One Place to Dunk on NBA Star: A New York City Chess Board

Max Haskell was on his regular grocery run in New York's East Village on Saturday when he pulled out his phone and saw a tweet that stopped him in his tracks.

NBA superstar Victor Wembanyama had posted out of the blue that he was just a few blocks away. Not only that, but the 7-foot-3 reigning Rookie of the Year was offering to take on allcomers, one-on-one, in Washington Square Park.

The twist was that they wouldn't be playing basketball.

"Who wants to meet me at the SW corner of Washington Square Park to play chess?" Wembanyama posted shortly after 9:30 a.m. "I'm there." Haskell, a 25-year-old local who has lived in Russia and the U.K., knew exactly what he had to do.

He abandoned his basket of groceries, on a Citi Bike, and tore across the Village and through the rain to play the most unexpected chess match of his life checkmate When he got there, Wembanyama wasn't hard to spot-he was the extraterrestrial ballplayer wearing a gray hoodie and size-20.5 sneakers.

Soon, Haskell found himself sitting on a damp bench and closing in on against this beanpole Frenchman. The chess boards of Washington Square Park, it turns out, are the only place in the world where a 6-foot-1 regular Joe can dunk on Victor Wembanyama.

"The man's extremely humble," said Haskell, a Washington Wizards fan who boasts a strong online rating above 2100 for rapid chess. "Toward the end of the game, a lot of people would have thrown the towel in. The guy stuck all the way through." For anyone who had been paying attention to Wembanyama's social media, the hints that he was in the market for a game had been around since Friday night. Shortly after he and his San Antonio Spurs teammates defeated the Nets in Brooklyn, Wembanyama posted, "What are the best spots to play chess in NYC??" The answers came flooding in with one clear winner.

Washington Square Park has been home to chess lovers, amateurs, and hustlers for more than half a century. Park lore has it that even Bobby Fischer, the last American world champion, used to drop in for games incognito. Then again, Fischer could easily get away with it-he wasn't a comically tall former No. 1 pick in the NBA draft.

Naturally, Wembanyama drew a little more attention.

After cooking up this plan overnight, he arrived at the park in a black truck with personal security, a Spurs staffer and a few family members. He put a crisp white towel down on a bench to soak up the raindrops and began a game against his brother. Over the next hour, with water pooling on the board, Wembanyama posted one victory and two losses.

"I was just feeling like it," Wembanyama said afterward.

"That's enough of a reason." And yet, the impromptu appearance of an NBA star at a neighborhood chess hangout may have only been the second strangest thing to happen to the ancient game in lower Manhattan in recent days. Not 24 hours earlier, the world's greatest player, Magnus Carlsen, was five subway stops away picking a fight with chess's world governing body over his choice of pants.

Carlsen had shown up to the World Rapid Chess Championships wearing jeans, which constituted a violation of the dress code and came with a $200 fine. When an arbiter informed of this, with a reminder that he had agreed to the rules, the multiple world champion dug in his heels. Officials didn't assign him a match in the following round and Carlsen responded by quitting the tournament altogether.

The 20-year-old Wembanyama, who wore baggy gray sweatpants, was subject to no such rules. Instead, he was adding his name to the growing legion of professional athletes who publicly profess their love of chess. Stars from basketball to the NFL to Olympic speed climbing have loudly trumpeted the virtues of a game that they believe helps them recognize patterns and make strategic decisions under duress.

Four-time NBA champion Klay Thompson is known to make his rookie teammates carry magnetic boards so he can fire up a game at a moment's notice. The Dallas Mavericks' Luka Doncic has even been made into an AI bot that users could play against on Chess.com. Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow, meanwhile, is an avid chess player and an avid chess trash-talker whose Chess.com account has been muted more than once.

As for Wembanyama, the game is as useful for brain training as it is for killing time on a road trip between Brooklyn and Minnesota. It can also provide an unusually humbling experience to an athlete whose exceptional size and talent have helped him excel since the first time he picked up a basketball.

Wembanyama might lead the NBA in blocks, but the Washington Square chess boards are the rare arena where his defense is a little lacking.