come by its Title I designation honestly. IS 318 was in South Williamsburg, near the border of Bedford-Stuyvesant— its most famous graduate was the rapper Jay-Z, who grew up in the nearby Marcy housing project—and the team reflected the student body; the students’ families were mostly from the struggling working class, and the majority of their parents were employed but not college educated.
Over the next two years, I returned often to IS 318—sitting in on classes, accompanying the team to tournaments and chess clubs around New York City, following their progress on Spiegel’s blog—and all the while, I was trying to figure out how they did it. The blunt reality is that rich kids win chess tournaments—or, more precisely, rich kids plus the cognitive elite who attend selective schools with competitive entrance exams. Take a look at the team winners, by grade, of the 2010 scholastic tournament in Orlando, held a few months before the Columbus tournament that Sebastian Garcia was playing in:
| Kindergarten | Oak Hall School, a private school in Gainesville, Florida |
| First grade | SciCore Academy, a private school in New Jersey |
| Second grade | Dalton School, a private school in New York City |
| Third grade | Hunter College Elementary, an exam school in New York City |
| Fourth grade | Tie between SciCore Academy and Stuart Hall School for Boys, a Catholic school in New Orleans |
| Fifth grade | Regnart Elementary, a public school in Cupertino, California, home of Apple and dozens of software companies |
| Ninth grade | San Benito Veterans Memorial Academy, in southern Texas, a public school whose student body is mostly Hispanic and low income |
| Tenth grade | Horace Mann, a private school in New York City |
| Eleventh grade | Solomon Schechter, a private school in a New York City suburb |
| Twelfth grade | Bronx Science, an exam school in New York City |
The winning team in every grade, in other words—with the exception of those outliers from San Benito— came from a private school, an exam school, a parochial school, or a public school populated by the children of Apple engineers.
Except, that is, for the middle-school grades, where the list of winners looked like this:
| Sixth grade | IS 318, a low-income public school in Brooklyn |
| Seventh grade | IS 318, a low-income public school in Brooklyn |
| Eighth grade | IS 318, a low-income public school in Brooklyn |
The students at IS 318 didn’t win in just one grade; they won in every grade the school was allowed to enter. The roster of schools they beat reads like a wealthy parent’s wish list of the most desirable private schools in the country: Trinity, Collegiate, Spence, Dalton, and Horace Mann in New York City, and exclusive private schools in Boston, Miami, and Greenwich, Connecticut. And the 2010 tournament wasn’t a one-time fluke; IS 318 won in all three grades in 2008 as well. (In 2009, they won in the sixth- and seventh-grade divisions but lost the eighth-grade trophy by half a point.)
In the end, it is a simple truth, no caveats or asterisks required: the chess program at Intermediate School 318 is the best middle-school chess program in the United States, bar none. In fact, it is almost certainly the best scholastic chess program in the country at any grade level. The team’s reputation has grown in recent years, and they have begun to draw good elementary-school players from around the city, which has added to their advantage. But mostly, they win tournaments because of what Elizabeth Spiegel was sitting in Union B doing that April afternoon: taking eleven-year-old kids, like Sebastian Garcia, who know a little chess but not a lot, and turning them, move by painstaking move, into champions.
By the thirty-fifth move in the game Sebastian was replaying with Spiegel, he had recovered completely from his early errors and taken a clear lead. He pushed his queen deep into enemy territory, putting the white king in check. His opponent drew a pawn up to block the black queen’s attack. Sebastian moved his queen two squares ahead: check again. The white king retreated a square, pulling out of the queen’s range.
And then, rather than keeping the pressure on the white king, Sebastian went for the easy score: he captured a white pawn with his queen. Once again, he had missed a looming threat: from the other side of the board, his opponent’s rook stole Sebastian’s bishop, and Sebastian’s advantage started to slip away.
“You took the pawn?” Spiegel asked. “Come on. What’s a better move?”
Sebastian said nothing.
“What about check?”
Sebastian stared at the board.
“Think about it,” Spiegel said. “Remember, when I ask you a question, you don’t have to answer right away. But you do have to be right.”
