Speed Chess

The word chess evokes boredom for most people. The image that comes up is of two old men spending an entire day making one move every twenty or thirty minutes. I owned a chess club toward the end of the seventies and I fervently wanted to change that image. The description above is what The Mechanics Institute was like just off Market Street. I wanted my club to be youthful and vibrant.

I had originally opened just a second hand bookstore with a partner, Douglas, running it Monday to Friday, 9 to 5. I came in some evenings and worked the weekend. When I would go out for coffee at "The Meat Market" next door, I would watch with interest the two tables where chess players challenged each other to 5-minute chess. Half a dozen other on-lookers would watch and kibbitz the game. I had been playing chess all my life. I used to think I was good. I had never played with a clock before, though. I didn't know what it was at first.

A chess clock has two clocks housed in the same box. There are two buttons: one for each player that stops your clock from ticking and starts your opponent's clock. One of the two clocks is always running. So if you set each clock to 10:00 and begin a game, you can manage a rule that says, "You must either win or lose before your clock reads noon." Now you have imposed a time limit on the entire game of less than four hours. In speed chess, or “blitz”, players universally give each person five minutes for the entire game. No, not each move, the whole game. That's about seven seconds a move for a 40-move game. No boredom here, you can get in six games an hour, faster than shooting pool and about the same as playing poker.

I started playing speed chess in The Meat Market, but I would often invite a few players back to the bookshop to continue playing. After a few months, I had set up four permanent tables for chess playing. I also branched out from the general used book selection to a specialty area of just chess books. I started with used chess books that I found in other bookstores around the Bay Area. Booksellers routinely give each other 40% discounts, so this is a good way to start an inventory. I ran an ad in "Bookman's Weekly" that kept a steady stream of good quality and some rare chess books.

As this started to bring in money, I added some in-print book lines and chess equipment, sets, boards, and clocks. I had become a standard meeting place for hundreds of chess players. The next phase was when I started the regular Friday night speed chess tournaments, $5 entry fee, $50 first prize, 16-player maximum. It became the talk of the town, in chess playing circles. The good players came, thinking of an easy $50 or $20 prize. The less than good players come to be able to say they had played with the good players. There were usually more people in the audience of kibbitzers than players. I began a rating system similar to the one used by the International Chess Federation. It was a way of flattering egos to have your ranking posted in my club.

After six months, my store had become a haven for chess players. I was subscribing to all the chess periodicals, many of them soviet and eastern European. I had become a US Chess Federation sanctioned tournament director and I held a "slow" chess tournament once a month over a weekend. I held a women's tournament, an under 16 tournament and as a lark, I put together a team and we played the Marshall Club in New York City by telephone. The speed chess tournaments, though, drove it all.

Seven seconds a move, and in the beginning of the game, it was more like one second a move, lightning speed. The players would continuously fidget, stand up, sit down, curse, scream, and cheat if they were losing and could get away with it. The audience thought this was better than many other forms of entertainment. At any time, there were as many as eight games going on in three different rooms. My place was the main floor of an old Victorian. Every entrant had to play each of the other players, one game, with the white pieces, the other with the black. Runners would update a master scoreboard with results. I kept a running point count, one for a win, none for a loss. Ties only rarely occurred because of the clock factor. You can figure that this was about three hours of entertaining fun for players and audience.

By popular demand, I started a second, Tuesday night speed chess tournament, keeping the $5 entry fee and raised the entry fee on Friday nights to $10, a $100 prize, and an 18-player maximum. Walter Browne, the reigning US Chess Champion starting attending from Berkeley. Chess players from New York, visiting California to play in big tournaments, would schedule my Friday night tournament as a must stop. One afternoon in came Anatoly Lein and Leonid Shamkovitch. They were Soviet players ranked numbers 3 and 5 in the world. They had sought asylum at a tournament in Paris earlier in the year.

Word spread that three of the world's top ten players, Walter Browne was number 10, would be competing that night. I started getting bribe offers for entry to the tournament. Twenty bucks to be able to say you had lost to three of the worlds best players; maybe one would become world's champion. I set up a lottery with numbers picked out of a hat, just to play. The crowd was the biggest ever, hard to move around, maybe a hundred and fifty people. Lein & Shamkovitch hung around for the summer, but that Grand Masters tournament was the high point.