Better Than Bobby Fischer

Danny Rensch never became the world’s greatest chess player. But his improbable rise from traumatised cult child to dot-com wunderkind represents an even more impressive achievement.

2022 Wikimedia Commons photo of Chess.com Chief Chess Officer Danny Rensch.

Last month, Quillette published an excerpt from Chess.com co-founder Danny Rensch’s newly published memoir, detailing the epidemic of cheating that’s swept the online chess world. It’s a must-read for fans of the game.

But you don’t have to be a board-game nerd to appreciate Dark Squares: How Chess Saved My Life. Most of the book isn’t about chess at all, in fact, but rather details the harrowing life that chess allowed Danny to escape.

Rensch first became obsessed with chess in 1995, at age ten, when he saw an HBO broadcast of Searching for Bobby Fischer, a fictionalised take on the early life of two-time US Junior Chess champion Joshua Waitzkin. He writes: “What if…I thought as I watched the movie. What if I could be Josh Waitzkin? What if I could sit down at a chessboard and magically discover that I was a child prodigy?”

It was an improbable aspiration for any child—but even more so for Rensch. Unlike Waitzkin, who caught chess fever from hustlers in New York City’s Washington Square Park, Rensch grew up in the middle of nowhere. Specifically, Tonto Village, an impoverished hamlet located up along a dirt road two hours north of Phoenix, Arizona.

This was the home of the Church of Immortal Consciousness (COIC). The church’s de facto leader, one “Reverend” Steven Kamp, regarded Tonto’s isolation as an asset. He’d originally run his operation out of a Phoenix suburb, but decamped to the wilderness when locals started asking questions about his followers’ clannish behaviour.