Nothing special — just an odd little chain of clicks…
I watched some of Searching for Bobby Fischer last night. It’s the story of Josh Waitzkin, a child chess prodigy who still plays chess. I know his several of his games well because a chess program I have include several of his self-annotated games.
In the movie, Josh’s foil is child prodigy Jonathan Poe. In real life, the boy’s name was Jeff Sarwer.
Jeff no longer plays chess. But he has a little on his web site about it, specifically the games against Waitzkin he played twenty years ago. He writes,
I found some old scoresheets of games I played in the 80’s. There are games from the World Youth Championships, New York Open, and for kicks the only two tournament games I played against Josh Waitskin. The first game I won, and in the second I blew a winning position and a draw occured [sic] that I never realized would become chess folklore. (The book and film “Searching for Bobby Fischer). In short, I was 7, he was 9, and I quickly forgot about the draw and won the world-10 championships 2 months later.You won’t find many tournament games of mine, but the truth is that I never played in too many tournaments — I was always happier playing speed chess in the park or in some random late night cafe or something
Truth is, Sarwer didn’t just stop playing chess because he realized he preferred speed chess in the park to tournaments. The truth is more tragic.
Anyway, the subtitle of Jeff’s web site is “citizen of the world” and he has a little interactive map that shows all the places he’s been/lived. “Wonder if he’s been” — oh, you know where I checked.
Turns out he’s currently living there, I think.