Tweet
Lev Alburt
September 21, 2017
There is an article on Lev Alburt in the September 21st issue of Bloomberg Businessweek by James Tarmy
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/featu...ter-lev-alburt
It is entitled “Wall Street’s Best-Kept Secret Is a 72-Year-Old Russian Chess Expert”
Some excerpts:
On East 83rd Street there’s a squat brick walk-up that’s a viable contender for the least fancy apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. But for the past 25 years, Wall Street machers and captains of industry have marched up to its gray-carpeted third floor to learn the secrets of attack and defense from Lev Alburt, a three-time U. S. chess champion and one of the most prominent Soviet defectors of the 1970s. Alburt has long been giving *patter-filled private lessons to New Yorkers from all walks of life, encouraging, cajoling, and reprimanding men and women as they attempt to learn the so-called game of kings.
“I’d take a walk up there, spend an hour with the chessboard with [Alburt]. We were friendly, we might talk about life a little bit, ” says corporate raider Carl Icahn, who took lessons with Alburt for years in an attempt to outplay his son, Brett.
“I’ve been going to Lev every two weeks or so, ” says Eliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York and currently the director of Spitzer Enterprises. “It is wonderful, frustrating, intimidating, and demoralizing. ” Alburt’s lessons are invariably interspersed with political discussions and a light dose of fatalism—“what you’d expect from a grandmaster from Russia, ” Spitzer says, but he keeps coming back. “We always have a good time talking. ”
_______
At the height of the Cold War, when the emphasis on so-called soft power was at a premium and athletes, musicians, and academics who enhanced national prestige were considered state assets, Alburt was one of the better-paid men in the Soviet Union.
In a story he tells often, Alburt says he’d made up his mind to defect, lost his nerve, and then, after reading an issue of Pravda on the plane and becoming disgusted with Soviet hypocrisy, his resolve returned. On a trip for a chess competition in Cologne, in West Germany, he took a taxi to a police station and asked for asylum.
He soon moved to New York and became a fairly well-known political commentator, more often than not aligned with what he describes as the “conservative, anti-Soviet side. ” He developed friendships with New York Republican congressman Jack Kemp and the right-wing commentator Charles Krauthammer (“We’re still the best of friends”), lectured at colleges denouncing the Soviets, and even appeared on Pat Robertson’s conservative Christian TV show, The 700 Club.
After the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union began to collapse, Alburt’s prominence as a commentator grew, and he wound down his competitive chess playing, finally giving it up in 1992. To supplant his dwindling income from tournaments, he slowly began to teach—charging a then-sky-high $100 an hour.
“I didn’t want to have too many students, ” he says. He would charge even more to travel—one man paid him $3,000 a day to fly out to his house in California—and raised his fee to $200 an hour if he had to go to a client’s house or office. For trips to Brooklyn he’d often charge as much as $300 an hour. (Today his base rate has risen modestly, to $150 an hour for lessons in his home. Lessons usually last two hours.)
In contrast with chess’s deliberative reputation, Alburt says the game helps traders think on their feet. “Strong chess players are good at making quick, usually correct decisions, ” he says. “Traders are basically doing the same things as chess grandmasters: You have to make quick decisions in by definition uncertain circumstances. ”
September 21, 2017
There is an article on Lev Alburt in the September 21st issue of Bloomberg Businessweek by James Tarmy
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/featu...ter-lev-alburt
It is entitled “Wall Street’s Best-Kept Secret Is a 72-Year-Old Russian Chess Expert”
Some excerpts:
On East 83rd Street there’s a squat brick walk-up that’s a viable contender for the least fancy apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. But for the past 25 years, Wall Street machers and captains of industry have marched up to its gray-carpeted third floor to learn the secrets of attack and defense from Lev Alburt, a three-time U. S. chess champion and one of the most prominent Soviet defectors of the 1970s. Alburt has long been giving *patter-filled private lessons to New Yorkers from all walks of life, encouraging, cajoling, and reprimanding men and women as they attempt to learn the so-called game of kings.
“I’d take a walk up there, spend an hour with the chessboard with [Alburt]. We were friendly, we might talk about life a little bit, ” says corporate raider Carl Icahn, who took lessons with Alburt for years in an attempt to outplay his son, Brett.
“I’ve been going to Lev every two weeks or so, ” says Eliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York and currently the director of Spitzer Enterprises. “It is wonderful, frustrating, intimidating, and demoralizing. ” Alburt’s lessons are invariably interspersed with political discussions and a light dose of fatalism—“what you’d expect from a grandmaster from Russia, ” Spitzer says, but he keeps coming back. “We always have a good time talking. ”
_______
At the height of the Cold War, when the emphasis on so-called soft power was at a premium and athletes, musicians, and academics who enhanced national prestige were considered state assets, Alburt was one of the better-paid men in the Soviet Union.
In a story he tells often, Alburt says he’d made up his mind to defect, lost his nerve, and then, after reading an issue of Pravda on the plane and becoming disgusted with Soviet hypocrisy, his resolve returned. On a trip for a chess competition in Cologne, in West Germany, he took a taxi to a police station and asked for asylum.
He soon moved to New York and became a fairly well-known political commentator, more often than not aligned with what he describes as the “conservative, anti-Soviet side. ” He developed friendships with New York Republican congressman Jack Kemp and the right-wing commentator Charles Krauthammer (“We’re still the best of friends”), lectured at colleges denouncing the Soviets, and even appeared on Pat Robertson’s conservative Christian TV show, The 700 Club.
After the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union began to collapse, Alburt’s prominence as a commentator grew, and he wound down his competitive chess playing, finally giving it up in 1992. To supplant his dwindling income from tournaments, he slowly began to teach—charging a then-sky-high $100 an hour.
“I didn’t want to have too many students, ” he says. He would charge even more to travel—one man paid him $3,000 a day to fly out to his house in California—and raised his fee to $200 an hour if he had to go to a client’s house or office. For trips to Brooklyn he’d often charge as much as $300 an hour. (Today his base rate has risen modestly, to $150 an hour for lessons in his home. Lessons usually last two hours.)
In contrast with chess’s deliberative reputation, Alburt says the game helps traders think on their feet. “Strong chess players are good at making quick, usually correct decisions, ” he says. “Traders are basically doing the same things as chess grandmasters: You have to make quick decisions in by definition uncertain circumstances. ”
Comment