Departments
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Week of 14 November 1997 |
Vol. I, No. 12 |
Feature
Article
Chairwoman of the board
by Eric McHenry
Esther Epstein doesn't remember learning to play chess.
The systems administrator at the BioMolecular Engineering Research Center, who in September became the U.S. women's chess champion, says she relies on family lore for details from that early part of her childhood.
"To believe my father," she says, "I was a fanatic. I was ready to play all the time."
Her limited recollections do seem to bear out her father's. Epstein remembers winning the all-family tournament for the first time -- at the age of six. It was then, she says, that she had the first inklings of her potential.
"My father and my older brother kept telling me, 'Oh, you're so excellent,' " she says. "I was so young -- I thought I was almost the world champion."
Such aspirations weren't particularly unrealistic. At 10, Epstein won the women's city championship in Gorky, her hometown in what was then the Soviet Union. By winning a major international tournament held in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), she bypassed the rank of National Master and ascended directly to Women's International Master at the age of 18. She supported herself as a professional chess player in Russia for several years before immigrating to the United States with her husband, Alexander Ivanov, in 1988. Ivanov, who has earned the ultimate rank of Grand Master, plays chess for a living and shares with his wife the distinction of having won a U.S. national championship.
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At the top of her game:
Esther Epstein is the 1997 U.S. women's chess
champion. Photo by Fred
Sway
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"We had a draw, because we were friends," Epstein recalls. "So we didn't struggle against each other."
This year Epstein won the championship's $4,000 purse outright in a round-robin tournament that brought the 10 highest ranked female chess players to Chandler, Ariz., for the week of August 23 to September 1. She finished the tournament without a loss, having bested six of her opponents and played the other three to a draw.
The victory was particularly impressive in that Epstein was, by her standards, out of practice. With a full-time job and a family of four, she has little time for tournaments other than the U.S. Women's Championship and the biennial chess Olympiad.
"Winning this tournament was a surprise for me," she says, "because I hadn't had any practice for about a year -- since the last Olympiad." Having taken time away from competition might actually have benefited her performance, Epstein says, because she came to the tournament with fresh enthusiasm for the game.
Epstein's path to victory was smoothed by a 13-year-old prodigy named Irina Krush, who upset defending champion Anjelina Belakovskaia early in the tournament. Belakovskaia ultimately battled back to finish second, but the damage to her cumulative score had been done.
For Epstein, the tournament's definitive moment was her victory over two-time U.S.S.R. champion Anna Gulko, who had prevailed or played Epstein to a draw in all of their previous encounters.
"At that point, I believed I could become the champion," she says.
Although the matches in which she competes have imposed time restrictions, Epstein says the clock is rarely a concern for her. She likes things to proceed quickly and doesn't spend a lot of time pondering each move.
One move, however, took her seven years to make. Personal and political impediments made it very difficult for Epstein, Ivanov, and their son Alex (ENG'99) to immigrate to the United States. For some time, a law enabled Ivanov's parents to deny them permission to leave. Additionally, Epstein's brother was imprisoned for many years as a political dissident. One consequence was intense governmental scrutiny of Epstein's actions; she might well be a Grand Master today, she observes, if she had been permitted to compete in tournaments outside of the Soviet Union.
"My problem was that I couldn't go abroad to play in international tournaments," she says, "because they knew we wanted to emigrate. I played inside the Soviet Union, but not in so many international tournaments at the Grand Master level."
Epstein and her family moved to Lithuania in 1981 in hopes of more easily obtaining visas, but it wasn't until 1988 that they were able to immigrate.
The subsequent liberalization of immigration policies in the former Soviet Union has allowed an influx of great chess players into the United States. A de-cided majority of the top U.S. competitors come from erst-while Communist bloc countries. Epstein says her husband, whom she met at a chess tournament when both were in their early teens, faces stiffer professional competition each year.
As a systems administrator at BU, she is responsible for the overall operation of computing services that support research in the biological sciences. Epstein holds a master's degree in applied mathematics from Gorky University.
These biographical details suggest a keen understanding of probability, permutation, and sequence -- useful resources for a chess virtuoso. When she was 10 years old, Epstein says, she could remember every move from every game she'd played in her life.
"Can you imagine?" she exclaims.
But Epstein is hesitant to ac-knowledge a connection between her skill with mathematics and her flair for chess strategy.
"If you look at the Grand Masters," she says, "their expertise is in a lot of different fields. It might be mathematics, it might be music. Robert [Bobby] Fischer was a genius at chess, but he didn't do anything else.
"I can't explain it," she says. "I think it's a special gift some people have."