“Chess is a test for our cowardice,” Grandmaster Irina Krush advised while maneuvering around a labyrinth of chessboards in Rockefeller Hall 104. Now 41, Krush—who has faced almost-daily battles since playing in the parks of her childhood neighborhood, Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn—has endured some difficult losses and many gratifying wins. Although each game presents a different challenge, a constant lesson has prevailed for Krush: Never abandon the board; never show any signs of weakness.
“I think there was a tournament where I was in a position to make a GM norm [a stellar tournament performance required to earn the Grandmaster title from the International Chess Federation (ICF)], and I offered a draw. But my opponent didn’t accept it, and I know there was probably a winning move somewhere in there, but I ended up losing,” Krush admitted to a hushed crowd. “And I ended up losing because I offered a draw and showed weakness,” she added. It was unusual to witness such stark humility and transparent self-criticism from the only active woman chess Grandmaster in the United States. But Krush, clad in straight-leg jeans and a pair of avowedly comfy loafers, often assumes the position of both student and teacher. Krush is dedicated to ever-eclipsing her last match while also advising young chess players—and recently Vassar students and community members alike—on how to improve their own performances.
Krush was invited to campus by the Vassar-Chadwick Chess Club, which meets weekly in Rockefeller Hall rooms 101 and 104, to deliver a well-attended lecture on chess and conduct a simul, which is when a highly ranked chess player simultaneously competes in multiple matches at once, moving from board to board with a furrowed brow and unfathomable expertise. The event was made possible by a donation from the late Eric Horsboll and his family; Horsboll was a longtime member of the Vassar-Chadwick Chess Club and four-time Dutchess County Champion. With its blocks of tables and diagonally placed chairs, the room itself was not unlike the portable chessboard Krush used during her lecture to analyze a recent ICF match.
When asked in a Zoom interview why she did not select one of her own matches to analyze, Krush’s reasoning was pure practicality: “This [Krush’s more publicized matches] is old stuff. There’s no principle against me teaching my own games, it’s just that I didn’t play a game yesterday. I would have to dig into the past. If it’s not new to me, I just don’t want to do it.” Although it has been more than a decade since Krush was awarded her Grandmaster title in 2013, and multiple decades since Krush burst onto the chess scene as a more-than-promising young player, Krush does not feel burnt out by the game. Unlike other Grandmasters, Krush does not practice eight hours a day. She does not catalogue the specifics of every single one of her matches in her mind like a filing cabinet. Yes, Krush competes in competitive tournaments. But she also delights in teaching elementary school students chess and casually dropping morsels of wisdom to experienced, intermediate and novice chess players. In a match, Krush is superhuman. As soon as she puts her opponent in checkmate, however, Krush is completely herself, and a person: an authoritative, compelling speaker, but kind and gentle; a passionate player, but quick to laugh. “I prepared this lecture at one to two in the morning the day of the game,” Krush confessed to me. “Sometimes you look for material and you can’t find anything. But I felt inspired by that game. Like, oh, this is going to be good stuff for the audience. A mixture of what will be good for my audience and what will be interesting to me.”
When the simul began, each board was a well-set dinner table, pristine and perfectly aligned. There were only male players, a mix of Vassar students and surrounding community members who regularly participate in Vassar-Chadwick events and practice. Vassar-Chadwick President Ernest Johnson commented on the demographics of the players, noting in written correspondence, “The only disappointment I had [with the event] is that I was expecting more female players to participate. We had none.” Johnson did note, however, that “The female participation in our club events has increased since this time last year.”
I sat in the corner of the room, completely silent, glasses on and a cup of steaming tea next to me. I thought the affair would be dead silent. I was wrong. Krush graciously shook the hand of every player in the room—a hodgepodge of children, collegians and much older gentlemen—and commented on their openings. As the five-hour simul lurched into its second hour, however, proceedings became more subdued. I did not realize people had begun to lose. When mothers of teenage participants cracked the door of the classroom open, their sons shot annoyed looks back, packing up their portable boards in defeat without speaking. I thought they had other obligations to attend to. Loss was silent, dignified.
One Vassar student in attendance who has been playing chess since childhood, Charles Spencer ’27, explained his emotions at the start of his match: “Going in, I was pretty nervous. I knew I was going to lose, but I was interested in seeing how the game would go.” This nervousness, which Spencer shared with other players in the room, was palpable. In the third hour, as more matches concluded, players began to pace around the labyrinth, sizing up their potential to be the last man standing, or just curious about the different paths people chose. “A lot of her [Krush’s] lecture went over my head, but one thing I took away is that it is really important to play a lot and play without fear. I think it is really easy to give up during a game if you recognize you are in a losing position,” Spencer explained.
Spencer and Krush share one commonality: their age when they began playing. Chess privileges youth. The youngest player at the simul—clad in a red sweater and squirming around in his seat, feet dangling from the ground—was 10. The man sitting two boards down from where I staked out, Steve Soifer, who is also the coordinator of the Hyde Park Chess Club and was the final player left at the simul’s close, informed me, “He is the only person who might have a shot at drawing Krush.” Krush herself began winning national championships at fourteen, and even before that played in tournaments against much older individuals. “As a little girl, I was playing mixed tournaments. My first tournament at Manhattan Chess Club was against adult men, so from a young age I got the experience of playing people older than me and of the opposite sex, whether boys or older men. So being in the minority was always the norm for me,” Krush explained.
Beyond becoming accustomed to having fundamental differences with her opponents, chess also taught Krush the power of finding joy within difficulty from a young age. “Everyone who comes into contact with me eventually realizes this little feature of mine, which is that I like what’s hard. At some point, they understand that I like it when it’s not just pleasant. You don’t have to break me, but you can make me work in a way that’s not pleasant, and I never am discouraged.” Chess has been a life coach for Krush, teaching her a resilience that some individuals will never fully understand or learn to equip. “The moment I hear the word ‘challenge,’ I like those words. Chess is a game that requires you to meet challenges and solve problems.”
After five hours, the final portable chessboard slipped comfortably into its carrier bag, its pieces clinking together like plastic wind chimes before assuming indefinite, sweet silence. Loss was not really loss, I learned. A loss is a lesson, fuel to start again. Loss is, according to Krush, one of the most valuable lessons one can glean from chess. “You just have to play,” Krush mused. “There’s no way out.”
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