Beating a Chess Legend

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Another unedited excerpt from my upcoming autobiography:

I wanted to make history. For that, I would need to use this event (New York Open) to show the world I was more than just a public interest story.

I got my chance in the tournament’s seventh round. I had come to the tournament determined to defeat my first Grandmaster. But I had still yet to sit down across from one. My opponent in round seven was the 33-year-old Filipino Eugene Torre, a formidably strong Grandmaster who had competed as a candidate for the World Chess Championship a few years before. He was also a boundary-breaker in his own right, having been the first Asian in history to earn the Grandmaster title, which I deeply respected. Distinguished and well-dressed with long dark hair, Torre was an absolute gentleman in the few interactions I had with him before our game. Once we sat down at the board, however, he was all business.

I was playing with the black pieces, so the odds were tilted against me before a single move was made. Despite this, my strategy going into the game was to “play for two results.” Instead of trying to win at all costs, in other words, I would keep open the option for a draw as well as a win for as long as the game allowed. Torre opened with 1. d4, a move directly from my own playbook. And for the first few moves I played my usual solid, positional game, gradually maneuvering my pieces to optimal squares. By the end of the opening phase, the position felt pretty equal, although looking back on it today with the aid of a computer, Torre technically had a slight advantage. That changed after the seventeenth move, when I laid an elaborate trap. At first glance, it appeared that Torre could just capture my pawn on c6 with his knight, attacking both my queen and rook. In fact, I had calculated a 10-move continuation which left me much better off. If all went to plan, we’d each have roughly equal material at the end of this sequence of moves. But my pieces would be beautifully coordinated to mount an attack. It wasn’t the easiest continuation to see over-the-board, but then again, this was Eugene Torre we’re talking about, so I couldn’t be sure.

Sure enough, though, on his eighteenth move he snatched up my pawn with his knight, just as I had hoped he would. I felt a jolt of adrenaline course through my body. I wanted nothing more than to blitz out the next series of moves, but I stopped myself. Had he really missed it? Or had he just analyzed the position more deeply and found a continuation I hadn’t considered? Stop, I told myself. Think this through. I spent the next few minutes checking my calculations, but couldn’t see a way out for him.

I had him.

After my eighteenth move, his whole posture changed. The momentum of the game was about to shift in my direction, and even he knew it. Normally quite stone-faced during games, I could see the occasional hint of a grimace appear on his face as he played out the next few moves in his mind. After a quiet opening, the game was now full of action, as pieces disappeared off the board in one exchange after another. By the 33rd move, everything had gone as I had anticipated. My queen, bishop, and knight were working in perfect harmony, ready to mount a lethal assault. His king and queen were on the verge of being trapped. I was no longer playing for two results.

We played on for another thirteen moves after that, during which I did my best to make sure Torre never got back in the game. On the forty-sixth move he resigned. My very first victory against a Grandmaster was officially on the books.

You can tell a lot about a player by how they handle themselves in defeat. Emotional losers are everywhere to be seen. But Torre was a class act. With a friendly face, he shook my hand in resignation. We sat analyzing the game for a little while together. “You have a great future ahead of you,” he said to me, as we got up to leave. The rest of the tournament, he would check in with me to see how I was doing.

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