2002-09-28 - 11:21 p.m.

Dinner With the Grandmaster

Tomorrow former U.S. Chess Champion Joel Benjamin is going to play a simultaneous exhibition against a group of local players, myself included. The grandmaster was in town tonight so the fellow organizing the exhibition hosted a dinner for him and invited a few of the people who had worked with him on the event. It was held at a Chinese restaurant on the other side of the Hudson River, and yours truly was invited.

I'd met GM Benjamin a couple of times before this, mainly at New York State Championship tournaments over the last several years. GM Benjamin's father used to be president of the New York State Chess Association and he himself has won or tied for first in that tournament nine times. That's a record that will probably never be broken.

Of course the big fear at affairs like this is that there will be a lot of strained silences and awkward pauses while people think of things to say. I had a couple of questions prepared just in case, but happily this wasn't necessary. Phil, the organizer, asked a couple of skillful questions, and we were off to the races. GM Benjamin spent the next couple of hours regaling us grandmaster war stories. He has a sharp wit and a sharp tongue, so it was amusing to say the least.

For instance, the name of a famous U.S. player came up, a man who died several years ago. I knew he had a reputation of being unpopular among his fellow professional chessplayers, now I found out why: the man was a cheater. Joel told a story of how, at a tournament in the 1970s, this grandmaster had made a draw offer to a friend of Joel's then tried to take it back again after the friend had used up a lot of time thinking about it. A long argument ensued, but the grandmaster got away with this bit of dodgy play. In a bit of poetic justice though he wound up losing the game on time.

GM Benjamin was on the team that programmed Deep Blue, the chess computer that beat then-World Champion Garry Kasparov in a famous match in 1997. Some of Kasparov's behavior during the match was hard to explain, but Joel seemed to have a pretty good handle on why Kasparov did the things he did. For instance, Kasparov was crushed by the computer in the last game of the match after he played a lame variation of the Caro-Kann. The reason for him choosing this inferior variation is that other computers had played badly against it, but as Kasparov found out, Deep Blue was not just another computer. Also, according to Benjamin, Kasparov was trying to set up a excuse for him losing the match.

Kasparov didn't look too good in some of the other stories he told us. Kasparov is a prima-donna with a huge ego who likes to stack the deck to make himself look good and has done some things that have badly damaged the sport of chess.

Yes, chess is a sport. Don't look at me like that. It's an art too, so there.

GM Benjamin also told us what life is like as a professional player in the United States, and the answer is: pretty sucky. While it is possible to make your livelihood from chess, it's nearly impossible to make it from actually PLAYING chess, especially if you are a native born American. He himself actually makes most of his money from writing, coaching and personal appearances, not from playing in tournaments.

According to Benjamin, Glasnost and the fall of the former Soviet Union were two of the worst things that could have possibly happened to American chess. When the Iron Curtain fell at the beginning of the 1990s, the Russian players came flooding into the U.S. The fact that many of them are willing to play for peanuts means that even a small event can attract a former Russian grandmaster and this makes it very hard to make a living by playing in tournaments. There is simply too much competition.

Joel noted that other countries don't seem to have this problem, take England for example. It seems to be easier for Russian GMs to establish themselves in the United States than anywhere else. Part of it is our easy citizenship requirements and part of it is the lax way the U.S. Chess Federation accepts foreign players as "American citizens" after a very short time.

The time at the dinner went by very quickly, and before we knew it, the restaurant was closing. Before Joel left he promised to play 1.e4 (1.P-K4) on every board at the exhibition tomorrow. I think he might have been joking, but let's see if he actually does it.