U.S. Chess Masters Match Wits, Nerve in Long Beach

They are mental gunslingers, men who recognize each other by face and by fidget. They store each other’s histories on computer disks and, at the press of a button, can study and replay their opponent’s every move of the last decade. On a good day, at the peak of their powers, they have been known to methodically and artfully drive each other to sanity’s edge.

Last week, 16 men who are rated as the finest chess players in the United States straggled into the lobby of the Hyatt Regency hotel in Long Beach. As old as a baggy-eyed 45-year-old Russian gambler and as young as a 20-year-old psychology major from Alabama, they have come to compete in the U.S. Closed Chess Championship, a grueling, monthlong tournament in which single games are known to last as long as six hours.

The winner of the tournament, the first major chess championship to be played in Southern California since 1978, will become the top-rated U.S. player, joining three other high-ranking American masters as candidates to take on Gary Kasparov, the world chess champion from the Soviet Union, in 1993.

For the next month, America’s chess champions will live out of their suitcases, struggling to screen out the irritating vexations of everyday life while they sit hunched, hour after hour, at their boards. They will play each of their 15 opponents in games that require absolute silence and superhuman concentration. The faintest background noises--the hum of fluorescent lights, the jingle of pocket change, even the most discreet of throat-clearing coughs--can become as jarring as the roar of jet engines.

“We don’t like noise. And we don’t like people who make it,” said Joel Benjamin, 25, who tied for the U.S. Championship in 1987.

They are driven by the dream of becoming the first world master from the United States since Bobby Fischer defeated Boris Spassky in Iceland in 1972. And they are haunted by their inability to fulfill it.

Fischer, who abandoned the game and retreated to a reclusive existence in Southern California, remains a specter of the unattainable, a reminder of how rarely Americans have even been able to compete for the kingdom of chess, let alone win it.

In 1978, the only other time the U.S. Championship was played in Southern California, Fischer visited several friends who were competing and, according to players and officials on the scene, lingered just long enough to circulate obscure political tracts and complain that the Soviet KGB was bugging the fillings in his teeth.

This year, Fischer’s books on chess and several unauthorized biographies of the former champion are being hawked prominently outside the game room on the first floor of the Long Beach Hyatt Regency, where the tournament will be held through Dec. 3.

Fischer’s name, as might be expected, was bandied about like a military password last week even before the games began. When Long Beach Mayor Ernie Kell pushed out a ceremonial pawn into the middle of an ornate chessboard during opening ceremonies on Thursday, a U.S. Chess Federation official noted that it was “Bobby Fischer’s favorite move.”

But those who have known Fischer, who is said by acquaintances to live in Beverly Hills and spend much of his time studying arcane political theories in library reading rooms, insist that he will not attend. Claudia Mokarow, a close friend who has handled Fischer’s affairs for the last decade, brusquely declined to comment when reached at her Texas home.

None of the 16 top-rated players in this year’s tournament quite live up to Fischer’s reputation for eccentricity. Understandably, they would prefer to be seen as clear-eyed practitioners of a venerable game.

“We don’t go over the bend any more than musicians or artists do,” Benjamin said.

Still, there are moments when some of the grand masters seem to pine for a trace of Fischer’s fame.

“Chess is an art, and people don’t appreciate the genius we have,” added Benjamin, who has been playing major tournaments since he was 16.

Eight of the current American champions are Russian emigres. They range from Roman Dzindzichashvili, 45, a beetle-browed former boxer with a mad scientist’s wild hair and a gambler’s weakness for backgammon, to Boris Gulko, 42, an intense, balding man who sits frozen over his chess board and is the highest-rated player in America.

Besides the Russian emigres, the competitors include Walter S. Browne, 40, a six-time U.S. champion who is known to fly off the handle if the lighting does not suit him; Yasser Seirawan, 29, the articulate publisher of Inside Chess magazine and a two-time candidate for the World Championship; and Stuart Rachels, a 20-year-old junior U.S. champion who was 2 years old when Fischer defeated Spassky in 1972.

Five of the players just flew in from Switzerland, where they played recently in a tournament. Several others expect to see each other on the Spanish island of Majorca, where a tournament will be held immediately after the Long Beach championship ends.

The chess masters come prepared for their long stays. Anthony Miles, 30, a British-born champion, rarely travels without a supply of his favorite tea. Like many of the players, Yasser Seirawan totes a laptop computer. On the night before a game, he studies his opponents’ past games, stored on computer disks.

Because of a lack of big-city sponsors, the chess masters are sometimes forced to play their annual tournament in small towns. This requires even more luggage and a willingness to do almost anything to stave off boredom.

Benjamin recalls last year’s tournament site--Cambridge Springs, a rural Pennsylvania hamlet--as a “ghost town.” To keep his sanity, Maxim Dlugy, 23, a former U.S. junior champion, went mushroom-picking.

This year, the competition is in Long Beach, a more urban setting that appears to meet with approval from the players. The 1989 Long Beach tournament--which is accompanied by that city’s yearly “chess festival”--is sponsored by the Software Toolworks company, a local firm that produces chess computer programs and is run by Les Crane, the former television personality and reciter of a 1971 hit record, “Desiderata.”

The top prize in the $28,000 Long Beach championship is $7,000--a decent purse, say the chess masters, who have been known to make up to $60,000 a year by playing in international tournaments, writing books, lecturing and playing in “simuls,” competitions in which they will simultaneously play matches with as many as 25 challengers--all who pay a fee for the opportunity.

After years spent in each others’ company, America’s chess champions are used to each other. They have even memorized each others’ nervous tics.

“I tap my fingertips,” said Lev Alburt, 44, who won the U.S. Championship in 1984 and 1985. Alburt noted that another opponent, John Fedorowicz, “plays with his hair.”

Despite the potential to drive each other up the wall with such intimate insights, most of the nation’s top players “get along pretty well with each other,” Benjamin said. “We better. We have to see each other every day for the next month.”

Spectators can be more troubling. When the first games started on Thursday afternoon, silence fell almost immediately in the first-floor room where the chess masters had gathered.

But soon enough, faint noises that would have otherwise gone unheard grew to an ear-shattering crescendo. One man’s heavy breathing became as loud as the wheeze of an iron lung. Coughs dropped like gunfire. As fans made repeated trips to an ice water dispenser, the sound of water splashing into empty glasses could be heard clear across the room.

Benjamin went into his first game worried about his greatest peeve--people with coins in their pocket. In an earlier tournament, he found himself surrounded by four people who seemed unable to resist the temptation to rummage through pockets filled with change.

“I felt like I was in the ‘Twilight Zone,’ ” he recalled.

The jangling so distracted him that, in a fury, Benjamin scribbled a warning on a torn piece of paper: “THE NEXT PERSON WHO JINGLES THEIR COINS AROUND ME IS IN SERIOUS TROUBLE!” As he finished writing, a new onlooker walked up and began to read the notice, jingling coins as he stood there.

“I could have killed him,” Benjamin recalled.

On Thursday, Benjamin played in peace. In the first hour of their game, he and the other chess masters seemed to have found a variety of ways to ignore the audience and their distracting noises.

Alburt, as expected, tapped his skull with his fingers. Fedorowicz, as Alburt had predicted, played with his hair. Browne clutched his forehead until it turned scarlet. Gulko put his fingers in his ears.

Fischer, to no one’s surprise, was nowhere to be seen. Which is not to say some people weren’t looking. A few players and chess devotees playfully noted that the former champion has been known to go out in public in disguise. “Be on the lookout for a tall man in fake beard and Groucho Marx glasses,” one said, laughing.

Most of the chess masters, however, held out little hope for a Fischer sighting. “You know those UFOs they have in the Soviet Union? They have better chance of being here than Bobby Fischer,” scoffed Dzindzichashvili.