THE KINGS OF NEW YORK: A Year Among the Oddballs, Geeks and Geniuses Who Make Up America’s Top High School Chess Team

Book by Michael Weinreb

Yellow Jersey Press ₤11.99, 304 pages

FT bookshop price ₤9.59

The New York Times recently ran a report announcing that the Edward R. Murrow public high school in Midwood, Brooklyn, had won the US national high school chess championships for the fourth year in a row. A few days later the paper ran a second story focusing on one of the top players, who was missing class to play chess for money around Wall Street, and risking academic failure.

In The Kings of New York, Michael Weinreb shines more light on Murrow, and the world that created the apparent contradiction - after all, isn’t chess supposed to make you smarter?

He tells a story that leads from the back streets of Brooklyn, to the open-air chess hustlers of Washington Square Park, to the two-day-long pizza-eating claustrophobia of the US Supernational school tournament, held in Gaylord Opryland Resort in Nashville, Tennessee. There are cameo appearances by President Bush and Senator Hillary Clinton, and the various oddballs and benefactors who inhabit the world of US chess.

The shadow of Bobby Fischer, whose greatness at chess was matched by his antisocial behaviour, hangs over this world and the collection of teenagers who wage chess war for Murrow. Recruited by a dedicated teacher who trails the city’s school tournaments like a professional talent scout, the team stars are the children of immigrants from Russia and the Baltic states, with a bench of players from the area’s black and Hispanic communities.

Weinreb, a sports writer, fills in the background on the enthusiasm for chess in the US generated by the 1972 Fischer-Spassky match, and the efforts to encourage chess in New York public schools. He boldly accepts the challenge of trying to make monosyllabic and geeky teenagers engaging enough to make us care as they clash with rivals from Arizona at the Supernationals.

But there is a bleakness to this sport and its sparse rewards; this book is not as compelling as other accounts of American high school sport such as H.G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights, or the 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams.

The chess team’s reputation helps their high school attract better students, as it struggles against budget cuts and the policy confusion of the New York public school system. When they win, there are stories in the New York papers. They get to meet the President. But the small chess team is hardly the talk of the school’s 4,000 pupils. There are no special sports scholarships for chess at top colleges. And no one is hanging out ”Go Murrow” signs on the streets of Brooklyn.

Jonathan Birchall is the FT’s US retail correspondent.