Matvey Natanzon dies at 51
Matvey Natanzon, who was known as Falafel because he subsisted on deepfried chickpea balls hustling gullible opponents in Washington Square Park in Manhattan while he groomed himself to be the world’s greatest backgammon player, died Feb. 14 in Clarence, New York, near Buffalo. He was 51.
Natanzon, who was born in Soviet Russia, emigrated to Israel with his mother when he was 4 years old and later moved to the United States, spending his teenage years in Buffalo, was a compulsive gambler.
“If I say it, I have to bet on it,” was his credo.
“Recently Falafel made another big bet, the biggest,” his friend Jake Jacobs, another backgammon champion, wrote in PrimeTime Backgammon magazine, published by the U.S. Backgammon Federation. “He had cancer. I am not certain of the specifics, but it was serious, deadly serious, attacking the best part of him, his brain. He bet he could beat it.”
A shlumpy jovial giant who weighed upward of 300 pounds at one point, Natanzon lost that bet, less than two years after doctors first told him that he had stagefour brain cancer.
His death was announced by his family in a notice in The Buffalo News.
His cancer had prematurely ended a roller-coaster career during which he went from sleeping under a bench in Washington Square Park, where he lived for nearly six months after college, to mastering backgammon, a board game that combines rolls of the dice with strategic checker moves.
“He had the skills to put his money where his mouth was, skills developed through tenacious study,” Jacobs said
“Backgammon used to be filled with characters,” Jacobs added. “Since the computer era overtook the game in the ‘90s, there are hardly any characters in the tournament rooms; the only ones to be found are on the keyboards, as players consult robots for answers, instead of consulting wizards such as Falafel. The game needs wizards, and he was one of the last. That’s his legacy.”
In his short pants, sweatshirt and knitted wool hat, Natanzon could look like an amiable loser to his easy marks, as he baited them with his nonstop babble and swaggering hubris.
He would graduate to winning (and, on rarer occasions, losing) tens of thousands of dollars in as little as an hour; achieve celebrity status in a game that had migrated from blacktie casino tables to cheesy hotel ballrooms, where baseball caps worn backward were de rigeur; and be named the top player in an unofficial ranking by his peers, known as the Giants of Backgammon.
“Falafel is, without a doubt, backgammon’s No. 1 commentator and is probably its best-known celebrity,” Joe Russell, the chairman of the backgammon federation’s board, said when he awarded Natanzon the organization’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018. “He has been in the Top 10 of the Giants list seven straight times, and has been voted No. 1 twice and No. 2 once.”
Matvey Natanzon was born in what was then Soviet Russia on July 5, 1968. His mother, Larissa Bomshtein, fled with him to Israel when he was 4, he said, to escape anti-Semitism and his father, about whom little is known. They settled in Azor, a town near Tel Aviv, where Bomshtein worked at an airport. When he was 14, she married an IsraeliAmerican Holocaust survivor, Dr. Robert Rein, a biophysicist, and the family moved to Buffalo.
His mother, now Larissa Rein, and his sister, Elaine Lewis, are among his survivors.