She looked into his eyes, he made his move
By Adam Lusher , Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 11:20pm GMT 17/03/2007
Chess is, by reputation, a game for super-bright, socially dysfunctional nerds. Scratch the surface, however, and you'll uncover a world of seething passion, nightclub violence and exotic dancers
I came in search of Brazilian dancing girls, sex, violence and castling. So far, I have found only the castling. Before me, in the Golden Lane Community Hall, in central London, stretch 22 chess boards, 44 players, 12 bald patches and precisely one woman. The matches between Battersea 1 and East Ham, and Streatham 1 and Dulwich 1, are being played in the kind of silence familiar only to Trappist monks and assertive librarians. Strain your ears and you might hear the ticking of some players' timekeeping clocks. Some have come in suit and tie. Others, though, have slipped into something more comfortable, such as a cardigan. This looks deeply disappointing.
Recent events would lead a man to expect much more from an evening of chess. Emilio Cordova, 15, an international master from Peru, was crowned South American chess champion in January. The teenager celebrated by running away to Brazil and reappearing in the arms of Adriane Oliveira, a 29-year-old single mother from Sao Paulo.
Miss Oliveira was variously described as "an exotic dancer" (the commonly reported version) or "an NGO worker dedicated to putting on shows" (what Emilio told the world and his father).
Last week, Emilio returned home a Latin American hero. He had proved that chess was no longer a game for the socially maladjusted genius. Chess was sexy.
It just doesn't look that way in London. In the community hall, things have progressed to a bit of heavy pacing. Players make their move, then circle the hall in contemplation. "To the uninitiated," admits Brian Smith, 61, the honorary secretary of the London Chess League, "it is a bit like watching paint dry."
I tell him that he is sadly deficient in his knowledge of Brazilian NGOs. "There is a website where they have graded women players" he says, but he can't remember the address.
Time passes. Clocks tick, the cardigans shift in their seats, the laminate flooring creaks under the weight of the pacers.
Then Mr Smith remembers he does have that website address after all. I find the nearest computer. A whole new world appears before me: one inhabited by Maria Manakova, a 33-year-old grandmaster. She's there at number eight in the World Chess Beauty Contest, organised by Vladislav Tkachiev, a grandmaster from Kazakhstan. Maria doesn't seem to be playing chess. She seems to be in the bath, covered in foam.
Someone in the international chess community is unwise enough to provide her Moscow phone number. "Chess is very sexy game," breathes Miss Manakova, in heavily accented English. "When two people make moves, like in sex, like in love, they do some moves to win. Yes, not only he, but she, the woman. There are very close parallels between these two things: chess and sex. No, I don't mean sex. I mean the game of love.
"When I first played my ex-husband Miroslav Tosic - he is Yugoslav grandmaster - I made a move. I didn't go with my king to the corner, I went to the centre, and my ex-husband thought, 'Oh, she's so brave'. He fell in love with me immediately, because in this move was my character, my wish to be with him. Maybe I didn't want to show it, but maybe I wanted him to win a little bit. I surrendered myself to him. He liked that."
When Miss Manakova appeared on the cover of Chess Monthly in Britain, the magazine rapidly sold out. The mention of her name makes Alan Palmer, a Battersea 1 player, nearly break the silence. "There were a string of covers," the besuited, 62-year-old business consultant whispers fondly. "Chess beauties every other month. My wife started to question my interest in the magazine."
Miss Manakova confirms that there are now many "chess beauties". "Many parents, if their daughter is clever and beautiful, they try to put her into chess." Just ahead of her, at number seven in the beauty contest, is Arianne Caoili, 20, who achieved particular prominence at last year's World Chess Olympiad in Turin. While off duty, she was dancing with Levon Aronian, the Armenian world number three, at the Hiroshima Mon Amour nightclub. This attracted the displeasure of Danny Gormally, the British grandmaster, and very public dancefloor violence ensued.
In between modelling stints, Miss Caoili has become the first chess player to grace the final of the prime-time Australian television show Dancing With the Stars. Back in Durham, Mr Gormally, 30, has recovered his gentle affability to confirm: "Chess is an art form, some combinations of moves are beautiful. People who are attracted to chess are attracted to aesthetics, beautiful things, beautiful women."
"Some women players dress to kill, in low-cut tops," he adds happily. "It can be very offputting. But you get used to it."
And this is just the players. FIDE, the world chess federation, doesn't seem to do stuffed shirts in blazers. The president since 1995 has been Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, who is also president of the former Soviet state of Kalmykia. He was elected Kalmuk president in 1993 on a ticket of a free mobile phone for every shepherd.
Then he announced details of his encounter with aliens: "They gave me a tour of their spaceship. I felt very comfortable with them." He has also ruled on the controversy about whether chess came from 5th-century India, or Persia, or China in the 5th century BC. "Look, the chessboard has 64 squares and our cells are made of 64 pieces. All this shows that chess comes either from God or from UFOs."
Some mutter about Mr Ilyumzhinov's effect on a game long saddled with a reputation for eccentricity. Wilhelm Steinitz, who became the sport's first official world champion in 1886, ended up telling the asylum doctors he could move chess pieces using just electrical impulses from his brain.
One of Britain's foremost grandmasters admits that, while "the majority are very level-headed", "about 10 or 15 per cent are unstable. I'm not too sure what some would do if they weren't chess players. I shudder to think." He asks to remain anonymous.
The world of chess is changing, insists Malcolm Pein, The Sunday Telegraph's chess correspondent and himself an international master. "We are seeing a de-nerdification of the game," he says. "Celebrities like Madonna are playing. It's huge in primary schools, because it is viewed as assisting children's development, and it is also cheap compared with running other activities.
"Tesco reported selling 35,000 chess sets one Christmas. I'm pretty confident that there are more chess sets out there than cricket bats. Look at the UK Chess Challenge: it started in 1996 with 23,000 children from 700 schools. It now attracts 74,000 entries from more than 2,000 schools."
The internet has also made it incredibly easy for players of all levels and all ages to find a similar opponent. "The big tournaments are broadcast live on the internet and attract audiences in the hundreds of thousands," says Pein. "Chess has a much broader social base now."
And, as if to prove his point, once the post-match analysis starts in the bar, the 'Trappist monks' of Battersea, East Ham, Streatham and Dulwich reveal a different side to their game. Emil Todorow, 54, Battersea's shaggy-haired, cricket-playing Bulgarian, leans his bear-like frame against the bar conspiratorially. "Behind the veneer of this polished behaviour," he growls, "You see that when a game of chess is lost, suddenly the veneer is lost, too. You have just raw, naked nature."
The lone woman, Dulwich's Jovanka Houska, 26, an international master and one of Britain's leading female players, smiles: "Chess is not as dull as it seems. I have played a transsexual before, and \u2026" She smiles enigmatically. "It's actually a sexy game. It's the clash of wills, the intellectual battle, the power struggle between a man and a woman. That's quite romantic."
Mr Smith is also happy, and stirred by the turn our conversation has taken. No London Chess League player has run away with a Brazilian exotic dancer, confirms the retired IT worker. "Not yet. But it sounds like a good way for a pensioner to go."