The only actor who out-hustled Stanley Kubrick at chess: “I have so little respect for your game”
Chess is a brutal game, something that Stanley Kubrick knew very well.
If you go around boasting about your chess skills after beating some borderline alcoholics with possible brain damage at your local pub, you might even be encouraged to enter a FIDE-rated tournament to finally have some quantifiable metric for your terrifying genius. That is until you get your ass handed to you by a six-year-old who is picking boogers out with one hand and trapping you in a forced mate line with the other.
It’s safe to say that Stanley Kubrick was probably a better chess player than you or I will ever be, not that the bar is too high. Before he became famous as the director who fetishises perfection, shoots 100 takes of every scene, and churns out one goddamn masterpiece after another, Kubrick was reportedly supporting his budding career as a photographer by playing chess for money in New York’s Washington Square Park, a tradition that’s still going strong.
Taught by his father, Kubrick always viewed chess as an important tool that helped him refine the way he approached both cinema and life, and it makes complete sense. For a perfectionist like him, chess represented a kind of beauty that was just too damn rare to find. Everything confined to 64 squares yet containing infinite possibilities, nothing escaping the cold, unwavering shadow of logic, and worst of all, there was nothing as humbling as a fucking loss.
His obsession with chess was something that could be seen in many of his films, but it’s from anecdotes from the people who surrounded him that we can piece together just how much value he placed on his chess skills. In a piece for The New York Times, his Paths of Glory collaborator Richard Anderson revealed that Kubrick used chess to study people’s psychological frameworks on set.
Kubrick’s wife, Christiane, also supported that claim by supporting the reports about Kubrick hustling his chess opponents for supplementary income in Washington Square Park. She recalled, “When he was a very young man, I think he was a chess hustler. He played it very well, not that I could judge.”
One actor who actually managed to beat Kubrick at his own game was Adam Baldwin, who worked with him on Full Metal Jacket: “One of the things we did to kill time was play chess, play hearts, smoke cigarettes. We would lay out the board, and he would kind of waddle over and wipe you out in 15 moves.”
Adding, “One time, I actually got him to blunder, and I won the game – big deal, one out of 50. But I said: ‘Hah, I got ya, I got ya. You have to resign now.’ And he said to me: ‘The only reason you won, Adam, is because I have so little respect for your game that I made a blunder. Now get back to work.’ He had that little wry grin of his and walked away.”
Kubrick might have been a great chess player, but it sounds like he was exactly as gracious in defeat as the rest of us.
