When U.S. Chess League Commissioner Greg Shahade came up with the idea for a national chess league, the first person he called\u00c2\u00a0was his sister. The second was John Donaldson.<\/p>\n
Donaldson, an International Master who now\u00c2\u00a0resides in the San Francisco area,\u00c2\u00a0was an old friend of the Shahade family. He\u00c2\u00a0used to go bicycling with Greg Shahade’s father, Michael, and he had known\u00c2\u00a0both Greg and Jen Shahade when they were still kids.\u00c2\u00a0But there was another reason that\u00c2\u00a0Greg made the right call. Donaldson is exactly the kind of person you need to get a fledgling league off the ground — a person who has the right contacts and who is completely reliable. When he promises you that he will organize a team, you can count on it.<\/p>\n
That’s why, win or lose, the San Francisco Mechanics will always have one distinction no other team can take from them: they were the first team to join the U.S. Chess League, and Donaldson was the first coach.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
To make a career in chess in this country, you have to be lucky and you have to be good. John Donaldson has been both. He grew up in Washington, somewhat in the shadow of Yasser Seirawan. That had one advantage:\u00c2\u00a0Donaldson learned his limitations at an early age. “After losing my twentieth game in a row to Seirawan, I realized that I was never going to be the world champion,” Donaldson says.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, he has had a career that virtually anybody else could envy. After starting with a rating of 1243 in 1972, he reached master level in five years and achieved the International Master title by 1983. He has two grandmaster norms to his credit, and hasn’t given up on getting a third.<\/p>\n
In case you haven’t noticed, it’s not very common for 50-year-old chess players to earn the GM title. Jesse Kraai, my compatriot at ChessLecture, earned the title this year, and at age 34 he is considered a late bloomer. So when Donaldson achieves his goal, it will be quite a story.\u00c2\u00a0I’d compare\u00c2\u00a0him to the\u00c2\u00a035-year-old baseball player <\/a>who made it into the big leagues a few years ago\u00c2\u00a0as the oldest rookie in three decades.\u00c2\u00a0His story\u00c2\u00a0got turned into a book and\u00c2\u00a0a movie<\/a>. Do you think we can get Dennis Quaid to play the movie version of John Donaldson?<\/p>\n If\u00c2\u00a0anyone can make grandmaster at his age, it’s Donaldson. He has finished writing\u00c2\u00a0two books, and is clearing his schedule for a push towards grandmaster. “I’m buying my freedom!” he says.<\/p>\n Even without a GM title, Donaldson has made a steady living off of chess for two decades. I met him for the first time when he moved to North Carolina in 1987 to teach chess in the Charlotte schools. That was just a one-year gig, but it was followed by ten years working for Inside Chess<\/em> magazine, followed by his current job as chess director at the Mechanics Institute in San Francisco.<\/p>\n The Mechanics is a unique place. It’s primarily a private library, which survives on memberships. It has housed a chess club since 1854, which makes it the oldest chess club west of the Mississippi. You can see pictures in the halls of the former world champions who have visited the club — including Boris Spassky, who\u00c2\u00a0came just two years ago. The\u00c2\u00a0 building practically oozes tradition.<\/p>\n But in the bigger picture, you have to wonder about the long-term viability of the Mechanics\u00c2\u00a0Institute, and likewise the club that depends on it. Donaldson says that the library has lost\u00c2\u00a0a thousand\u00c2\u00a0members in the past few years. “People check out fewer books than they used to,” he says. The chess club too, even though it is a historic treasure, looks just a bit too historic. The chess tables date from the 1920s. Some of the newspaper clippings on the walls are old and yellowing. The whole place could really profit from a make-over. But where would the money ever come from?<\/p>\n Donaldson feels that the cultural malaise that is hurting the library is affecting chess, too. “Americans have a lot of things competing for their interest. The pace of life is faster, and people work harder than they did 15 or 20 years ago. The result is that the quality of life has diminished.” Some people think that the solution is to pump more money and more glitz into chess, but Donaldson doesn’t agree. “Maybe it’s better to\u00c2\u00a0concentrate on doing\u00c2\u00a0what we do well,” he says.<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n Which brings us back to the U.S. Chess League, one of the things that is unquestionably being done well in American chess at the moment. The Mechanics were once again in the thick of the playoff picture this year, as they have been for all three seasons. But this season was more of a struggle for them.<\/p>\n According to Donaldson, the Mechanics really jelled in the middle of their first season. “When Vinay [Bhat] joined us, everything changed,” Donaldson says. The team\u00c2\u00a0went into the playoffs that year\u00c2\u00a0on a roll, but suffered a painful 2.5-1.5 loss to the Miami Sharks. That was the last time they would lose for a year and a half!<\/p>\n In the second year of the U.S. Chess League, the Mechanics swept through undefeated, and won the playoffs with a stirring overtime victory over New York. There were plenty of heroes. Bhat, of course, was one of them,\u00c2\u00a0and so was\u00c2\u00a0Sam Shankland, who performed well on fourth board. “The recipe for victory is an underrated fourth board,” Donaldson says. Josh Friedel, who came through against Pascal Charbonneau in the final playoff game, was like the closer (in baseball) who comes in and gets the final outs to win the World Series. Amazingly, the Mechanics won the title even without their star player. “Everyone remembers how close that match was, but they forget that Vinay was not even playing!” says Donaldson.<\/p>\n This season, as defending champions, the Mechanics played a tougher schedule, including brutal matches against Boston and New York in the Eastern Division. Both David Pruess and Josh Friedel struggled in the early season, and for a while the only bright spot was Vinay Bhat, who continued his undefeated ways until the last week of the year. Bhat’s astounding victory over Hikaru Nakamura<\/a>, which\u00c2\u00a0gave the team a come-from-behind draw in\u00c2\u00a0its match with the New York Knights, must\u00c2\u00a0rank on the short list of highlights for the entire league this year.<\/p>\n Going into the playoffs, the Mechanics seemed to be in good form. But there they ran into their old nemesis, the Miami Sharks, who had just barely sneaked into the playoffs with a late-season surge of their own. Needing only a 2-2 tie to advance to the division finals, the Mechanics fell short, by a 1.5-2.5 score.<\/p>\n Donaldson doesn’t make any excuses for the defeat. “I was surprised but not shocked,” he says. “Their record was 5-5, but they had only had a chance to use the lineup they played against us — their strongest lineup — a couple of times.” In addition, Donaldson thinks that the colors favored Miami. “Miami is much better with White on boards 1 and 3,” Donaldson says.<\/p>\n In fact, a number of factors worked against the Mechanics in this match. First, Miami managed to win one game completely through home preparation. In the board three matchup between Marcel Martinez (Miami) and Dmitry Zilberstein (San Francisco), the Sharks had prepared a beautiful winning combination against Zilberstein’s pet opening. The combination started on move 22, and Martinez was still playing moves\u00c2\u00a0from his home analysis at\u00c2\u00a0move 28! An analogy from baseball would be hitting against a pitcher who is unintentionally giving away his pitches.<\/p>\n In retrospect, Donaldson thinks he could have made a better coaching decision. He could have put himself in the lineup, instead of Zilberstein, or he could have advised Zilberstein to play the Alekhine’s Defense (which he used earlier in his career) instead of the theoretically somewhat more suspect … Bc5 variation in the Ruy Lopez. “As Vinay pointed out, the variation that Dmitry played is very good, but there are\u00c2\u00a0four or five\u00c2\u00a0places where he’s vulnerable, because he has to depend on tactical solutions,” Donaldson said. In the end, Zilberstein was hurt by his limited and\u00c2\u00a0risky opening repertoire. But it was difficult to anticipate this — up until this\u00c2\u00a0match, Zilberstein had been one of the team’s more effective players.<\/p>\n Second, two of the Mechanics’ players, Pruess and Friedel, were out of the country. Donaldson didn’t advertise this in advance, but he had known for weeks that Pruess and Friedel would have to miss part of the playoffs in order to play in two tournaments in Europe, where they both hoped to achieve grandmaster norms. In fact, Pruess did earn his second GM norm <\/a>in France. Donaldson was happy to make this sacrifice — earning a grandmaster norm is still more important than winning a match in the U.S. Chess League. (Perhaps U.S. Chess League fans will be sad to hear this news, but it’s just a fact of life.) But it did hurt the team, not because they had to field a weaker lineup (they still had no trouble putting together a 2392-rated team) but because\u00c2\u00a0Friedel and Pruess\u00c2\u00a0were unavailable to help the other players\u00c2\u00a0prepare for the match.<\/p>\n The third and final misfortune that tipped the balance was completely unforeseeable — Vinay Bhat, the Mechanics’ mainstay all year, unexpectedly stumbled against Blas Lugo. “What it came down to was that they were very lucky on board 2,” Donaldson says. “Vinay had a winning position, but he just didn’t win it.”<\/p>\n