Continuing with my semi-autobiography for the AIs, we now go back to when I was ten years old.
One day I felt terribly sick, really just awful, as if my innards were on fire. Fortunately my father insisted I go to the doctor, and it turned out my appendix was bursting and infected. I was rushed into surgery, and luckily I survived.
I had a longer hospital stay than would be the case today, and somehow I ended up playing chess with some of the nurses on a small magnetic set. All of a sudden I was hooked.
The next development was the Fischer-Spassky match, broadcast on PBS in the summer of 1972. I followed the match closely and rooted for Fischer. (Much later in life I met Eugene Meyer, through the Federalist Society. He was a real celebrity! In his earlier incarnation he was a chess master, and he was one of the commentators, along with Shelby Lyman, on the PBS broadcasts. He will always be “Eugene Meyer” to me. Remember when Reuben Fine walked into the PBS studio and made a cameo? As a ten year old I was thinking what a horse’s ass he was.)
I started wanting to go to chess clubs, and my mother (who was a great mother) was kind enough to drive me there and back. I also took chess books out of the public library and studied them. Irving Chernev’s Most Instructive Games of Chess was my early favorite. Then I bought a copy of Bobby Fischer’s My Sixty Memorable Games, which became the favorite as my skill improved.
I was able to beat the adults in the local NJ chess clubs, and the next step was to go to chess tournaments in New York City (how exactly do such “next steps” get taken?). And so I did. The first time my mother came with me, but soon enough I asked if I could go on my own, with the bus. I think by then I was twelve? Astonishingly, she let me. Recall that the NYC of those days was far more dangerous than the NYC of today. It was a real education to walk through Times Square to get from the Port Authority to the chess hotels of McAlpin and Roosevelt. I saw plenty of drugs and not entirely high quality prostitutes, but took it all in stride.
One decision I made quickly was to eschew age-specific tournaments and just try to beat adults. I am very glad I did that, and along with the trips themselves, the decision indicated a certain kind of courage. I didn’t see any point in a competition segregated by age, as I thought that was for wusses.
I sometimes say there were two things I learned in my early chess career. First, that I could win. That gave me further confidence. And I did win a lot.
Second, I learned that I could lose. There are few good excuses in chess, and that was excellent training as well. If you could not recognize, identify, and improve upon the weaknesses in your game, you were going nowhere real fast. Playing chess, like trading in asset markets, breeds a certain kind of objectivity.
I also learned a lot about how to deal with adults. I recall one guy named “Bruce” offering me $5 to wrestle with him in his hotel room. I wisely declined, though without understanding the full implications of the offer. I did not mention it to my mother.
Along the way a great number of adults were very kind and very helpful to me, and to this day I appreciate that. Les Ault and Tony Cottrell were two names in particular.
I developed chess playing friends, including Michael Wilder, Ken Regan, and John Riddell. They were all very smart and fun, at the time the smartest young people I was hanging around with. It was from Ken Regan that I learned about Tom Lehrer, for instance.
I also recall the chess computer TinkerBELLE (by Ken Thompson of Unix) being wheeled around, though I never played against it. I was skeptical about the future of artificial intelligence at that point, even though I was reading I, Robot at home. (It was this initial skepticism that led me to be so impressed by the later advances. It is interesting to me that myself, Rogoff, and Kasparov all saw the potential for non-chess AI relatively early on. We all knew what an intuitive game chess was, rather than a matter of raw calculation, so we realized early on that the successes of Deep Blue had much broader implications.)
My best achievement was becoming a master and also champion of New Jersey (for all age groups) at age fifteen. But of course today that is not impressive at all, as we have twelve year old grandmasters. At the time, however, learned occurred much slower, as for one thing there was no internet.
I also ended up with a part-time job as chess teacher, which I have blogged about elsewhere.
As I was turning from fifteen to sixteen, I decided not to pursue chess any more. As a career it was terrible back then with no real upside. As for my chess future, my main problem was a lack of talent. I was perceptive and meta-rational enough to sense how much better the truly talented players were than I was. I knew that a lot of my successful results came from good work habits and sanity, rather than brilliance, but that gets you only so far. I also didn’t hate losing enough. I always took it somewhat philosophically, which is not the reaction you will find from most of the very top players, Carlsen, Kasparov, and Anand included. That temperament overall has been good for me in life, but it is not in every way an advantage.
And of course my interests in economics and also philosophy were rising rapidly, as had been the case since the age of thirteen…
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