How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character (23 page)

In 1960, an English psychologist (and, as it happens, a chess enthusiast) named Peter Cathcart Wason came up with an ingenious experiment to demonstrate our natural tendency to confirm rather than disprove our own ideas. Subjects were told that they would be given a series of three numbers that followed a certain rule known only to the experimenter. Their assignment was to figure out what the rule was, which they could do by offering the experimenter other strings of three numbers and asking him whether or not these new strings met the rule.

The string of numbers the subjects were given was quite simple:

2-4-6.

Try it: What’s your first instinct about the rule governing these numbers? And what’s another string you might test with the experimenter in order to find out if your guess is right?

If you’re like most people, your first instinct is that the rule is “ascending even numbers” or “numbers increasing by two.” And so you guess something like

8-10-12.

And the experimenter says, “Yes! That string of numbers also meets the rule.” And your confidence rises. To confirm your brilliance, you test one more possibility, just as due diligence, something like:

20-22-24.

“Yes!” says the experimenter. Another surge of dopamine. And you proudly make your guess: “The rule is: even numbers, ascending in twos.”

“No!” says the experimenter.

It turns out that the rule is “any ascending numbers.” So 8-10-12
does
fit the rule, it’s true, but so does 1-2-3. Or 4-23-512. The only way to win the game is to guess strings of numbers that would prove your beloved hypothesis
wrong
—and that is something each of us is constitutionally driven to avoid.

You may tell yourself that you’d never fall for such a trick; you’d be more careful. Perhaps, but if so, you’d be in the minority. In Wason’s study, only one in five participants
was able to guess the correct rule. And the reason we’re all so bad at games like this is the tendency toward confirmation bias: It feels much better to find evidence that confirms what you believe to be true than to find evidence that falsifies what you believe to be true. Why go out in search of disappointment?

It turns out that confirmation bias is a big problem for chess players. Building on Wason’s findings, two researchers at the University of Dublin, Michelle Cowley and Ruth Byrne, interviewed two groups of chess players, all members of the Irish Chess Union: one group of experienced novices with ratings around 1500, and one group of experts whose ratings ranged from 2000 to 2500. They presented the players with midgame chess positions and asked them to choose the best next move—and while doing so, to speak into a tape recorder their thought processes: which moves they were considering, what they thought their opponents might do in response to each possible move, how they thought they might respond to each response—exactly the process that every good chess player employs at the board. Cowley and Byrne then used a chess-analysis program
called Fritz to see how accurate each player’s analysis had been.

Unsurprisingly, the expert players analyzed their positions more accurately than the novices. What was surprising was
how
they were better. In a word, they were more pessimistic. When the novices found a move they liked, they tended to fall prey to confirmation bias,
to see only the ways that it could lead to success, ignoring possible pitfalls; the Eeyore-like experts, by contrast, were more likely to see terrible outcomes lurking around every corner. They were able to falsify their hypotheses and thus avoid deadly traps.

When I asked Spiegel about the Dublin study, she said she agreed it was a good idea for a chess player to be a bit pessimistic about the outcome of any particular move. But when it comes to a person’s chess ability as a whole, she said, it was better to be
optimistic.
It’s like public speaking, she explained: if you’re not a bit overconfident when you step up to the microphone, you’re in trouble. Chess is inherently painful, she said. “No matter how good you get,” she told me, “you never stop making stupid, stupid mistakes that you want to kill yourself for.” And so part of getting good at chess is feeling confident that you have within yourself the power to win.

I saw this phenomenon in action on the day that I visited the Marshall Chess Club with Spiegel and her students. In the morning, before Yuri Lapshun lost to James Black, Lapshun played another IS 318 student, Shawn Swindell, a small-framed African American boy in the eighth grade who wore a diamond-stud earring and whose rating at the time was about 1950. When Shawn found out he’d been paired with a player rated more than five hundred points higher than him, he felt doomed. He was assigned the white pieces in the game, which gave him the slight advantage of moving first, and he later told me that his first thought was
What a waste of having white.
James Black, by contrast, entered into his game with Lapshun entirely convinced that he could beat an international master—a belief that might have seemed foolish and brash, but which turned out to be entirely true.

10. Sunday

Each player in Columbus played seven games—two on Friday, three on Saturday, and the final two on Sunday. As of Sunday morning, most of the kids on the IS 318 team hadn’t been outside the convention center since the tournament began. They just circled endlessly: the food court, the ballroom where the games were played, their hotel rooms, and the team room in Union B. No one seemed to miss the fresh air. On the scoreboard, IS 318 was comfortably ahead in K−8 and also ahead, though less comfortably, in K−9. James Black had won his first five games and then drew his sixth on Sunday morning. Going into the final round, the K−8 team seemed to be fairly certain to win the team trophy, and James was one of five players tied for first overall. If he won his last game, he could win the individual trophy, something that no player from IS 318 had ever done at junior high nationals.

The K−9 team had a bad Sunday-morning round. Justus lost, some what shockingly, and among the other four players with a chance of being one of the top scorers on the team, two lost, one drew, and only one won. They were still in first place going into the final round, but their lead was narrowing. For Spiegel, the situation brought back bad memories of the previous year, when her K−9 team had held a half point lead going into the seventh and final round and then seriously choked: each of the six top players on the team lost his last game, and IS 318 tumbled out of first place to finish in third. (“The scale of the chokage,” Spiegel wrote on her blog at the time, was “incredible.”)

This year, the final round was scheduled to begin at 2:00 p.m., and at 1:40, James was sitting across a table from Prilleltensky talking strategy. James was playing on board one, meaning that he would be sitting on the risers at the front of the ballroom, separate from and elevated over the other thousand or so other players. He was playing black against Brian Li, an eighth-grade student from a suburb of Washington, D.C., and he had a feeling that Li was going to play the grand prix attack. His conversation with Prilleltensky was technical, most of it well beyond me—Should James play d5 or e5 on his third move? Which piece should attack d6?—but it became clear before long that what James really wanted from Prilleltensky was a confidence boost: some reassurance that James knew the right opening and, even more, that he knew what he was doing in general.

A couple of minutes before two o’clock, the two of them started walking up to the ballroom. James had on a black hoodie and dark jeans, and he looked anxious. They stepped onto the escalator together.

“James, remember: calm, concentrated, confident. Okay?”

James pulled his hood over his head and looked up at the ceiling. “I’m nervous,” he said in a quiet voice.

“You’re nervous?” said Prilleltensky. He bent down low next to James, a trainer getting his boxer ready for a fight. “You know who’s
really
nervous right now, James? Brian Li. You know why? Because Brian Li, probably about twenty minutes ago, went and looked at the pairings, and he found out he was playing
James Black
on board one in the last round. I can tell you right now, James, there is no pairing in the whole tournament, maybe no pairing he’s had his entire
life,
that would scare him as much as that one. Right?”

James smiled.

Isaac Barayev, James’s teammate, who was a couple of steps ahead of them on the escalator, turned around. “Hey, James,” he said. “If you win, I think you got the—”

“Isaac, Isaac, Isaac!” Prilleltensky cut him off. He didn’t want James thinking about first-place finishes or trophies or results, just chess. He turned back to James. “Just do your thing, James,” he said. “Play slowly, take your time, be confident. You’ve got this, okay?”

And James did have it, it turned out. He and Brian Li played for three hours and ten minutes. At one point, James thought he was going to have to settle for a draw, but then on the twenty-seventh move, Brian made an unusual exchange, trading his queen for a rook and a bishop, and from that point on, James felt in control. Finally, on the forty-eighth move, his knight captured a critical pawn, and Brian, realizing defeat was inevitable, resigned. James ran back to Union B, where he was enveloped in a flurry of hugs and high-fives. He had won the individual championship, and his victory meant the K−8s had clinched the team championship. (The K–9s hung on to win their division as well.) James pulled out his cell phone to call his father.

Spiegel was thrilled by James’s win, but the most emotional moment in the tournament for her came when Danny Feng, a tall, taciturn eighth-grader with long floppy hair, returned to Union B and announced that he had won too, which gave him six victories in the seven-round tournament. It wasn’t so much his result that got to her; it was the way he had played. She had been Danny’s main chess teacher since the beginning of sixth grade, back when he was a true novice barely aware of how the pieces moved. She had almost literally taught him everything he knew.

Danny set up a board to show his win, and it was a grinding victory—he had made a major error in the opening, losing a pawn right away, a beginner’s mistake, but he had slowly fought back until, in the endgame, he had a slight advantage—a rook and a pawn against his opponent’s rook. It was a hard position to win, the kind of endgame that often concludes in a draw. But Danny had pulled it out, move by move, slowly edging his pawn forward to the back rank, where it was promoted to a queen. Usually when Danny analyzed his games with a teacher or coach, he moved his pieces meekly, but this time he was slamming them down, like Shawn and James did, clearly proud of himself. Spiegel couldn’t help herself—it was an endgame she had taught him, and as she watched him execute the last few moves perfectly, she started to cry.

The students watching couldn’t quite believe it. Afterward, in the hotel elevator, Warren Zhang said to Prilleltensky, “Was Ms. Spiegel really crying over Danny’s game?”

“Of course,” Prilleltensky replied. “It was a very beautiful game.”

11. The Test

The next month, IS 318 almost pulled off an even more remarkable feat—James, Justus, Isaac, and Danny came within a half point of winning the high-school nationals, despite the fact that none of them was in high school. They beat teams from some of the best high schools in the country—Bronx Science and Stuyvesant in New York, Whitney Young in Chicago, the Lakeside School (Bill Gates’s alma mater) in Seattle—before losing in the last round to the team from Hunter College High School.

Despite his resounding victories in Columbus, James Black gained only eleven rating points in the junior high tournament, moving from 2149 to 2160—still forty points to go before making master. The rest of the spring his rating kept ebbing and flowing, pulling closer to 2200, then falling back. Finally, on July 17 at the Marshall, James beat Michael Finneran, an eighteen-year-old from Connecticut, and his rating hit 2205. He was a national master. At the beginning of September, James celebrated with a party under some shade trees in Fulton Park, in the heart of Bedford-Stuyvesant. People sat on folding chairs, and James was presented with a cake topped with an edible photo image of himself at the chessboard, framed with white frosting. Maurice Ashley, the first and, so far, only African American grand master, was there, and he inducted James and Justus and Joshua Colas, a twelve-year-old player from White Plains, New York, into a newly founded society called the Young Black Masters Club. Just a year after Justus had become the first African American master under fifteen, there were now three under
thirteen,
a point of pride for not only their families but black chess players and fans across the country.

Spiegel made a speech, and she said that while she was proud of James’s accomplishment, she was more proud of the determination he had displayed. She told the story of his past year in chess, how he had often pulled to within a few points of 2200 and then, again and again, slipped back. “Imagine how frustrating that must be,”
she said to the assembled crowd. “And then add to that frustration the fact that everyone is watching you, asking how you did, expecting you to already be there.

“For more than a year,” Spiegel went on, “James studied, solved tactics, played, analyzed his games, confronted his own mistakes and misunderstandings, and he did not give up. In the last year he has played sixty-five tournaments and three hundred and one rated games. He plays in tournaments until eleven o’clock at night, and then gets up early every morning to do thirty minutes of tactics before school. He has worked so hard, so patiently, for so long. That is what I respect the most about James.”

In the spring, right after the junior high tournament, Spiegel had given herself a new mission. The following October, thousands of New York City students in the eighth grade would be taking a daunting exam known as the Specialized High School Admissions Test; students who did well would be admitted to one of the city’s prestigious selective high schools, including Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech, and Bronx Science. She decided that she would volunteer to train James for the test. John Galvin, the vice principal, told her she had given herself an impossible mission, that there was no way a student who consistently scored below average on statewide standardized tests could ace the specialized-school exam. But Spiegel had seen James absorb chess knowledge astoundingly quickly, and she had faith in her own teaching ability. As she put it to me in an e-mail message in April: “I figure with six months, if he’s into it and will do the work, I can teach a smart kid anything, right?”