Star basketball players stick out in a crowd, but grandmasters at chess? Not so much.
So to the uninitiated, the grandmaster peering over shoulders to watch a chess match in Harvard Square is indistinguishable from the weekend warrior or the tourist. But the regulars know.
On an unusually warm weeknight in March, Farzad Abdi, a chess master, took on Billy Collins, a homeless man who is widely acknowledged as one of the best players in the square. Toward the outer edge of the circle of spectators stood grandmaster Marc Esserman.
As Abdi moved in for the checkmate, Collins – down in pieces and on the run – became animated and more self-confident. Abdi’s clock was ticking down, and Collins was slipping out of his pincers.
“How’s he going to win this? How?” Collins demanded, punctuating his taunts with percussive slaps of the timer. “Where’s the win at? Where’s the win at?”
As it turned out, the win was in the seconds on Collins’ side of the timer when Abdi’s hit zero. His time was up. It was Abdi’s first loss of the day. A 30-year-old math grad student at UMass Boston, Abdi had earlier lamented that it had been so long since he last played before dispatching his challengers five times, all the while fending off teasing from chess regular Tommy DeMartino.
The chess tables in front of Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square are the premier place in the area for players to test their skills and match up against the best players in Greater Boston, usually in blitz or speed chess, which is much faster than tournament chess. Those tables were installed in front of the Holyoke Center in the early 1980s. Harvard University, which owns the building, puts the date at 1982 but the Cambridge Historical Commission puts it at 1983. Over the years it has lured in some of the greatest players to compete against the best of the regulars.
Collins is among those who have played and even beaten visiting grandmasters. Nathan Smolensky, tournament director for the Boylston Chess Club, based in Davis Square, confirmed Collins’ prowess.
Collins, 57, grew up in a loving foster home in Roxbury, where the family doctor taught him to play chess. He was one of the first selected for the Metco program, which buses students from the inner city out to schools in the suburbs. Collins attended Braintree High School, where he says he was on the chess club but wasn’t given the place on the team his skill deserved.
“I was the best player at the time, but I was black. The school was all white,” said Collins. After high school, Collins flirted with joining radical black political organizations, and wound up a “third lieutenant” with the group United Black Strategies. But Collins was never as into the politics as he was into the prestige that accompanied membership and their attempts to “clash with the police” repelled him.
Collins had worked jobs here and there, but not in more than two decades, when his foster mother died and her Roxbury home where he still lived was sold by her children. Since then he has been homeless, but he has found time to hone his chess game. He gets by with the support of benefactors, panhandling and small-stakes chess. This summer, Collins wants to enter the World Open Chess Tournament in Philadelphia.
The chess players in the square have diverse backgrounds. Andrey Froim, another highly regarded player, hardly speaks English, but he is very familiar to the crowd of regulars through his play.
A 70-year-old Lynn resident, Froim is probably the steadiest presence at the tables, taking public transit to the square six days a week. Froim was born in Kazakhstan, learned to play chess from his father, a doctor, and grew up in Moldova, where he was a teenage chess champion, he said through a Russian interpreter. He had a career teaching chess in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and moved to America in 1996. He has known little else besides chess, and still schools the people who dare to play him.
Abdi grew up near the Caspian Sea in Iran where he learned chess at the age of 5 and soon fell into a habit of beating his family at the game. As a teenager, he joined a chess club and took his game to a new level. Both Abdi and Froim said the way to master the game is by introspectively analyzing every game, but that type of dissection is anathema to Collins, who prefers to try out new combinations and see how they work. He is one of the few who said he has gotten good by playing people in the square, though he credits the many hours he spent playing a computer chess program about 10 years ago as well.
DeMartino, a truck driver who grew up in South Boston and lives in Dorchester, claims he has been coming to play chess in Harvard Square longer than anyone.
“I was a punk,” said DeMartino, 55. “I came down here to just beat people up.”
DeMartino said he picked up chess wandering into the Boylston club’s previous location in Boston’s Combat Zone. While other players struggled to come up with a real-world analogy to chess, DeMartino quickly seized on boxing.
“You get two very highly rated, very technical style boxers… not ham and eggers,” DeMartino said. “You just keep grabbing a pawn here… and in boxing that would be an opponent, his eye just keeps getting more swollen and swollen.”
In international competition, a chess player’s style can be deduced by fans around the world because all the moves are recorded and analyzed online and in newspapers. In the fast paced games played in the square, sizing up an opponent is more of an art. But the players – many of whom were reluctant to give their name – have their system, an open gossip network about each player’s strengths, weaknesses and proclivities, as well as some live commentary during the games.
Collins said one of the reasons he’s been able to beat chess greats is the unconventional opening move he often employs, which is called Scholar’s Mate, and the improvisational approach he takes to the game, which can baffle people who are book trained.
“I was the world’s foremost authority [on Scholar’s Mate] at one point because nobody played it,” Collins said. “I’m really a master, and the only reason I haven’t gotten that [rating] is I’m poor. You’ve got to be rich to play chess.”
Collins, who said he makes more money panhandling than pushing pawns, said he wishes more passersby would stop for a game. He’s also pretty sure his appearance – a black man with dreadlocks wrapped up in a net – makes people underestimate him.
“They think that every time I beat them it’s luck,” Collins said. It is pretty hard to pick the true masters out of the bunch.