The Quiet Genius

I was definitely one of these in high school (only back then you'd spout on and on about the Polugaevsky). Most of us on my team were. Except for this one guy.

Well, actually he went to a neighboring high school, but we soon were running into him at OTB tourneys. And he started attending a nearby club on Tuesday nights with the rest of us.

His name was Eric (nope, not Allebest!) and he had the most natural talent of anyone I've ever known personally (he went from 1620 to 2134 USCF in one three-year span).

He was also generally rather quiet and soft-spoken. Not likely the sort of guy you'd notice at a club, or one who would garner huge amounts of respect in the rather showoffy chess world. I remember there was once a picture of the spectators at a game that appeared in the magazine Chess Voice; in it Eric was identified as "Ned Noface." No doubt the irony that "Ned" could've probably beaten everybody else in that picture in a simul would've been lost on the editors.

At any rate, I had just obtained the huge RHM tome about the Najdorf Sicilian and was no doubt doing my best to commit the entire thing to memory. Eric came up to me in the middle of a game at some tourney--he was going up against a master--and he said: "I just played ...b4." "No, you shouldn't have. It gets a ?!." Later on he told me he took the pawn. "That's another ?!."

Not too much later I found out he'd won. He had just beaten the guy--a master--in 23 moves. With Black. And with two ?! moves in a row.

That was right around when my faith in committing entire tomes to memory began to sag.

But Eric was forever managing feats like that. He'd achieved a good deal of his rise to (or toward) the top riding the somewhat dubious coattails of the Polish opening. Once--this was on a cross-country tour--he'd gotten such a bad position out of it that people there were asking him how much it cost to buy his 1974 rating. But he just ground his heels in and gradually turned things around (and carved out yet another win).

Another time--on that same tour--he ended up in a rook ending with 2 RPs vs a BP. It was the same ending which occurred in Fischer-Botvinnik, as his opponent realized; Eric though, being thoroughly ignorant of all this, managed somehow to finagle a win out of it.

During one of my many games against Con (the subject of another blog), we arrived at the following position:

https://lichess.org/editor/1N2k3/7R/6p1/8/4pn2/2N1p3/5nPP/6K1_b_-_-_0_47

Here I played 47... Nd1. And yeah, I'll admit I waited until just the moment Eric was standing there looking on when I played it. Naturally, I was hoping that a burgeoning grin would be there to greet my "brilliancy." Instead, he merely bore an intent and rather distant look--and I saw him go heading off toward some tables and sets in back of the club to analyze.

I returned my concentration to the game--which I fortunately did manage to draw after Con's 48 Ne2. Right afterwards Eric pointed out how 48 Nb5 would've mated Black.

"How did you know there was gonna be a mate?"
"I just figured that with a rook and 2 knights there ought to be something."

He was also the one who told me that thing about how you should attack in the direction your pawn chain is "aiming at."

During the post-mortem of some game he'd lost, I kept recommending attacking sorts of moves. And he finally said, "No, I'm losing. I can't do stuff like that."

His skill at the game even extended to Bughouse (which was quite a new phenomenon at the time). I remember one game where his move was simply to drop an extra pawn down in front of his kingside pawns. I, who was (as usual) caught up in calculating combos, had no way to account for this (positional Bughouse?!--the mind boggled!).

I guess though the main thing I learned from Eric--and it was quite a lot--was his overall approach to the game. Rather than offering up the usual Tarzan impression, he was actually trying to figure out (in his understated way) what was going on on the board.

Oh yeah, so whatever became of him with all his great talent? Well, the prospect of winning a couple hundreds bucks over a weekend is quite enticing while you're still in school...but not so much so later on. And he soon gave up the game to sell real estate. ;)