It’s Hub-NYC chess match with trash talk, fans, logos

By Ryan Kost
Globe Correspondent / August 29, 2008

You could be forgiven if you haven’t heard much about what one man called “by far the biggest rivalry going on in the chess world right now.” But in the burgeoning United States Chess League, a special community where speech is reduced to board coordinates, a two-year spat between the Boston Blitz and the New York Knights is garnering a lot of attention.

As the Red Sox and the Yankees faced off one evening this week in their age-old war, these two chess teams met via the Internet for their season opener, the Blitz based at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge as the Knights tuned in from New York.

In the insular world of chess, the USCL is a growing movement, an organization that is shifting chess’s focus from the individual to the team, from a board game to a sport.

The teams are your typical franchises: bright logos, flashy names (Miami Sharks, Arizona Scorpions, Seattle Sluggers), and private sponsors.

Then, of course, there are the big personalities.

Take Alexander Shabalov, a chess grandmaster who plays for the Knights. In a pregame interview, he psyched out his opponents, as would any good celebrity athlete.

“I expect total Knights domination on boards 1-4,” Shabalov told a blogger who follows league news. “We have so much depth. Our bench is uncomparable [sic] to the other teams in the league.”

Of course, he said, the interview was in jest. “The whole idea was to do the totally nonsensical interview with some trash talking.”

But the point is clear. This isn’t Bobby Fischer’s chess. Nor is it, necessarily, the chess world’s answer to the failed Xtreme Football League. Teams nationwide have recruited – and, thanks to sponsors, can afford to pay – several grandmasters.

Though Shabalov lives in Pittsburgh, he plays for New York, rather than the Philadelphia Inventors.

The team’s offer, he said, was sweeter. “I’m a chess professional, so basically I’m going with whoever gives me better conditions.”

Source: Boston Globe

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