The video can be viewed on the web site called Comedians
in Cars Getting Coffee. You can watch the whole 17-minute episode, as Seinfeld
fans will certainly do, but people with no sentimental connection can jump to
the chess part, which starts at around 8:00 minutes into the video. [Click
on the above image to start it].
Jerry: I was thinking this morning – I swear to god
– we would be rehearsing, something dumb would happen, or wierd, you would
just go: "That was interesting!" And the wheels would start to turn.
Michael: That's how you play chess. He makes a move and you
go "Hmm, that's interesting." I used to play chess. When I was in
the army I was unbeatable, I was very good at it. With chess there's ratings.
Chess master's about 2100, and I was playing a computer on a 2100 level.
So I'd been playing that machine for weeks, and then I happened to be out on
Hollywood Boulevard, and I saw this man, tattered and dirty, a street person
– he had a chess set. I said "you play chess?" and he said "I
do, I do."
Jerry: A homeless guy...?
Michael: A homeless guy. I said: "I'll tell you what,
I'll play you a game." He said: "Okay, I'll play you two games, I'll
beat you two times and you can't play me no more."
He puts out his hands, see who's going to go first, Black, White... I pick
and I'm White. That means I have the first move. I already have the advantage...
Jerry: You are sitting on the sidewalk?
Michael: I'm sitting on the sidewalk, down here like this.
I move my piece out, he moves his piece out, very quickly, boom. I said "Oh,
he stops that move..." So I move a knight out, he moves out a pawn, he
moves out a bishop and in two minutes he got me on the defensive and then it's
boom, checkkmate. He checkmated me in two minutes! Nobody has ever checkmated
me in two minutes! Nobody. Not even the machine can checkmate me in two
minutes.
So this time I said "Okay, let's play. Let's play chess." He makes
me pick, I go first again. Okay, I lean in, he move out his knight, I move my
bishop, bab-pa-bap, then checkmate! Faster than the first time. So now he's
putting the stuff away, and I'm going "Come on, come on, let's play again,"
and he's going "Naw, I beat you two time, you can't play me no more."
I'm following the guy down the street, "Come on let's play" and he
goes "Naw, I don't wanna play, I don't wanna play." He wouldn't play
me.
At home I called a friend who is a professional chess player. I said "Leon,
I played a guy on the street, who beat me twice. He goes "Yes, you played
a savant. When I'm in a tournament in a city I look for those guys, to play
those guys." I said "You beat them?" and he goes "Never!".
I said "God, can you get one of those guys in a tournament? Imagine!"
He's says "You can't hold them in play, they're crazy. But they're unbeatable."
Jerry: So he could really beat the greatest chess player in
the world!
Michael: Possibly. Most likely. He told me in the beginning:
"I beat you two times, that's it. We don't play anymore. You can't play
me anymore."
Jerry: Why would he set a rule like that?
Michael: Because he's done it over and over again, and he
doesn't have a lot of time, to be fooling around with someone he can beat, so
easily. That's probably why.
Jerry: What was it that he was able to do well that he could
win so fast?
Michael: He saw the moves before they took place. This is
where it gets a bit metaphysical. Perhaps you have to be ultimately crazy or
disavaged from the kind of reality that we are all adjusting to. There are other
kinds of reality, other kinds of zones to inhabit. Great artists have inhabited
zones, and then it becomes a new paradigm. People go "Wow, he hasn't thought
about going there."
I invented a chess board, I want to play in a round, so you are like in the
north and the south pole, so you can play in all directions. That's when I had
to stop playing chess.
The chess segment on chess ends at 12:00 minutes, but we it is well worthe
watching the remaining five minutes, or in fact the entire video, especially
if you have gone through 150 episodes of the Seinfeld show, repeatedly, and
are sentimentally attached to all the characters.
Thanks to Juhani Mykkänen of Helsinki, Finland, for
pointing us to this video.
Addendum
Al Smith of San Francisco, CA, believes that if Michael Richards
is referring to an encounter that happened in the 70s or early 80s, then maybe
he ran into Jimmy Lazos, a 2350 rated master who once won the American
Open.
Kevin Cotreau of Merrimack, NH, reminds us that although Michael
Richards' narrative seems genuine enough, he sounds like the typical clueless
player many of us have met: he thinks he was good, but has no idea that he was
really terrible, only not as terrible as the other terrible guys he used to
beat. Of course, we have all seen street players who are very strong, but clearly
not the best on the planet.
Shaun Graham-Bowcaster of Oklahoma City, USA tells us that
Michael Richard's comment about a computer and the 2100 master rating most likely
refers to one of the various tabletop computer models and softwares that used
the number such as the Fidelity 2100, and Chessmaster 2100. These were once
very common, and that is why Kramer would have associated the number with a
master rating.
William Shea of Hawaii says that in his experience chess players
on the street are probably about 1500-1900 strength. "The only thing that
really impresses me is how good they are at making illegal moves when they are
in a losing position. The truth is the guys on the street are best at beating
hobby players and just pulling fast ones from time to time."
