TFN Talks with Irina Krush
Photos courtesy of Saint Louis Chess Club
TFN Talks had the honor of sitting down with American chess Grandmaster Irina Krush to talk about her life, victories and challenges, and her meteoric rise to the top of one of the most complex and respected games in the world. Krush is an eight-time U.S. women's chess champion and the only current active female American Grandmaster.
Irina do you remember when you were first introduced to chess and what sparked your passion to pursue the game further than just an occasional sit-down with friends?
My dad was a very good level amateur player, and he taught me to play when I was around five years old, around the time that we emigrated to the US from the Soviet Union. I played my first tournament (with adults) at the Manhattan Chess Club when I was six and represented the US in a world youth championship (in Poland) when I was seven. So chess was never just a “hobby” or something I did with friends. It was a regular part of my life since I was five; my dad saw that I had aptitude for it and just kept teaching me. He taught me until I was nine, when he found a more professional coach for me.
At age 14 you became the youngest U.S. women’s champion and at the age of 29 you earned the Grandmaster status from FIDE, the International Chess Federation. Along your journey in chess and your many many wins, did you feel that you were born with a natural gift for the game or was it something that was achieved with meticulous learning and labor, or a little bit of both? What did it feel like to be the youngest women’s champion in the game?
I think it's a bit of both, the “natural gift” but certainly cultivated through lots and lots of study and practice. I've seen some pictures of myself when I was really little, like 3-4 years old, and I'm surprised by how serious I looked, like I had a chess player's gaze before I learned chess. But the biggest part of me getting good was my dad seeing my potential and pushing me to develop it through study, tournaments, coaching, etc from a young age. When I was in middle school, he went to my school and spoke to the principal about allowing me to have more flexible attendance so I could study chess at home. And he did the same for high school. It wasn't an easy sell; it was an unusual allowance to make for a public school. Because of this “hybrid” schooling, I saved a lot of time that I could devote to chess. I won the US Women's Championship for the first time just a month or so after I began my freshman year in high school. It was a surprise then, because I won with such a big score, almost doubling the points I'd had in the previous championship. It was definitely a confidence booster and clarified what I'd be doing for the next few years of my life :)
Can you describe to someone who is unfamiliar with chess or has only played casually what playing the game feels like for you? What goes through your mind at any given tournament?
The beauty of chess is how it absorbs your mind, demands all your attention...because every move is a problem to be solved. Your mind essentially works this way: if I do this, he will do that, I will answer with this, then he will play that...and you do that for as long as it takes to understand: is this a desirable path to go down? Another way to put it is, chess is a search for the truth.
Even when it's not your turn, you're thinking about what your opponent may do. And you have to be 100% alert, because one mistake can spoil the whole game, and there's no worse feeling than playing a great game and ruining it with one careless move.
Do chess players at your level study their opponents moves and past tournaments prior to the game? How much psychology is involved in predicting how your opponent is going to play?
Yes, chess players at my level study their opponent's past games to predict which opening is likely to appear, to get a sense of their style, what kind of positions they feel most comfortable in, strengths/weaknesses in their play. You can form a “psychological” portrait of a chess player like that. Forming a portrait of the opponent is a very important skill for a chess player to have (or for their coach :) ). If you play someone over many years, you can factor in other things, ie, their personality, motivation level, risk tolerance, etc.
Can you talk a bit about the different moves available in a chess game? Why do they have names and how is it possible for one to remember all of them? Is it something that just naturally happens as you progress or is it something that you meticulously have to study?
Yes, there's lots of “names” in chess. We have names for openings- “Queen's Gambit”, “King's Gambit”, “Italian Game”, “Sicilian Defense” as a few examples- and names for particular tactics- “pins”, “forks”, “discovered attacks”- as well as endgame strategies like “Philidor's Defense”. This is just how chess players talk about chess; it's a way of communicating information. If I want to tell you about the opening that occurred in my game, I could tell you it was a Sicilian Najdorf variation and you'd immediately know what set of moves I am talking about. Little children can learn all these names, so it's not as hard as it looks :) As you study chess, it all just settles in your mind, there's no special memorization required.
All these random-sounding names in chess are actually quite cool; they reveal the history of the game. A lot of openings are named after chess players (some famous, some less so) that invented them, or played them a lot and thereby contributed to their popularization. Francois-Andre Philidor was the best player of the eighteenth century and discovered a lot of ideas that are foundational to chess and still valid today. So when we use “Philidor's Defense” to defend in a rook endgame, we're using an idea he found in the 1700's! Isn't that cool? :) Philidor is also responsible for one of the most famous quotes about the game of chess: “pawns are the soul of chess.” Simple phrase, but it was completely revolutionary at the time.
Have you seen the hit Netflix series ‘The Queen’s Gambit’? And if you have, what was your reaction to how the characters and the game was portrayed? As I’ve come to observe there is a lot of controversy surrounding the show.
I have seen it, and I enjoyed it. It accurately conveyed the spirit of chess competition, the rivalries and comraderie. What stood out to me in a pleasant way was how comfortable Beth was in this male world, how she was accepted and respected and there wasn't a lot of drama about her being a woman. Sure, the high school boys were surprised she wanted to play in the “open” section at her first tournament, but they weren't hostile or insulting. The game of chess came out looking well: as a field where your skill is the determining factor, as a game accessible to everyone. In the final scene, Beth gets out of her taxi to play with local Soviet chess players in the park. A Queen playing with pawns, but the chess board equalizes everything :)
As a woman, what has been your experience, rising to the top in the world of chess - a world predominantly dominated by men?
I had a very good experience as a little girl and as a woman in the chess world. From a young age, I spent a lot of time at chess tournaments, not only with boys of my age, but more often adult men, and I always felt at home in this world. The thing is, chess is an objective game with an objective measure of skill: rating. And chess players are an objective bunch who respect skill. If you can play good moves, no one cares whether you're a boy or a girl. Of course, this is just my experience, growing up in 1990's New York City. But probably because of such a positive experience in this male-dominated world, it's why I love chess and chess players so much.
What have been some of the challenges you have had to overcome in your professional career?
Only my own laziness. If I'd worked harder, I would have achieved more :)
Outside of chess, what are your hobbies? What do you enjoy doing in your free time?
When I was little, I got the nickname “bookworm”...so reading has always been an enjoyable thing for me, especially history. Watching a movie. Traveling somewhere, taking pictures. I always loved capturing a new place in photos, like I was making my own connection with it in that way. I'm learning a new language now, that's really fun, my teacher is wonderful. But in my free time, I still enjoy relaxing with chess, like watching Magnus Carlsen's “banter blitzes” where he talks about his games as he's playing. What can be more fun than watching the best player in the world talk about his games?
What advice would you give someone who dreams of playing chess professionally?
Start young, put in all the hours while you're young.
In May 2020 The New York Times reported that you had contracted Covid-19. I can sympathize with this firsthand, as I had contracted it too. What was your experience like and did you at any point fear that you could lose your life? Did it cause any sort of reflection?
Covid was rough :) After a few days of feeling mildly unwell, I realized I could not breathe normally. I had no fever, no cough, no other symptoms. I was just out of breath. I went to the urgent care clinic and they didn't know what was wrong with me; they sent me to the ER to check for blood clots (covid wasn't suspected as I didn't have the usual symptoms; it was mid- March). They did a ct-scan of my chest and told me it was “classic covid”: double pneumonia in the lungs. After being released from the hospital, I went back to the ER three more times over the next week, that's how hard it was to breathe. I never experienced anything remotely like that in my life, I couldn't even sleep laying down. It felt like a truck had run over my chest; it was just so heavy and so exhausted from trying to get those breaths in. It was a really scary and uncertain time, not knowing if it was going to get even worse than it already was. Despite all this, my oxygen level remained high and my lung x-ray was clear within two weeks. But the inflammation left a toll - almost a year later, my chest and breathing are nothing like they were pre-covid. On the one hand, I am completely functional, able to live and work productively, but I always, always, feel it in my chest, I can never breathe effortlessly like I did before. You just adjust to a new normal- a heavy, tight, sore chest and extra effort required to draw in a breath. I feel lucky that the damage was limited to that, and hopefully it will eventually get better, or some treatment will be discovered, as many people are dealing with the same thing.
During your recovery you also managed to tie first place in a Isolated Queens II, an online women’s tournament and helped the United States to a runner up finish in the first Online Nations Cup, a team event involving most of the top players in the world. Was your passion for the game something that proved to be a distraction and a tool to fight back, to keep going?
Yes, chess helped me, it gave me happy moments, something else to focus on. It reminded me of who I am besides just the person suffering from Covid :) When I played the Online Nations Cup in May, it was a reprieve, since I could actually do some work without talking (I do a lot of teaching and in those early months it was so hard to talk without running out of breath; one lesson and I would feel the effects of it for the whole day).
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