All the Wrong Moves by Sasha Chapin

Author:Sasha Chapin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-08-12T16:00:00+00:00

THE SECRET OF CHESS

I first stumbled upon the lectures of my future teacher and spiritual guardian, Ben Finegold, during a despairing google for chess tips in Bangkok. He was different from all the other chess lecturers I’d seen before. Most lecturing grandmasters, even the most charming ones, approach the game with a hushed reverence, as if delivering news on a pediatric oncology ward, or trying to placate an errant tiger. Finegold is the complete opposite. He’s charismatic, frank, and viciously funny, matching a respect for the game’s elegance with flagrant mockery of everything else. When Finegold’s students raise their hands, he often points a meaty hand at them and says, “You, with the wrong answer,” or “You, with some crazy comment.” Upon hearing one of their replies, he’ll often respond, “Ugh, that was painful,” or “Hey, you’re the best player in your chair.” He’s given to claiming that the Panov-Botvinnik Attack was named after “Mr. Attack.” His lectures are littered with Tarantino references, imitations of other lecturers from his chess club, and fatuous advice like “never move pawns.”

I soon felt like he was someone I’d already known my entire life. He reminded me of my stereotypically Jewish relatives, who communicated their affection with scabrousness and sarcasm, just like they communicated everything else. I found his lectures so comforting that I often left them playing in my apartment on my laptop during cigarette breaks or other interregna—his voice came wafting out to the balcony and took on a strange gravity under the starlight.

He isn’t always the most informative lecturer. His lectures are as much about verbiage as they are about chess. Sometimes, if a game he’s showing a class bores him, he’ll say things like, “Enh, this seems like a chess position,” or “We need some smelling salts for the audience.” But he communicates a powerful if occasionally clumsy affinity for the game that I enjoy much more than the highfalutin academicism displayed by other teachers.

Finegold has a unique place in the chess world. He has ardent fans, because of his aforementioned characteristics, and many detractors, also because of his aforementioned characteristics. Moreover, he lives on an odd plateau of chess skill—that of the low-level grandmaster. The fact that this is a coherent concept is another illustration of the vast distance between the amateur and the professional player. To any player like me, any grandmaster lives in an unreachable and starry grove of intellectual superiority. Someone like Finegold can calculate in drunken sleep better than I can while achieving satori on Adderall. But, to most grandmasters, Finegold isn’t that notable, except for his personality. Like in any professional sport, the best of the best chess players have to live with being forever inferior to the best of the best of the best. While Finegold occasionally scores an upset, like a win against Shakhriyar Mamedyarov, a player consistently in the world’s top ten, he mostly can’t compete with the top-flight professionals.

There are essentially two ways you could regard Finegold, given his position in the chess ecosystem.

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