NICHOLAS MURPHY —
They say that chess is like life: you attack others, you defend yourself, one wrong move and it’s all over – but what happens when chess is your life? If that is the case, you experience infinite lives, each one improving your strategy and hoping to stay awake as long as possible. Imad Khachan, the owner of the last old-style chess parlor in New York City, Chess Forum, gave a glimpse into his many lives and their lessons.
Imad was born in 1964, in Lebanon, where he suffered through the Lebanese Civil War beginning in 1975. Imad explained how the first thing that disappeared in the war was the electricity, forcing his eight younger siblings, parents, and him to live submerged in the darkness that covered every inch of the walls. Imad learned chess on his father’s friend’s fascinating magnetic chessboard.
Similar to many people recently spending the Covid-19 pandemic looking for anything to immerse themselves in, Imad used chess as an escape from reality during the war. The game is all about spatial recognition: a virtue that Imad learned to master the more time he spent studying the game. Spatial recognition in this context describes the positional awareness of one’s pieces, and how to improve them. The game taught him that “the distance between life and death is just a block.”
Taking this lesson with him and in turn, escaping death, Imad moved to the United States the first chance he got, coming in the form of a full scholarship to NYU to get a P.H.d in American literature. Survival was always his first instinct, and he promised himself “if I ever leave [Lebanon] I will never go back.” Imad took English as a second language growing up in Lebanon, so when he came to the United States the transition was workable for college.
Imad didn’t find a chess community immediately in New York City due to his tendency to play it safe – growing up in the war taught him to only take the known safe streets, which back then didn’t include walking by the Washington Square Park chess boards where locals go to play.
219 Thompson Street held a lot of history within its dusty walls before it became NYC’s beloved Chess Forum. It opened as an Italian bakery in the 1920s, lasting until the 40s when it became a grocery store. Then, from 1970-1984, it was a chess studio run by grandmaster Nicolas Rossolimo, until it became a printing press. There is some speculation regarding the death of the grandmaster Rossolimo, with some claiming that he fell off a building or his young chess players found him dead in the room after their lesson. However, these ghost stories were just stories to Imad who took over in 1995 to introduce his own chess parlor.
The Chess Forum opened in 1995, fortuitously the same year the Chess World Championship came to New York. “Beginners luck,” Imad called it. This event drove business to his young store, with many grandmasters, journalists, and fans of the game now lurking in the streets of New York. Unfortunately, the honeymoon phase died down and reality set in as a small business, as he was almost unable to pay the rent. As his father said, it’s just “you and your luck,” a phrase that described Imad’s business throughout the following six years until he finally had some breathing room. Not for long though. When the stock market crash of 2008 happened, Imad was once again blown away by a hurricane of hardship. It was “back to square one, back to minus zero. That was the hardest time. Humiliating… What I went through couldn’t be done to a child or a family.” Food became sacred. A dollar a day is what Imad literally lived off of. One dollar.
Pushing through that period of hardship once again, the Chess Forum acted as a haven for all those that needed it. “Late Night Chuck,” a customer from its earliest opening days, used to come into the store after midnight when he had a break from taking care of his sick father. “It was his window to freedom,” said Imad, who told how Chuck interacted with every chess book, magazine, and player he could get his hands on. For someone like Late Night Chuck, the Chess Forum was much more than a simple chess store. It was a home. Imad’s nickname, “father to everybody,” shows that although he doesn’t have a wife and kids, his customers are part of his family. At any time, people could come in for only a dollar an hour to make friends, sit in an air-conditioned room (many of them couldn’t afford air conditioning), and pass the time away from the discomfort that lay waiting just outside the black glossy door.
Specifically, during the Covid-19 pandemic, Imad was pushed to his limits. “This part is very important to me, the family part, what happened to these guys who really, when I open they are here and they stay as long as they want, all day 24 hours. They go to work from here, this was their life. What happened to them? That really was always on my mind.” After doing everything he could to stay open, including thinking about opening a secret speakeasy, the Chess Forum closed for three months. Imad sat through the long nights until finally, he was able to open shop again.
Looking at me with determination and humility behind his eyes, Imad told about a discovery he had made in his years as a chess player: “What we think of as genius and we are so impressed with, rarely it is genius. Genius is actually three things. Talent. Discipline. Opportunity.” Imad continued to explain that talent is something that you are given (no control over that), discipline is your internal and personal will to do something (it’s more than just “pushing pieces” on a board), and opportunity is the resources you have available to help you with your goals. Imad has observed that what’s missing, in most cases, is opportunity.
In an ever-growing digital age, one might ponder how the rise of online chess has affected Imad’s business. Imad looks at this new change as a double-edged sword. On the negative side, limiting interactions and losing the in-person aspect have ruined parts of the game. On the positive side, online chess has granted access to many people that wouldn’t be able to play chess because they either don’t have someone to play with, they can’t afford it, or they don’t know where to start. For those that prefer in-person and don’t have someone to play with, Imad can connect them to a player in his store where they play by speaking moves over the phone.
Above all, Imad believes that “if you are not educated, I have to educate you. If I can benefit you with one letter, one word, one sentence, I have done my job. You have to benefit the world.” He helps kids learn chess by offering them books, materials, and chess time for free. Even the game’s motto, Gens una sumus, Latin for “we are one people,” aligns with Imad’s philosophies about the importance of unity. And when a 6th-century inanimate game agrees with you, people should listen to you.
The Dutch Report 