Chess Players

Remember that famous line from the movie ``Wall Street'': ``If you want a friend, get a dog.'' Well, take it from me, if you want a chess buddy, buy a chess program for your PC.I'm a ``patzer,'' a chess player who knows how to move the pieces fairly well but is forever doomed to mediocrity. Like all patzers, I play for pure love of the game, knowing that Garry Kasparov - even on his worst day - could play 30 opponents like me at once and crush us all.Still, I've had fun during the 25 years or so that I've played chess.

When Jose E. "Pepe" Herrera left Cuba in 1955, he thought he might never have a reason to go back.Last week, he found one: a chess tournament.As part of Baltimore's contact with residents of the island, the Ellicott City resident and five top-ranked area chess players traveled to Havana for four days to compete with Cuban players.A mostly teen-age crew of Cubans soundly defeated the Americans. But, for both sides, the visit was an exhilarating reminder that, despite still-strained official relations between their countries, Cubans and Americans have much in common.

Baltimore police swept the park in front of City Hall Friday and Saturday nights, handing out 14 citations for having open containers of alcohol, routing six squatters from cardboard boxes and charging five people on a variety of minor charges."

ELISTA, Russia -- Kirsan Ilyumzhinov roams his small domain like royalty, resplendent in a white Rolls Royce, his warrior-guards mounted behind him on a formidable Humvee, stirring clouds of dust as they race across the dry, empty steppe.Little wonder that he worships chess. The name of the game comes from the Persian word for king, and Ilyumzhinov luxuriates in the notion. He uses the Mongol word to describe himself: the khan of Kalmykia. His is a modest kingdom. He is president of the ethnic republic of Kalmykia, a region of 350,000 mostly poor shepherds and farmers in southern Russia.

His black cap said "Repent," but after a morning at his street-corner pulpit at Eutaw and Saratoga, Larry Eugene Smith yielded to an earthly temptation -- chess."

Bobby Fischer has been gone from public view for 20 years -- but among avid local chess players he has hardly been forgotten.For two decades, they have read the former world champion's books; studied the moves of his most famous games; swapped stories about his private life -- and wondered whether he would ever return to international play.Now they are eagerly, if somewhat skeptically, awaiting a $5 million exhibition match between the reclusive Mr. Fischer and Boris Spassky, scheduled to begin today on an island off the coast of what was once Yugoslavia.

MOSCOW -- They used to say here that the qualities that make a good chess player are the same qualities that make a good Communist.Perseverance, a belief in the power of logic to overcome obstacles, strategic thinking, patience, aggressiveness: All these were held up as Soviet ideals.So for 70 years the nation actively promoted chess as a symbol of Soviet prowess -- "Take chess to the workers!" was a slogan coined in 1923 -- although after the debacle of August it could be argued that the Soviet Union produced more good chess players than it did good Communists.

In a classroom at Hampden Elementary School in Baltimore, dozens of children sit hunched over chessboards, locked in intellectual battle.You can almost hear the young minds at work.A girl in a plaid uniform rests chin on hand as she studies the array of chess pieces on the board before her.A boy in shorts and T-shirt twists himself into a pretzel, eyes at table level, as he ponders his opponent's position.In an alcove at the back of the classroom, Robert Erkes, a chess master, gives a rapt group of onlookers the chance to solve chess puzzles.

Sid Robertson always felt compelled to do more with chess than just play.In the early 1980s, he edited The King's File, a chess gazette for the Washington area. And in May, Robertson, 52, took his promotion of the game even further when he opened Chess by the Creek, a chess studio and tournament site on the first floor of the 2 1/2-story office building behind Fire Station No. 2 on Main Street in Ellicott City.The creek in the studio's name is the Hudson Branch, which flows on the south side of the building and empties into the Patapsco River.

Call it the "Nerd Factor." That's the image of chess in the United States: the guy with glasses as thick as Coke bottle bottoms, six pens in his ink-stained pocket, an off-key laugh that seems rather bizarre at best.And that's the good image, considering the past. Consider Paul Morphy, the greatest American chess player of the 19th century. ended up a babbling madman, suffering from paranoid delusions. Consider Bobby Fischer, the greatest American chess player of the 20th century. After he won the world championship in 1972, he went into hiding in Southern California, avoiding all chess competition, surfacing occasionally only in odd rumors that he was spending his days distributing religious pamphlets in mall parking lots.

As the Down and Dirty Dawg pep band blared Michael Jackson's Thriller and the theme to Hawaii Five-O, scores of University of Maryland, Baltimore County students marveled at the scene unfolding in the student commons, complete with cheerleaders, the school mascot, the school dance team and a chess set with pieces 6 feet tall. "Are we allowed to play with those?" asked UMBC sophomore Rupa Patel of Annapolis, as classmates posed for cell-phone photos with the oversized pieces and hoisted them from square to square as if staging an impromptu game.

It's a major collegiate tournament complete with colorful play-by-play and an audience of rabid fans watching well-conditioned players use their skills to outwit and outmaneuver their opponents. But this isn't one of the many college football bowl games that so dominate the airwaves at this time of year. The play-by-play is delivered through headphones and the audience can be counted by the dozens rather than the thousands. This is the Pan-American chess tournament, one of the most prestigious collegiate championships, and the reigning champion, University of Maryland Baltimore County, which has won the tournament a record seven times, has been an admirable leader in recognizing and rewarding a different kind of scholar-athlete.

Aleksander "Wojo" Wojtkiewicz, an internationally ranked chess player who won a chess scholarship to the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and had played on its championship team, died of an intestinal hemorrhage Friday at St. Agnes Hospital. The Halethorpe resident was 43. Born in Riga, Latvia, he moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., about 10 years ago and to Maryland in 2002 after being recruited by UMBC. "He was quite a figure in the chess community throughout the United States," said Peter Gunst, an attorney and part-owner of Fells Point Chess.

The recent crackdown on local poker tournaments makes me wonder why the vice squad has not gone after the organizers of local chess tournaments. As in a poker tournament, each participant in a chess tournament must pay an entry fee on registration. The money collected is used to pay for the cost of the event, its organizers and to form a prize award for the winners. The stock response to my seemingly absurd question is that poker is gambling because it involves luck while chess is not because it depends on skill.

Nine days ago, Battsetseg Tsagaan was sitting in a cafe studying for her last exam. It was easy compared to the cramming she still faced for today's Pan American collegiate chess championship in Miami. Her jobs as a mom, student, teacher and wife leave little time for her talent as one of the top college chess players in the United States. Once, she had the luxury of preparing for a tournament for a month. Now she's happy to have had at least these last few days to get back into the swing of things.

NEW YORK - Ask most chess grandmasters if chess is art, and they will say unequivocally, "Yes." Ask them if chess is also a sport, and the answer will again be yes. But suggest that chess might be just a very complex math problem, and there is immediate resistance. The question is more than academic. Beginning tomorrow, Garry Kasparov, the world's top-ranked player and the former world champion, will play a $1 million, six-game match here against a chess program called Deep Junior. It will be the fourth time that Kasparov has matched wits against a computer and the first time since he lost a similar match in 1997 to Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer developed by IBM. Recently, Vladimir Kramnik, Kasparov's former protege and the current world champion, tied an eight-game match against another chess-playing program called Deep Fritz.

The now-infamous letter left at a sniper scene included a common Caribbean salutation: "Mr. Police." A suspicious caller to the toll-free tip line spoke with an accent. The trunk of the $250 Chevrolet Caprice in which John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo spent their last hours of freedom had been modified so that someone could wriggle in from the back seat and covertly fire a rifle. All of these clues suggest that Malvo, a slight, short, 17-year- old Jamaican native, could have played an active role in the 13 Washington-area shootings that killed 10 people, wounded three and terrorized millions more.

One week after the University of Maryland Terrapins brought the national basketball championship home to College Park, another Maryland university will be contending for a national title in the Final Four. However, where the Terps won with brawn, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County Retrievers rely on brains. This is, after all, the Final Four of chess. "College chess is like Revenge of the Nerds for sports," said Alan T. Sherman, faculty adviser for the UMBC chess team and an associate professor of computer science.

When Jose E. "Pepe" Herrera left Cuba in 1955, he thought he might never have a reason to go back.Last week, he found one: a chess tournament.As part of Baltimore's contact with residents of the island, the Ellicott City resident and five top-ranked area chess players traveled to Havana for four days to compete with Cuban players.A mostly teen-age crew of Cubans soundly defeated the Americans. But, for both sides, the visit was an exhilarating reminder that, despite still-strained official relations between their countries, Cubans and Americans have much in common.

Remember that famous line from the movie ``Wall Street'': ``If you want a friend, get a dog.'' Well, take it from me, if you want a chess buddy, buy a chess program for your PC.I'm a ``patzer,'' a chess player who knows how to move the pieces fairly well but is forever doomed to mediocrity. Like all patzers, I play for pure love of the game, knowing that Garry Kasparov - even on his worst day - could play 30 opponents like me at once and crush us all.Still, I've had fun during the 25 years or so that I've played chess.