"I'm not Bobby Fischer"
Don't call the 18-year-old boy king of chess -- defending his title this weekend -- a geek. He rules a new generation of champs raised on hip-hop and video games.
By David Kushner
March 11, 2006 | This week in San Diego, 64 hunched and pensive brainiacs have been competing for the coveted title of United States Chess Champion. The winner, to be decided Sunday, will take home $25,000. That's chump change compared to the millions that young stars like Daniel Negreanu are making in poker. But there's plenty at stake for 18-year-old Hikaru Nakamura, the controversial boy king defending the crown.
This stocky Asian-American teen from White Plains, N.Y., is shattering the history books to become America's winningest chess prodigy ever. By 10, he achieved the rarefied title of master. At 15, he was the country's youngest grandmaster. In December 2004, he sealed his coronation by taking home the 2005 U.S. championship. As of Friday morning, after seven long and brutal days of play, hes in the top three of his group, and gunning for a repeat.
But don't call him a geek. While chess gets written off as nerd play, Nakamura represents a brash new generation of champs reared on video games, hip-hop and the Internet. Known for his speed and aggression, he has been dubbed "the world's most impolite player" -- fighting words in one of the last sports that still prizes modesty and grace. While other players discuss the art and beauty of chess, Nakamura talks like a street fighter. After getting skipped over one year for the chess Olympiad team, he crushed a rival player and called it "payback." In one notorious interview, he cockily anointed himself the best player in America and deemed his peers conniving foreigners. "There aren't really any 'American' grandmasters that are higher rated than me," he said. "That's actually why I still work alone. It's very hard to trust anybody."
He's just as brash in play. While grandmaster etiquette calls for accepting a draw during a deadlocked game, Nakamura consistently breaks rank by refusing to concede. "I don't give up!" he snaps by way of explanation. Online, he's nicknamed "the King of Blitz" for his top-ranked mastery of high-speed smackdowns. Opponents have been known to strike back beyond the board. During one tournament, a kid got so angry he allegedly chucked a basketball at Nakamura's head. But Nakamura has only been emboldened by his bad-boy image. As Dirk Jan ten Geuzendam, editor of New in Chess magazine, puts it, "Nakamura likes being the fighter and the loner. He's the lone American taking on the world."
Nakamura's potent brew of balls and brains has earned him the obvious comparison: Bobby Fischer. But for Nakamura, Fischer, the wunderkind who became a wild-eyed, long-bearded paranoid, who vanished mysteriously during his prime, serves also as a cautionary tale. "He played too much chess and went crazy," says Nakamura. "I'm not a mad genius."
But his experience serves as a sort of modern parable about the game. Nakamura rode the fuel of new technologies to become a powerhouse player. But his hard, fast rise has left him feeling burned out and, unlike his coddled peers in Europe, ready to pull the plug. "When it's this hard to make a living," he says, "you're not going to keep the talent in the game. Eventually, they have to go into other things."
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Much of what mainstream America knows and thinks about chess prodigies comes from the 1993 movie "Searching for Bobby Fischer." The film follows Josh Waitzkin, a shy prodigy, as he enters chess's inner circle of bratty kids, domineering parents and narcissistic Obi-Wanlike trainers. Dads come to blows, Ben Kingsley chokes back tears, and when Josh loses a sure-win match, his father chews him out in the pouring rain -- without an umbrella, of course. In the end, everyone finds inner peace, no one's broke, and the Lilliputian underdog overcomes his nemesis. To today's real chess prodigies, says Magnus Carlsen, a baby-faced 14-year-old Norwegian grandmaster with a rack of corporate sponsors, "That is just film."
What's more, the search for the real Fischer is over. He turned up, he's nuts -- spewing anti-Semitic venom and claiming, among other things, that Jews planned 9/11. As a result, Americans, who made Fischer a Cold War hero in 1972 for defeating the Russian champion, Boris Spassky, have soured on the man and now mostly ignore the game. If there's a brainy young nerd with math and strategy skills, most Americans would rather watch him play cards.
This reality is not lost on Nakamura's generation. Junior World Champion Elisabeth "Lizzy" Paehtz, a sassy German 21-year-old who competes in miniskirts and heels, has watched numerous peers give up the game in lieu of the far more lucrative world of Texas hold 'em. Giving up chess for poker, she says, "is tempting for a player; you know you can make a lot of money." Compared to the $7.5 million prize at the World Series of Poker this year, chess tourney winners get a pittance.
Nakamura hit the relative jackpot when he won the last U.S. Championship and earned $25,000. But a five-figure prize is the exception rather than the rule. While invitation-only events cover the competitors' travel expenses, players have to pay their own way at less prestigious events. "It's almost impossible to make a living at the game," Paehtz says.
The degree of suffering varies according to a player's nationality. In Western Europe, where living costs are high, players survive by mastering a game far removed from the chessboard: sponsorships. Paehtz, for example, is a celebrity in Germany who chats up talk show hosts and poses on all fours in a slinky outfit for her Web page. She's now sponsored by a German electronics company.
Carlsen, with his boyish charm and the novelty of being the youngest grandmaster alive, has several sponsorships including one from Microsoft, which periodically flies him to its offices so that he can checkmate VIP geeks. The players from the former Soviet Union generally have it easier because their living expenses are low, and their social status is ensured. "If you're a successful young chess player there, you don't have to do anything else," says Geuzendam. "Everyone treats you like a star."
But America is another story. The cost of living is high, the respect is nil, and the sponsorships nonexistent. Nakamura explodes when he talks about the other players' sponsors because, despite being the U.S. champion, he has none. "Any other young person who devotes his life to becoming the best in the world at something is making millions of dollars!" he fumes. He's exaggerating, but the point is well taken. He's the best, and for this he has given up plenty. Before he goes onstage, he likes to slip on his iPod and crank up his theme song. "It's by Green Day," he says. "'Boulevard of Broken Dreams.'"
Next page: At 18, the exhausted champ is already planning a life after chess