The better Lee

The town newspaper ran another front-page feature article about him, the second one in as many years. There was a big photo of him smiling and holding up a golden trophy in the shape of a horse’s head. The headline: “Local boy genius crowned regional chess champion”. And the first sentence: “Waterford’s very own boy genius, Lee Thompson, 16, has won the prestigious tri-state chess…”

But when I earned my first professional dan rating just a few days earlier, I had to settle for a ten-word note on the St Acutis school bulletin board — “Lee Hyun-woo was awarded a major go title, say congrats!” — which was now partially covered by a pinup of the newspaper article. Literally in its shadow. Even though my title was actually earned against adults and pro players, and even though go is way more complicated than chess. It requires a spark of creativity and imagination, whereas chess is all calculation and memorization. There’s a reason AI mastered chess so much faster than go.

I hate that we share a name. I hate that everyone knows his story about being named after some loser Confederate civil war general, and nobody that knows that for me Lee is actually a surname, and it’s the second most common name in Korea.

We go back to visit Seoul every year. It’s where both my parents are from, but I was born here in the US. There, people understand. They appreciate the beauty of the game and they recognize my natural talent. They know I’ve got something really special. I never got in the paper there either, but that makes sense because I’m not really Korean. I mean, my classmates back home all think of me as “the Korean kid”, because they only see my monolid eyes; but my family in Korea all think of me as “the American kid”, because I speak with an accent and listen to hip-hop instead of K-pop.

As usual, we made the trip to South Korea during my summer vacation. This year, my cousins started calling me “oekuk-saram”, a deliberate mispronunciation of the word for “foreigner” that makes it blindingly clear I don’t belong here, either.

Of course, while we were there I went to a local dojo to play some games, since I don’t often get the chance to play live, over-the-board go (they call it “baduk” in Korea) instead of online games. The dojo is huge, with dozens of boards running games every night for all skill levels. Every year, more and more people crowd around my board to watch me play, and this year was no exception. They debated whether I would one day win one or more the major cups. Most of them thought I would. Here, at least, I get to have a few brief days of celebrity.

And then we flew back home, and school started again, and do you know what’s waiting for me? Lee is sitting in the cafeteria holding hands with Betse Demois, who I have had a crush on since the second grade. Who I’d asked out before I left, and who said she liked me but she was already seeing someone, and maybe someday we could get together if this didn’t work out. Like I’m a backup option. He even had the gall to wave at me and smile, like we’re old friends or something.

I think that was the moment I decided I had to show him up. I had to beat him at his own game, since I really doubted he would ever play mine. I couldn’t stand being a second-rate strategy star anymore, not anymore, not when I knew I could be so much better than him. I was tired of being that Korean kid who played a strange game nobody cares about. So I joined the chess club.

I have to admit, it was nice being part of a dojo, even if they didn’t call it that. There’s a camaraderie among competitors that’s just not the same with online games or at the occasional tournament. When I play chess here, I’m not Korean or American or anything at all — I’m just another black king or white king, and we’re all made of plastic or wood.

I assumed that I would quickly come to dominate the club. Go is a game of sweeping strategy, where you fight several battles at once, always with an eye for a larger plan. You try to stake out your own plot of safe territory by building two eyes, thereby making it unassailable, someplace they can’t get to you. It is a game of simple rules: take turns placing stones, surround opposing stones to capture them, and whoever controls more territory at the end wins. These simple rules create endless complexity.

I already knew some basic chess before joining the club. It’s a game that’s unnecessarily complex. Each piece moves in different ways, and some moves are only possible under certain specific conditions or in special circumstances. In chess, these complex rules are what create complex situations, which means it’s forever limited by its own ruleset.

Chess is a game for merchants. You don’t build or create anything, like in go, but instead you begin with a wealth of pieces already on the board and you spend that fortune to hurt your opponent. Nothing is every truly safe and everything — except the king himself — is for sale. It is a game based on making clever trades: a knight for a bishop, or a pawn for a better position from which to make future trades, or a queen for two rooks, knowing that later a pawn might rise up to become a new queen to replace her. You have to learn to recognize scam deals that look too good to be true, because they’re usually a trap. It is a game of small-time tactics, a game of goading your opponent into making stupid mistakes.

All this is to say that it should have been easy to rise to the top of the club, to prove myself smarter than the other Lee. And I did rise quickly through the ranks of our little school club. I learned the key principles and studied famous games. I spent hours crouched over the small board learning various lines. I began to see beauty in the way different pieces can support each other to control squares.

I surpassed the more casual players, who you didn’t have to force into making a blunder, since they would just give you one for free. For that matter, I learned the term “blunder”, as well as “fork” and “pin” and “x-ray” and “open file”, and I learned to use them all to my advantage.

I played Lee dozens of times, then hundreds. I took every chance I had to play him. I expected that I would lose, at first. He did, after all, have a head start of more than a decade. But by now, I was firmly the second best at the club, and I didn’t expect that I would keep losing. All I cared about was beating him.

At least when I was fully focused on go, we played in different arenas. For nearly a year I spent most of my time on chess, and the only result of all that time has been that instead of being “the other Lee” I was now “the second Lee”. The kids in the club even started calling me “Lee 2”, mushed together so it sounded like “Leetoo”. He wasn’t Lee 1 (or “Leewon”), of course, he got to keep our joint name. He was just Lee. This was so much worse than it had been before.

I never won more than a handful of games against him, probably less than twenty percent even by the end of my year-long crash-course. Nothing seemed to work against him, and he was always a half a step ahead of me. The most frustrating thing is I would come so close to winning. He wasn’t any smarter or more naturally talented than me — I think even he would agree with that — but he had seen so many more positions over the years that he had a kind of second sense for when there was a trap coming his way or a brilliant move of his own to make. He always seemed to know when he needed to slow down and spend the time on his clock to find just the right play.

The tri-state championships were coming up again, and I would have to go. Half the kids in our club were going, so the second best couldn’t skip out. So I was faced with two terrible choices:

One, I go, and I play and I do pretty well but I lose to Lee in the finals, and the newspaper runs another feature about “The two Lees, student and master”, or “The good Lee and the even better Lee”, or something equally unintentionally insulting.

Two, I refuse to go to the tournament, and I become the cowardly Lee. The weak Lee. Not even the Lee who tried and failed, but the Lee who tried and ran away.

Either way, after all the times I’d told the guys at the club that go is harder than chess, I’d be the Lee who proved it’s not.

But there’s a third option, of course. I could even out the playing field, make up for his years of experience so that it’s truly a test of intelligence and natural calculation ability, rather than just a matter of who started playing first. I could use technology to give myself the exact same advantages he has. To make it fair.

The games were all livestreamed of the competition website. I could write a simple script that picked up the moves from the livestream and fed them into the chess.com analysis tool or some other AI platform. I wouldn’t need it to feed me the best moves, and that wasn’t the point of this anyway. The script would just identify moments where the evaluation bar had the potential to swing dramatically, and it would send me a little signal. Something not too obvious, maybe a little nudge on the soles of my shoes. The right shoe if I had a strong upcoming move; the left shoe if my opponent did.

I would still have to find the move myself, of course. That’s why this wasn’t really cheating. All the script did was cancel out the other Lee’s ability to identify these moments through experience. All it did was turn the game back into a pure clash of calculation.

It was shockingly easy to write the code and build small devices that fit into each shoe.

On the day of the tournament, I was feeling good. The first few games went quickly. I could feel the buzzing in my shoes, but I hardly needed it. These early matches were just to establish my credentials, to get me to the final rounds, where I’d have to face the real players.

Our results from these preliminary round-robins determined our seed for the final eight. We were placed in a direct elimination bracket that would take place over the course of two days, facing two opponents on each day. Each match was first to win two out of three games, and we each had 40 minutes on our clocks. The top three seeds carried over from last year’s medalists, everyone else, me included, had to earn our spot. I ended up seeded fourth.

This is where the matches got really tough. My first opponent played brilliantly, controlling the board and projecting power in a way that almost reminded me of go. But that style also made it my game, so I already knew how to counter him. I advanced to the round of four, the semi-finals.

Next was another player I’d never met, last year’s runner-up, which meant that this was the person Lee had beaten to win. It turns out Lee isn’t the only experienced player in our region — if it hadn’t been for the shoes, I don’t think I could have won. In our first game, I spent more than 10 minutes looking for the sacrificial move that would put me in a winning position, the move I knew was there thanks to my trick. In the second game, it took 13 minutes. But I found it.

Lee sat next to me in the cafeteria during the mid-day break, ahead of us facing each other in the finals. He didn’t ask if the seat was free or if I minded him taking it. It was my first major tournament, and I had no idea what the etiquette was, so I didn’t stop him.

“I watched all your games, you’re having a hell of a weekend,” he said.

“I guess so.”

“You’re like a different player altogether,” he said.

When I didn’t reply, he just sat there looking at me, not even eating. Calculating.

I couldn’t stand it anymore. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He nodded to himself as if something was confirmed in his head, and he finally took a bite of his lunch before responding.

“It means that when we play in the club, when you beat me, it’s all about position and attrition. You grind us down, slowly tightening things up until we have no good moves and only bad options.”

He took another few bites. I just sat there, saying nothing.

“But this weekend is different. You’re taking big risks now, making big trades, playing tight for an hour and then blowing up the whole game with a single move that looks crazy at first. It’s not really your style.”

My shoes felt too tight all of a sudden. I pushed my plate back. I wasn’t hungry anymore and the thought of eating turned my stomach. I still couldn’t bring myself to say anything.

“So how are you doing it?” he asked.

“Doing what?”

“Cheating,” he said, casually, as if talking about the weight of the chess pieces or the ticking of the table clocks.

I stared, dumbstruck, probably open-mouthed. He just kept eating, until he nearly finished his whole meal. I was paralyzed. I didn’t even care about chess, not really, all I could think about was the eternal shadow this would cast over my go career when it came out.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “I get it, I do. I know this whole thing is hard for you, Leetoo.”

It struck me then that this was the first time he had ever called me that, and I was oddly grateful, both that he had never used it before and that he had used it now.

“I’m not going to tell anyone. You actually are a solid chess player, and I don’t want to mess up what you’ve got going on with go either. I’m just saying, whatever system you’ve worked out, don’t use it on me. For that matter, don’t use it again on anyone else. You’re too good for that.”

With one last meaningful look, he stood up and walked away, leaving behind a few scraps of food on the table. He returned to his seat next to Betsy Demois, who had come to watch the match. Who knows what he told her.

I still had an hour until our first game. I used it to go downtown and buy a new pair of shoes.

I came in second place in the first and only major chess tournament I would ever play. There was no newspaper feature that year, just a three-paragraph blurb in the sports section titled “Two Lees in a pod”. But I wish they had written a big one for the front page, because I think he was the better Lee, after all.