Hey, coach, is that pawn to queen four?
David Brooks
 
Remember all the fuss after the Bruins won the Stanley Cup, celebrating Boston as the first city to win championships in four different sports in a single decade?
 
Turns out, the fuss should have been even louder, because the area has actually won five national championships.
 
People forgot the Somerville-based New England Nor’easters, newcomers who won the 2010 U.S. Chess Federation title in a real upset. They beat every team in the league, from Arizona and Seattle to Dallas and New York, except their cross-town rival, the Boston Blitz, who they tied.
 
We can be forgiven for overlooking this, however, because the 6-year-old USCL has to be the most publicity-shy national organization I’ve ever encountered. They have zero recognition outside the chess world, which is large but insular.
 
Merely finding somebody to contact from the league or a team was tough. It’s a journalistic triumph that I’m writing this column with actual quotes from actual people, in anticipation of the Aug. 29 start of the seventh season.
 
“This is not exactly major league baseball,” agreed David Vigorito, manager of the Nor’easters. “It’s not even minor league baseball.”
 
Here’s how it works. The 16 teams play a 10-week season that will culminate in playoffs in November.
 
Each team has eight or 10 active players, four of whom play in each game, one game each against a member of the opposite team.
 
Players include some of the best players in the country, including former U.S. champion Larry Christiansen of the Boston Blitz and the country’s top-rated player, Hikaru Nakamura, who was lured to St. Louis.
 
The tournaments take place online, using the well-established Internet Chess Club, which cuts travel costs and allows thousands of fans to watch. Since you have to pay to watch on the ICC, it also provides an income stream.
 
“During the season, we were updating something like five times a day, and got thousands of page views,” said USCL founder Greg Shahadi of Philadelphia. His rating makes him an International Master, one step below grandmaster, which is roughly equivalent to being a good enough ballplayer to make the Lowell Spinners roster, or maybe even the Pawsox.
 
USCL play is bit faster than in competitive chess tournaments – 90 minutes for a whole game – but otherwise it’s pawn to king four and let the best Sicilian Defense win, just as it has been on the chessboard for two centuries.
 
Shahadi said he wanted a team alternative to the traditional sequential-game contests that make up chess contests for everything from school tourneys to state contests (Joe Fang of Nashua recently won the New Hampshire Chess Association title for at least the 10th time in recent decades) to the U.S. Open to the world title.
 
Most of the Chess League players are not paid. Some get a small stipend, and a very few, like Nakamura, get some real money.
 
This isn’t an unusual situation for chess. Vigorito said only a handful of American players make a living by playing chess, since prize money from tournaments is pretty limited. Winning the U.S. title, the richest prize in the country, will snare you only $40,000.
 
Most of the upper echelon, including Vigorito, make a chess-related living by teaching or writing about the sport. But many others, even some who have obtained master ratings, make their living via day jobs and do chess on the side.
 
Speaking of money, one issue is that the league’s main sponsor is Pokerstars, a huge online poker site. (There’s overlap between poker players and chess players.)
 
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York has shut down Pokerstars for alleged violations of online-gambling laws and has temporarily stopped allowing players from the United States to play real money games. Shahadi said the Chess League has already gotten funding for the year – which can’t be too much, since the league only gives each team $1,500 for expenses – so the 2011 season won’t be affected, but the league’s financial future is a bit up in the air.
 
In other words, it is like the major leagues!
 
One of the most interesting things about the U.S. Chess League operations is that it uses a ratings cap. The average chess rating for the four players on a team in each contest has to be below 2400, or roughly the lowest level for International Master.
 
“It’s like a salary cap,” said Shahade.
 
And it has the same goal as a salary cap: preventing chess-rich places like New York from loading up with Grandmasters and trouncing everybody else. The cap makes roster-juggling almost as important as chess knowledge in winning a title – again, just like the major leagues.
 
For example, last year’s favorites, the St. Louis Arch Bishops, who are backed by billionaire Rex Sinquefield, failed to make the playoffs because they ran into problems with their talent-laden roster (feel free to draw a Yankees parallel), whereas the first-year Nor’easters juggled a balanced lineup that included some up-and-coming youngsters, which helped them win the title.
 
All of that is fun but, as far as the game of chess goes, somewhat secondary.
 
The real advantage of the Chess League is that it brings top-quality players online for the teeming masses to watch.
 
It adds another option for those who’d love to see something like the 1956 “game of the century,” in which 13-year-old Bobby Fischer sacrificed a queen to defeat a chess master during a major tournament. Even online, that would be cool to see in real time.
 
I no longer play chess like I did in high school, but any outlet for the Game of Kings is OK by me.
 
So come Aug. 29, maybe I’ll pull the La-Z-Boy in front of the laptop and get ready to rumble.
 
Blitz vs. Nor-Easters starts at 7 p.m. Be there or be square.
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GraniteGeek runs Mondays, and in a blog at www.granitegeek.org. David Brooks can be reached at: dbrooks@nashua telegraph