The Days and Knights of Tom Murphy

The customer shrugged. Murphy hit the clock. Within seconds, Murphy's pieces were swarming the opposing position. The young man pressed his palms to his temples. "Ohhhh, no, no, no! Oh, God, what's happening here?"

Ninety seconds later, the customer was in checkmate. He handed Murphy his money. "Another game?" Murphy asked, as he set up the pieces.

"You hustled me fair and square," the man said, "but I'd be crazy to play you again."

THE CLOCK THAT GOVERNS THE RHYTHM OF TOM MURPHY'S DAYS IS A KIND OF DUAL EGG TIMER. It has two time screens and two buttons. After each move, a player taps a button, which starts his opponent's time ticking down and stops his own. In standard blitz, players start with five minutes, or three, or sometimes one minute apiece. Whoever runs out of time first (or finds himself in checkmate) loses the game. The final instants of a blitz chess match can be a thrilling sight, when the players are down to their last seconds and their hands flash between the board and clock with such desperate speed that it looks as though they're juggling lava.

Blitz is the 50-yard dash to slow chess's grueling marathon. American chess legend Bobby Fischer is a blitz enthusiast, and, at international tournaments, there's usually a full complement of grandmasters -- the game's loftiest designation -- competing in the blitz matches. To succeed at blitz requires deep knowledge of chess theory, if not the same planning and intellectual endurance the slow game demands.

Blitz is Murphy's game of choice, and he is one of the best blitz players in the country. In 2005, Murphy finished 15th in the World Blitz Chess Championship. In 1998, he swept the Arlington Chess Club's annual championship, beating out two international masters (the rank just below grandmaster). In 2000, he won the Atlantic Open, a national tournament held in the District.

Slow chess purists occasionally make the charge that blitz chess hustlers such as Murphy possess no real knowledge of the game, that they owe their wins to shallow tactical gimmickry. But Murphy's strengths, according to those who have played and studied with him, lie in his careful study of the game rather than mastery of flashy traps. "He's an encyclopedia of chess," said Ted Udelson, a former student of Murphy's for 10 years and a regular tournament competitor. "His expertise and his understanding of the game is so deep, I challenge you to find grandmasters who understand the game in greater depth than he does."

"I've watched Tom defeat grandmasters convincingly," said Mike Atkins, director of the Arlington Chess Club. "I watched him positionally crush [grandmaster] Pavel Blatny from Czechoslovakia. What makes him so good at blitz is that he's got a lot of deep theory, and he doesn't have to think."

Murphy once had hopes of becoming a grandmaster, but, as his career progressed, he decided that blitz more completely embodied his love for the game. "For those of us who are truly obsessed with chess, a pure chess moment" -- a particularly elegant defense or ensnarement of an opponent's piece -- "is a moment of art," Murphy said. "What drives my obsession is the search of the next painting on the chessboard. It might take a painter a week, or a month, to create his masterpiece. In blitz, you do it in five minutes."

Murphy's preference for the breakneck thrills of blitz to the ponderous agonies of judgment and planning that slow chess requires also says a good deal about the life he has chosen. "The way you play can tell you things about what's going on in your own life," said Shabazz. "Some players play their lives out over the chessboard."

If conventional chess is the art of fretting over the future, of sensing peril in all its guises, of divining the tiny misstep that will lead to ruin down the line, then, for the blitz player, prudence and reflection are deadly sins. Blitz is a game of snap judgments, of short-term rewards, of blind faith in familiar patterns that don't require peering too far into the future.

Six weeks before I'd met him, Tom Murphy had been living in a rented room in College Park and had been building a career of sorts, doing recruiting and canvassing on environmental issues for the Public Interest Research Group. But since then, he'd been devoting himself to the more immediate, short-term struggles of survival in the park in Dupont Circle -- hustling the money for his daily ration of food, cigarettes and brown-bagged beer, plus his stake for the open-air poker game that, most nights, goes on at the chess tables until dawn.