I just got back from Arlington, TX where I had taken my son to Checkmate USA vs India. This was a faceoff between USA and India with chess luminaries on both sides playing rapid chess.
World champion Gukesh D faced Hikaru Nakamura, currently the strongest US player.
Arjun Erigaisi, the second Indian player to cross an ELO rating of 2800 played Fabiano Caruana the second strongest US player. The women’s match had Carissa Yip against Divya Deshmukh. Sagar Shah, my coaching client and the CEO of Chessbase India met Levy Rozman, the force behind Gotham Chess. Tanitoluwa Adewumi, the Nigerian refugee kid whose family fled Boko Haram to seek asylum in NY, where he became a chess prodigy, played Ethan Vaz, the up-and-coming Indian talent.
It did not go well for India as USA made a clean sweep winning 5-0. Many of the games were close and the matches were exciting. It was showbiz more than serious chess and spectators were encouraged to cheer and make noise.
We had a grand time.
I met Danny Rensch, the Chief Chess Officer of Chess.com and got a copy of his book Dark Moves which had been published a week before. I finished it in two sittings.
When I was a doctoral candidate at Columbia Business School, I used to frequent chess clubs all over the city. I played a chess hustler who had set up a table in Washington Square. He was shabbily dressed and I thought he was homeless. Someone told me that he slept on park benches.
He cleaned my clock. I watched for a while as he demolished all comers including some I recognized as good players.
Later I found out that he was Roman Dzindzichashvili, one of the strongest players in the world. Why would a world champion caliber chess grandmaster play random people at $2 a game? I could not understand it then. Now, after reading Dark Moves, I fully understand. A similar world class player, Igor Ivanov, was Danny’s coach for a while. A genius on the chess board, a virtuoso on the piano and a broken reed in all other aspects of life, he lived in a haze of vodka, constantly traveling to play in tournaments big and small and vying for picayune prize money. He died prematurely of cancer.
Danny was born into a cult led by a charismatic couple. They appropriated the earnings of all members and dictated every aspect of the lives of their followers. His father walked shortly after he was born, had a daughter with another member of the cult and married the daughter of the leader and began a family. Danny was taken from his mother and placed with various other ‘parents’ in succession. No one looked out for him and there were times he had nothing to eat. Incest was rampant. He had a crush on a girl who turned out to be his half-sister.
He was nine when he saw the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer. This was his introduction to the game, and he was deeply, very deeply, inspired. It turned out that he had raw talent, and he rapidly became the best player of his age in Arizona. The cult leader stepped in and took charge of Danny’s chess education and progress. He was looking for vindication. Fame through Danny’s prowess would ‘prove’ that what he was doing was ‘good’ and ‘right’.
It was only much later that Danny realized how grossly inappropriate many of the things he was asked to do were. Such as giving regular foot massages to the aging cult leader. Such as being told to eschew all contact with his birth mother because she did not have the right energy for him.
Danny is transparently honest, and you can feel the searing pain that permeated his life. And the questions he asked of the broken people who all the adults were he knew.
What I love about Danny is that his horrific experiences did not make him bitter or vengeful. He readily admits the ‘good’ that the cult did to many members. And, somehow, he developed both self-awareness and deep compassion.
So, what does this have to do with you?
It goes back to one of my core teachings. You can wake up every day and help build a cathedral.
Or you can break rocks.
The reason that phenomenal chess players scrounged for dollars was that there was no money in chess. Even the best players could not make a decent living.
From his earliest days Danny was aware of this, and he felt deeply that it was just plain wrong. He determined that he would change this sad state of the game. He would make it possible for these artists of the chessboard to live with dignity. And he would make millions of lives better by introducing them to chess
Originally, he thought he would do this by becoming the next Bobby Fischer and dazzling the world.
This did not happen. He became an International Master but then his playing career stalled.
Then he met a couple of guys called Erik Allebest and Jay Severson who had bought a domain called Chess.com
Danny knew something about this new thing called the Internet. And he intuitively knew that it would change the world of chess.
He forced himself on Erik and Jay – in his own words he was an incredible ‘asshole’ – and let his vision ignite them. There were many ups and downs as they grew this fledgling company and his account makes fascinating reading for anyone who is fond of chess.
Today Chess.com has hundreds of millions of users and is an incredible venue for strong players to establish their brands and make money. It also runs regular competitions with prize money and has turned tens of millions on to chess.
If you are a good player, you can now make good money. You no longer have to scrounge.
Danny’s childhood vision has materialized in ways he never could have foreseen.
What is the cathedral YOU are trying to build?
Peace!
