash talks stops. The mythical winding staircase to this rarefied spot in the chess world takes us up uncarpeted steps to the second floor and into the well-worn, timeless atmosphere of what might once have been called a gentleman's club, although women are welcome. The largest room is lined with chess sets and framed photographs of chess champions. "We're standing here on hallowed ground," says Marshall's president Doug Bellizzi. Steeped in tradition, the club was founded in 1915 by Frank Marshall, one of the five original Grand Masters of chess, given that title by Czar Nicholas II. They purchased the building in 1932, and the great Cuban player Jose Raul Capablanca presided over the opening ceremony.

Marshall's pièce de résistance, in fact, is the famous Capablanca table, with an inlaid wooden chessboard. Capablanca won the world championship on this table, and in 1965, when Bobby Fischer was banned from attending a tournament in Cuba, Fischer played on the table, with the moves of his opponent telexed in from the island. On a recent Tuesday night, about twenty players face off in the downstairs room, while upstairs on the historic table, a Hasidic Jewish Grand Master holds a rook between his thumb and fingertip, poised to quash a fourteen-year-old scruffy child prodigy in a game broadcast on the Internet. Unlike in the park and the clubs, games here are played in total silence. Players don't even say "check" when attacking the king, as most of us amateurs were taught to do.

As we ascend the winding staircase of the chess world, we seem to come to an imaginary turret where the players are locked in eternal combat. At this "Capablanca table of the mind" players are, as chess player Gary Ryan observes, "locked into timeless space—there's only this kind of laser-like focus on the board. You make a move, and I make a move that is totally riding the edge against your move. It's like a surfer catching a big wave. I'm not sure chess is a game," he continues. "Chess may be something else—like a dream. I think that dreams are probably our attempts to figure out problems." Twenty-three-year-old American women's champion Jennifer Shahade echoes his sentiment, "You get to make beautiful things happen on the chess board. At certain moment, you think of a move that is so paradoxical or that makes everything fall into place."

Meanwhile Bobby Fischer, who started it all, is living in Iceland, unable to return to the U.S. without facing charges for playing a 1992 rematch with his archrival Boris Spassky in what was then Yugoslavia; the U.S. somehow cannot forgive his violation of sanctions, despite all his victory did for the game. In a clipping on the wall of the Village Chess Shop, Spassky, the Russian player he beat for the championship, makes an offer to the U.S. government, asking to be punished along with Fischer. He suggests that the U.S. put them both in jail—in the same cell, in fact. Their only request: a chess set.

source :: "Chess Havens." Steve Zeitlin. Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore. Vol. 31, Spring–Summer 2005. Retrieved 20070615 from http://www.nyfolklore.org/pubs/voic31-1-2/dnstate.html.