Stepping Stones to Chess Mastery

Player         A       B       C       D       E       TOTAL

Arlene        X       1        1        1        1        4

Bill             0        X       1        1        1        3

Cindy         0        0        X       1        1        2

David         0        0        0        X       1        1

Emily         0        0        0        0        X       0

      The above cross-table is typical of chess tournaments for young children. "1" means "win" and "0" means loss. A draw would be indicated by "1/2"—but little kids almost never draw games. 

      The number of participants could be a lot greater and the pattern would be the same. It indicates that, at that moment in time, the players are in classes absolutely separate from one another. "Arlene" is absolutely stronger than all the other players, while Bill is absolutely stronger than everyone except Arlene. And so on.

      In chess rating terms, that means there are at least 400 ELO points separating player from player, ELO now being the universal measure for differences in playing strength. The distance between Arlene and Cindy (800 points) is greater than that between the current World Champion (2879) and a middling master (2280) such as I was once upon a time. The distance between Cindy and Emily is about as great as that between said middling master in his glory days and the weakest adult in a sanctioned weekend event, either then or now.

      Thus, while an extended streak of wins marks a player as one in a billion at the top of the ladder— as a Steinitz or a Fischer—among younger players it is a common phenomenon. There are lots of Arlenes in the world who will forever remember what fun it was to beat all opposition for a time.

      That's by way of putting my own early successes into perspective as I embark on the following chapter of my autobiography.

  

Stepping Stones to Chess Mastery

Synopsis
      This synopsis is only necessary while the story is under construction.

       When I was in Grade 10, I began playing chess regularly with a school friend, Ken Norris. I had already been going up against all comers in my neighbourhood for five years with marked success, and at first I won easily against Ken too. However, a far more disciplined student of the game than I, Ken soon caught up and surpassed me. In our first Manitoba Junior Championship in the Spring of 1960, I was pleased to finish in the middle of the pack, while Ken was a surprise contender for first place. or someone playing his first tournament, he amazed all with his knowledge and maturity, losing only to a far more experienced rival in the last round of the preliminaries. Yet when, after that tournament, Ken and I resumed our after school sessions, I found I had reverted to beating him easily again. Taking that to heart, Ken simply gave up the game, which I thought a great pity. Despite our score against each other, I saw him as a real player, as opposed to me, whom I considered something of a madcap goof, never to be really anything.

IT WAS THE MORNING of my first day of high school when Ken Norris approached me. I had not seen him for six years. I was standing in the great hallway along with three hundred other Grade 10 students, waiting for the teachers to come down from the staff room and unlock their classrooms. This was Kelvin High in the south end of Winnipeg. It was September 1959. I was fourteen.

          I had not seen Ken since Grade 3. I did not know what class he was in except that it was not mine, for I had seen a list of my classmates. He had walked over from another wing of the building first thing to say hello after all these years. That impressed me.

          "It is good to see you," he said. I agreed that it was good to see him too. That was true. There had always been a peculiar courtesy to the guy; even at six he had never laughed at me. We had been friends back in early elementary school, not best friends, but good enough that we exchanged a few visits, despite living more than a mile apart in River Heights. Once his parents took me with him to see a play at the old Playhouse, Midas or Aladdin—or maybe it was my mother who took the two of us. I remembered that. At the end of Grade 3, the school boundaries changed. Ken started attending another elementary school and went on to another junior high too. We had not bumped into each other again until now.

          "I heard you play chess," said Ken. Oh, so that was it.

          "Yes, but I'm surprised you'd know," I said.

          "Like who doesn't know?" said Ken. "Whenever I tell anyone I'm interested in the game, immediately they mention your name." It flattered me to hear that. I had been beating everyone in my immediate neighbourhood since I was nine, when I first surpassed Father at the game, but I did not know my reputation had travelled more than a few blocks from home. I had not played anything like tournaments sanctioned by the provincial federation. I hardly knew they existed. I just played whoever dared place a set in front of me and, with one exception, always wiped them out. Easy.

          The single exception was David Whytehead, a somewhat older boy I met at Anglican Summer Camp in Lake of the Woods. The summer I met him, I beat him the way I beat everyone, but the next summer he solidly trounced me. As the great Judit Polgar said of her games against the even greater Magnus Carlsen, "Playing him is what drowning must be like." I had that feeling. I asked David what had happened to make him so good. He said he had simply worked through a comprehensive manual—there are lots of them out there—and sparred regularly with a neighbour who lived next door to the family mansion on Armstrong Point. 
      Yes, David was a rich kid, but it was his serious gentle imperturbable attitude to things I liked—a kind of stability. I would have liked him as an older brother. When he thanked me for getting him interested in the deeper mysteries of the game, I could not remember anybody thanking me for anything before. So I liked him but not his younger brother who, closer to my age, was in my opinion a querulous neurotic twerp. (And I was expected to chum with him though the summer.) 
      Whytehead Pere owned mines in northern Manitoba. It was my father who told me that. He had a mahogany ChriCraft for the lake, and he piloted his own four-seater airplane when he went north to inspect his properties, often taking his sons along with him. In fact, that second summer at Anglican Camp, the summer David showed me the fruits of disciplined learning, the three Whytehead "men" were on the way to the airport in Keewatin the next morning. They would fly out first thing, their period at Anglican Camp that year overlapping with my family's by only twelve hours. Now I think it is possible they had delayed their departure on purpose so that David check his progress at chess against me. Their mother was there too. The plan was that at Keewatin airport they would separate. She would drive back to Winnipeg while the others flew north.

          The whole family was popular at Anglican Camp, and a solid mahogany ChrisCraft also deserved respect, so many of us were on the dock at six in the morning to see them off. Sleeping above the boat house there, I could hardly avoid being part of that number of well-wishers. On the one hand I was sorry to see David leave so soon but, on the other, I was pleased that my way was again clear to win the weekly chess "championships" at the Camp. 
      Twenty hours later their plane had gone down in the bush, the father and both sons dead. Curiously, when Father told me about that, I noted it with a simple numbness—and then, amazingly forgot about it, let it slip my mind. When I started playing Association junior events in 1960, I found myself expecting to see David's name in the lists. "But he was three or four years older than I; maybe he won't be a junior anymore," I mused, hopefully, before thinking, "Oh, he's dead."

          Except for those games against David Whytehead, and a memorable game against Albert Boxer in 1958, I believe I beat everyone I played from 1955 on.

          Now my father played the game. He had more or less forced me to learn, for he needed an opponent. He had taken up chess as an adult, and that can be tough going, if you expect too much of yourself. It is like taking up the fiddle at forty. Work hard and there is a lot of pleasure waiting for you in those strings, they tell me, but do not expect to play like Heifetz. The guys at Father's chess club were too strong for him. Father bought all the right books though, and he subscribed to the best of the English language chess magazines, Al Horowitz's Chess Review, published in New York. I browsed the books and dreamed upon the magazines, which had pictures, but to say I studied them, no, that would overstate the case.

          When I could beat Father consistently, he gave up the game. He bought no more books and even tried to suspend his magazine subscription. Fortunately for me, he had recently renewed for five years, and there was no getting out of it.

          Dad did take me to watch the Canadian Open when it was played at the old Free Press Building in Winnipeg in 1958. In the skittles room, ("The Cutty Sark" I remember the ships in bottles)  I impressed the President of the Jewish Chess Club, the aforementioned Albert Boxer, who announced to Father and everyone else that my talent was special.

          "He already beats me," said Father.

          "No, really, he has talent," said Albert.

          You would think that would inspire Dad to find instruction for me—Yanofsky was teaching in those days, so was Dreman—or at least search out local junior tournaments that I could play in. Belonging to a chess club, he would surely have known about them. But for reasons of his own, he did nothing. Nor did he ever come watch me play.

          While I did not know about local chess, I did know about the International Game, because Chess Review was full of accounts of the World Championships, which in those days was always between Soviets, as well as the early rise of Bobby Fischer, who, from New York, was a year older than I. I figured real chess happened in Moscow and in New York, but not in Winnipeg and certainly not in my neighbourhood. I was a kind of street fighter, that's the way I imagined myself, or a King of the Sandlot, but not a real chess player, because I was not a real anything. Nothing I did really counted.

          Yes, my self esteem was pathologically low. On the other hand, it was great disposing of all comers, always easily and with flair. The sun came out at those moments, and it came out because of something I did. As far as relationships with celestial bodies are concerned, you can't ask for better than that.

          But I was hardly thinking of any of that as I stood talking with my old friend Ken on the first day of school.

          "I've been serious about chess for about a year," said Ken. "I've been playing correspondence, but I find it hard to find appropriate competition locally." Correspondence? How can he afford the postage, I wondered.

          Meanwhile ancient skinny Miss Fleming, she with anonymously thick hingeless legs, was approaching Room 14, key in hand. "Shouldn't you be getting back to your class?" I asked, nervously, worried for Ken.

          "Oh, they can get along without me for a couple more minutes," replied Ken. "I'd be really pleased to play you sometime."

          "Okay," I said.

          "If you still live where you used to, I'm on your way home. We could play after school some afternoon."

          "All right," I said.

          "What about today?"

          "It's the first day. There'll be all those textbooks to lug home," I said. Tall and very skinny, I probably overestimated my weakness, but really I was not strong, and I didn't look strong. Ken knew about this from before. I had lost at least three months of Grade 3 to polio. Father said my case had been so slight as to make no difference, there were no after effects at all. I accepted that and back then never correlated the illness with my problems. I do now.

          "I could help you with the books," said Ken. "You could leave half of them at my place until tomorrow if necessary."

          "Okay," I said and followed the others into the classroom. I was worried the door would close on me and I would be marked late on my first day. From the corner of my eye, I saw Ken standing at a little distance, looking at me until I had almost disappeared. Then he turned to saunter unhurriedly to his class, which, as it happened, was at quite a distance.

          At four o'clock, there was Ken waiting outside my home room. "They let us out early," he explained.

jrbuuwrg 150611 1956

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