Chess to Enjoy / Entertainment
Wallboarding
Baseball has bat boys. Tennis has ball boys. And chess? By GM ANDY SOLTIS
MARC YOFFIE WON THE U.S. INTER- collegiate and earned a gold medal on a U.S. team that took the World Student Team Championship. But when he appeared on the cover of Chess Life he was photographed reading his high school homework. He was sitting a few feet behind Bobby
Fischer and Art Bisguier around the time that this position arose in their last-round game:
A game shy Bobby Fischer Arthur Bisguier U.S. Championship 1962-63
behind them. Someone had to input the moves—that is, to read the latest move on a grandmaster’s scoresheet, pick up the right piece on the demo board, put it on the right square, and do it fast enough so that the board was up-to-date and accurate, even in a time-pressure scramble. That someone was a wallboard boy. He was a “boy” because by tradition the
duty was performed by young players and because few of the young players back then were girls. The tradition goes back to at least the great Hastings 1895 tournament when among the “boys” was 14-year-old George Thomas, the future British chess (and ten- nis and backgammon) champion. It may sound exciting to be on such a stage but as a former wallboarder I can recall getting bored during the long waits in between moves and catching up on my own homework.
Bisguier only needed a draw to become the only player to win a U.S. Champi- onship ahead of Fischer. But after 23. Rh1 he played 23. ... Bd8?, allowing 24. Nf5! Rxh1 25. Nd6+!. He was lost within a few moves, 25. ... Kf8 26. Rxh1 b5 27. f4 Kg8 28. f5 Nf8 29. e6! and Fischer retained the Championship title. Yoffie, then 15, was in the photo because he was handling the game’s demonstration board. Back in those dinosaur days, spec- tators had to actually go somewhere, usually a hotel ballroom, to spectate. There was no MonRoi or even Internet, and cer- tainly no simultaneous Houdini or Rybka analysis to help fans experience the games in real time.
What they could see were the players, sit- ting at their boards on a stage, with large wooden, metal or plastic “demo” boards
16 November 2012 | Chess Life
There was no rating requirement for wall- boarders. In fact, Mikhail Botvinnik was suspicious of “boys” who were too strong. During the 1940 USSR Championship he learned that they were at least first-category players—about 2000 rating today, recalled Yuri Averbakh, who was an 18-year-old “boy” then. “He demanded that none of us approach the table of (Botvinnik rival Vasily) Smyslov,” because he feared they would suggest moves, he said.
Averbakh was one of several former wall- boarders who became famous in their own right. When Botvinnik made the draw that clinched the world championship title for him in The Hague-Moscow 1948 tourna- ment, the youngster handling his wallboard was Yakov Estrin, who went on to become a celebrated author and world postal champion. Nikola Burlyayev never made a name in chess. But after being chosen, at age 14, to work the giant board at the 1960 Mikhail Tal- Botvinnik championship match he earned fame as a Russian movie actor, writer and director.
Many wallboarders have vivid memo- ries of games they handled. Yoffie recalled Robert Byrne’s hand trembling when he
made a move against Fischer in a U.S. Championship. “I’ll never forget that,” he said.
Rafael Vaganian, on the other hand, remembered being chewed out as a teenager by a veteran grandmaster, Gideon Ståhlberg. Vaganian was handling Ståhlberg’s board at an international tournament in Erevan when the Swede summoned him and seemed to ask (in Russian) for a glass of water. When Vaganian, later an elite GM himself, fulfilled his mission, Ståhlberg blew up. He didn’t want voda, he said. He wanted vodka.
Aside from their beverage duties—Fischer was always asking for milk—wallboarders had a heavy responsibility. The spectators relied on them for accuracy.
During the U.S.-versus-USSR radio match of 1945, 13-year-old Eliot Hearst was “pretty nervous” because he didn’t want to post a wrong move, he recalled. His older sister Marlys had handled one of the boards “but she didn’t know chess notation that well and was graciously dis- missed after making a few errors,” said Hearst, now a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona.
At another U.S.-USSR match, in 1954, wallboarder Allen Kaufman became a minor celebrity. The New York Times ran a front-page photo of the Vasily Smyslov- versus-Sammy Reshevsky game on board one and Kaufman was in the frame. “Somehow, that photo seemed to make me a contact for some reporters,” said Kaufman, later executive director of the American Chess Foundation. “If memory serves, I was called about various changes in the U.S. lineup. Of course, I had no inside information—but that didn’t stop me from giving my personal opinions.” Peter Biyiasas managed to convey his
own opinion—to an elite grandmaster— during one of the most famous events of the 20th century, the 1971 Candidates match between Fischer and Mark Taimanov in Vancouver. Biyiasas, then a 20-year-old Canadian master, was selected to handle the wallboard.
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