Fifty thousand dollars richer from last week’s win, but not much more famous, Caruana considered this alternate universe, which may still come to pass a few years hence. Caruana recently bought a house in St. Louis. “I like to invest in real estate,” he said. (He also owns homes in Florida.) “I’m not really looking for flashy cars.” But the location was key: while New York, and Manhattan, in particular, has long been America’s foremost incubator of chess players, it has been eclipsed in the past few years by the Midwestern city best known for its professional baseball team, its tornadoes, and its barbecue. “Nobody had any idea St. Louis could become a chess hub,” Caruana told me. Seirawan, who retired as an active tournament grand master in 2003, agreed. “If you had said back then, ‘Since your retirement, the center of chess has moved to the Midwest,’ I’d go, ‘Really? Chicago?’ ”
The unlikely shift can be attributed almost entirely to the efforts of a deep-pocketed retired financial executive named Rex Sinquefield, best known, previously, for helping create the first S. & P. index funds, in 1973, and for leading what Bloomberg Businessweek has called “a crusade against the income tax.” Raised in a St. Louis orphanage, Sinquefield didn’t learn to play chess until the ancient age of thirteen, when his uncle Fred taught him. “The second time we played,” he told me, “I beat him. I always felt a little guilty.” He went on to play in high school and college, still in St. Louis. These days, he plays some twenty online games at a given time, he says, describing himself as a “decent club player” with “a healthy addiction.” After moving back to Missouri, more than a decade ago, he decided to start a chess club. He believes that the game represents “everything valued by Western civilization, and maybe Eastern civilization: intelligence, judgment, study, hard work, intuition, calmness under pressure—all of that is on the line with chess.”
The amount of money that Sinquefield has since invested in Missouri chess is difficult to calculate, but estimates are well into the tens of millions. Sinquefield describes it simply as “a lot.” “The family joke,” his wife, Jeanne Sinquefield, told me, “was I let Rex do chess because ‘How expensive could it be?’ ” She, incidentally, has since helped persuade the Boy Scouts of America to create a chess merit badge, which more than a hundred thousand scouts have earned.
Thanks to Sinquefield’s efforts, there is now a “chess campus” in the St. Louis suburb of Forest Park. There, a visitor will find the largest chess piece in the world (a fourteen-foot-and-seven-inch-tall queen), sitting outside the World Chess Hall of Fame, which moved to St. Louis in 2011, three years after the opening of the six-thousand-square-foot Chess Club and Scholastic Center of St. Louis, which has more members than New York’s famed Marshall Chess Club. (The St. Louis club works with more than a hundred Missouri schools, mostly in the St. Louis area.) For eight years running, the U.S. Chess Championship has been held at the club, as has the Sinquefield Cup, an international tournament whose online broadcast had 1.5 million viewers last year. Congress declared St. Louis the nation’s “chess capital” in 2013. Even the St. Louis Cardinals had a chessboard installed in their locker room, just last week: the team’s manager, Mike Matheny, loves the game, and his players are learning.
“Imagine that this city would become the most noticeable spot, chess spot, on the world map,” Garry Kasparov, arguably the greatest chess player ever, alongside Fischer, told the crowd gathered at the U.S. Championship award ceremony. Kasparov declared that “now, here in St. Louis, we are facing the renaissance of the great game of chess.
