U.S. champs no pawns to rigid new chess rules
2 Bay Area grandmasters help team conquer world, drug tests
The greatest chess players in the U.S. now have to do what nearly all great competitors must do.
They have to pee in a plastic cup. Just like baseball and football and Olympic stars must. Rules are rules.
“It’s farcical,” said chess master John Donaldson of San Francisco, the captain of the U.S. chess team.
Farcical or not, it happened last month at the biennial Chess Olympiad in Baku, Azerbaijan, where the fivemember U.S. team — which included two grandmasters from the Bay Area — managed to set aside the distracting specter of the plastic cups long enough to defeat 149 other teams from around the world and end up in first place.
For two weeks, inside the giant tournament hall on the shore of the Caspian Sea, Donaldson’s job included counseling his players to pee into the cups when requested or go home in disgrace.
The undefeated match score posted by the U.S. team (nine wins, two draws, zero losses) was unheard of. It was a staggering upset over teams from such chess powerhouses as China, India, Russia and a gaggle of former Soviet republics.
Also unheard of were all the new anticheating rules, which included forcing chess players to pass through metal
detectors, to surrender wristwatches and books, to ask for permission to visit the bathroom during a game, and to submit to an electronic pat-down after taking care of that particular call of nature.
The World Chess Federation, Donaldson said, “insisted on implementing a series of illconceived rules in a heavy-handed fashion.”
Any player whose urine was found to contain amphetamine, steroids or caffeine could be sent packing. Drinking four cups of coffee or two cans of an energy drink is enough to send a chess player’s pee over the caffeine limit, Donaldson said.
Some of the new rules came about because computer programs — including the ones that can be loaded into a cell phone or a smart watch — now play chess much better than humans do. Consulting a machine for advice during a chess game is something like consulting a dictionary during a spelling bee.
And the other new rules — the ones involving the plastic cups — are in place because the World Chess Federation is seeking to have chess become accepted as an full-fledged Olympic sport. Under Olympic rules, competitors must be drug-free — even though absolutely no one in the chess world believes that drugs can improve chess play.
At the Mechanics’ Institute chess room in downtown San Francisco, where Donaldson has served as director for two decades and where players have gathered for more than a century to play the world’s most popular board game, the anticheating rules are causing a lot of laughter inside a room best known for silence.
“A grown man asking for permission to use the bathroom?” said Kevin Walters of Berkeley. “Drug tests? Outrageous.”
Walters was one of 100 or so amateurs butting heads the other night at the chess club’s long-standing weekly tournament.
“Nobody cheats here,” he said with a laugh. “It’s chess. What’s the point? We’re not playing for big money. We’re all friends.”
But another player, John Ebert of Vallejo, said he understood the need to monitor for chess computer programs and that “weird stuff sometimes goes on in the bathrooms.” He said he once saw a clandestine note scribbled on a roll of toilet paper from one player to another, suggesting a chess move.
Indeed, in decades past, the late renowned Chronicle chess editor George Koltanowski, who directed countless local tournaments, was known for taking inspection tours of the men’s room to see if players were sneaking forbidden peeks at chess textbooks during games.
Although cheating in some sports is driven by the quest for large salaries and prizes, even the biggest names in U.S. chess rarely play for big money. The prize for winning the Olympiad in Baku was a pawnsize $4,000 per player. At the weekly Mechanics’ tournament, winners get $100 or so.
No one at the Mechanics’ Institute has ever been asked to pee into a cup, and no one ever will, Donaldson said.
“Honesty is the glue that holds society together,” he said. “Anyway, our prizes aren’t large enough.”
Donaldson was still seething that the Baku guards had confiscated a couple of spy novels he tried to bring into the hall to occupy himself during the twoweek tournament’s considerable downtime.
“It was crazy,” he said. “I guess they thought there could have been secret messages inside the books.”
That was not nearly as crazy as what happened to British grandmaster Nigel Short, who was ordered to submit to an electronic patdown after returning from a dash to the men’s room. Short, who had only minutes on the chess clock to finish his game against a Chinese grandmaster, railed against losing precious thinking time for the screening and said later that he was considering a “physical assault” on the arbiter who ordered him to undergo the electronic wand.
As for what happened on the U.S. chessboards at the Olympiad — exactly how the Americans wound up on top — that’s hard to explain to a non-player, Donaldson said. Victory in high-level chess is often the result of accumulating subtle advantages that even an average player cannot recognize.
The team triumph was perhaps the greatest showing for U.S. chess since 1972, when the dysfunctional dynamo known as Bobby Fischer beat the pants off Russian great Boris Spassky to win the world title.
These days, no bigtime chess game is really over until the lab report comes back clean and the winner survives the high-tech pat-down. But none of the new rules compares in inanity to the recent chess observations of one Donald J. Trump, Donaldson said.
At a recent rally in Pennsylvania — a month after the U.S. chess team’s remarkable triumph — Trump complained to supporters that a problem with coping with complicated international trade pacts is that “you have to be a grand chess master, and we don’t have any of them.”
Actually, the U.S. has 90 chess grandmasters (the correct term), and five of them had just defeated the rest of the world.
“If that was the only thing that Trump didn’t know, it would be a brilliant thing,” Donaldson said. “But it isn’t.”