ENJOY THE GAME

SIXTY-FOUR SQUARES LOOKING FOR TWO PLAYERS: THE MOVES THAT STAY

MANUELA RAYNICK

April 7, 2025

New York’s Marshall Chess Club is more than a landmark—it’s where strategy meets ritual and art meets the endgame. Time folds in on itself here. The clocks measure minutes, but also memory. Marcel Duchamp came in search of silence; some say he never left. At the Marshall, every move is a composition, and every game is a kind of remembering.

---

It was a Tuesday, or maybe a Thursday. The kind of winter day when the light on Tenth Street seems thinner than usual, like it’s been wrung out by the wind. I stood outside the Marshall Chess Club for several minutes before I went in. Not because I was waiting for anyone. I don’t wait for anyone anymore. But because the door, old and wooden and painted a tired white, seemed like the sort of door that should be knocked on. It felt wrong to enter casually and unannounced into a room where people sit silently, thinking five moves ahead of the present, without first asking permission.

23 West 10th St, New York, NY 10011

I’ve been a member of the Marshall for over a decade now. Long enough to know most of the regulars by face, if not by name. Long enough to know the way the seasons feel inside that room—how the air thickens in August, how the coats pile high in January. It smells faintly of varnish and dry coffee grounds. The wood is worn. The players, mostly men, are worn too. Some of them glance up when the door opens, but they don’t really see you. They are far away. Deep in the endgame, or deeper still in memory. The walls are covered in plaques and framed photographs, but the effect of these is not reverence, but a kind of domestic clutter. This is not a museum. It is a place where people do something they have done for a long time. It is a place where people still concentrate.

I originally stepped into the club because of Marcel Duchamp. He played here, often bringing along Man Ray. Not regularly, not ritually, but often enough that his ghost feels legible in the air. Duchamp, the man who gave up art for chess. Who decided, sometime around 1923, that there was nothing left to say in art, and so sat down at a board and said nothing instead. Some call that a retreat. Others call it the only honest gesture of the twentieth century.

Man Ray and Marcel circa 1964

The Marshall Chess Club is the kind of place where time moves not forward, but sideways. There are clocks, of course, but they do not tell time. They measure intensity. They punish hesitation. Here, everything is a calculation. Even silence is strategic. Someone coughs. A bishop is lifted and then set down again. Outside, traffic continues. Inside, it is always 1968 or 1947 or 1993. The club has absorbed all those years and rearranged them into something else—a grid of memory.

There was a boy there, maybe fifteen. Tall and lean, with a narrow face and the kind of long fingers you notice even if you don’t want to. He played fast. Not sloppy fast, but like someone who has already played the game in his head before it starts. His opponent was older, in a wrinkled cardigan, and seemed already defeated after move twelve. The boy played a quiet queen move that looked like nothing at all, and the older man sighed audibly. Resignation is its own kind of applause.

Inside the Marshall

I thought again of Duchamp. I could imagine him sitting here, his profile in shadow, his mind elsewhere. Chess for Duchamp was not a hobby, but an alternative life. He once wrote that “the chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts,” which is the kind of thing you say when you have given yourself completely over to structure, to abstraction, to systems beyond taste or fashion. Chess, unlike art, doesn’t care who you are. Only how well you see.

I remember once talking to Asa Hoffmann, who taught me endgames for a while. Now in his late eighties and a legend at the club and beyond, he once beat Bobby Fischer. But he never bothered to pursue the grandmaster title, too busy living the game to chase its credentials. He was studying a photograph pinned to a bulletin board in the hallway. A faded black-and-white print, curling at the corners. “That man in the back,” he said, pointing with the stem of his pipe, which he never lit, “was a French artist. Known for grand statements, but a lousy player.” I looked closer. Of course it was Duchamp.

Fourth from the left

It is easy to mistake obsession for elegance. The Marshall is elegant in that sense. The chairs are mismatched, the tables slightly uneven. And yet nothing is accidental. There is no room for accident in a place like this. You must think before you move, and think again before you think you have thought enough. The boards are arranged with ritual care. Some people bring their own pieces. Others carry score sheets in weathered folders. There’s a kind of devotion here that has nothing to do with winning.

I sat down with an older player, whom Asa introduced me to. His name was Jay, and he claimed he had played Duchamp once in a simul as a teenager. He said this like someone might say they once saw the Rolling Stones at Shea Stadium on their first US tour. It didn’t matter whether it was true. What mattered was the way he said it—like a confession. He told me Duchamp had a quiet kind of presence. Not cold, not warm, just distant. “Like he had already played the game,” Jay said, “but was playing it again for our sake.”

There’s something monastic about chess. Or maybe that’s just how it looks in this room, under this light, with these people. Nobody raises their voice. Nobody checks their phone. When a player blunders, he does not cry out—he simply lowers his gaze and resigns. It is a kind of dignity you don’t see much anymore. A kind of slowness. A kind of attention. The sort of thing we tell ourselves we don’t have time for, though we do. We just spend it elsewhere.

Duchamp (in the front with back to the camera) playing a simul in a collage by Dorothea Tanning, 1945.

From the left: Julien Levy, Frederick Kiesler, Alfred Barr Jr., Xanti Schawinsky, Vittorio Rieti, Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, George Koltanowski

In one corner of the room is a cabinet filled with trophies. Dusty, dull, but still somehow proud. The names engraved on them read like characters in a novel you forgot you were reading. Some are still alive, still playing. Some have vanished into other lives. But their names remain, shuffled into the long list of people who have sat here and tried to see ten moves ahead.

The Marshall Chess Club was founded in 1915. It has moved locations, shifted decades, but the feeling has stayed the same. Today, the club carries the patina of faded glory—grandeur that is gently fraying at the edges. And yet it is still busy, still vibrant in its own way, filled with Eastern European coaches murmuring instruction in accented English, and East Asian youngsters with quiet determination, dreaming of being the next Magnus Carlsen. It is a place where people who care deeply about something that does not matter come to be with others who feel the same. Which is another way of saying: It is a human place. Even if its rituals seem abstract. Even if its rooms are quiet.

Frank Marshall—born in 1877, flamboyant, romantic, full of bold combinations and dangerous opening ideas—may have made his most enduring move not on the board, but in founding the club that bears his name. He gave American chess a home, and homes are not just where we live but where we tell ourselves who we are.

Current and former members

The club has seen things. In 1956, it witnessed what came to be called the Game of the Century—young Bobby Fischer, just thirteen, dismantling Donald Byrne like a boy cracking open a watch to see how time works. In 1965, Fischer again, playing the Capablanca Memorial in Havana remotely, via Teletype, a ghost in the machine before we had the language for that. The US Chess Championship has come through its halls more than once, leaving behind traces on the floorboards, in the stories retold every year with a slightly different inflection.

It is easy to romanticize this. That’s the risk with any place that has survived. But the truth of the Marshall Chess Club is not in its trophies or legends. It’s in the way someone resets the pieces after a loss. In the way a child studies a position long after their opponent has walked away. In the way the room is always still, quiet.

Outside, the city is loud and bright. The world has moved on. Chess is online now. Kids play bullet matches on their phones, flipping through tactics as if swiping through strangers. But inside the Marshall, time resists. Here, the moves are still written by hand. The clocks are still clicked with deliberation. People still look each other in the eye before the game begins.

I stayed longer than I’d intended to. Long enough to see the boy win again. Long enough to watch a man lose three times and still smile. Long enough to hear someone quote Alekhine under their breath, as if reciting scripture. When I left, the sun had set without anyone noticing.

Marcel Duchamp, Pocket Chess Set, 1944. Pocket chessboard in leather, celluloid, and pins, 16 × 10.5 cm closed, 16 × 22 cm open

Chess, Duchamp once said, is like drawing: “It demands a vision and forethought.” At the Marshall, vision is not about ambition. It’s about patience. To sit in that room is to learn how to wait. To think not only about what is, but about what might be. Not in the hopeful sense. In the precise sense.

I thought of Duchamp one last time. Of his silence. Of how he watched his contemporaries go on to fame and museums and manifestos, while he spent his life studying positions, composing endgames. People called it disappearance. But maybe it was the opposite. Maybe it was attention so pure it looked like absence. Maybe chess was the one place he could still be seen.

I walked back out into the cold night. Past the new ramen restaurant on the corner of Tenth Street and Sixth Avenue, past the organic wine bar with outdoor seating and over-bright lighting. No one looked up. No one noticed. The Marshall sat quietly behind me, still glowing with its fluorescent hum. A room full of people not talking, only thinking of their next move.

Some moves matter. Some moves stay. Some rooms, like the Marshall, remember them all.

Manuela Raynick was a chess prodigy in the 1990s, briefly ranked among the top under-fourteen players in Central Europe before quitting the game at sixteen, saying she found tournament halls “too brightly lit, too full of polyester, and too devoid of poetry.” She writes about memory, games, and the architecture of obsession.

Cover image: Marcel Duchamp, King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes, 1912. Oil on canvas, 114.6 × 128.9 cm