Danny Rensch grew up in a village on the edge of a great forest, in the mountains outside Payson, Arizona. He spent his days with roving packs of children, building forts, playing cops and robbers in the woods, or splashing around in a septic dump, unmindful of the shit and of the bears and javelinas that sometimes came down from the hillsides in search of food and water. When Rensch was nine, he saw a movie, “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” about a boy in New York City who plays chess in a public park with homeless men and discovers that he’s a prodigy. Rensch and his friend Dallas found a cheap chess set and started playing constantly. One day, Dallas took Rensch to play chess with his grandfather Steven Kamp.
Kamp was not just Dallas’s grandfather; he was the leader of a cult to which almost everyone in the town, Tonto Village, belonged. The members of the Church of Immortal Consciousness, also known as the Collective, followed the teachings of a Dr. Pahlvon Duran, who, they believed, lived the last of his many lifetimes as an Englishman in the fifteenth century. Duran spoke to the Collective through Steven’s wife, Trina, and he preached that the goal of life was to fulfill one’s “Purpose” and to live “in Integrity.” Ego was discouraged. So was private property. Families were moved from house to house, and were sometimes reconfigured, too. Rensch had only recently learned that Dallas was actually his stepbrother.
Like most of the members of the Collective, Rensch often didn’t have enough to eat. At times, he didn’t have shoes. Kamp had his own house. He had Cheerios and cigars. He also had books about chess and his own wooden set. He had been following the world championship in New York between Garry Kasparov and Viswanathan Anand. Kamp, a good chess player, saw that Rensch had talent. “Chess made me special,” Rensch writes, in “Dark Squares,” his new memoir, “and to be special in the eyes of Steven Kamp is to be special in the eyes of God.”
Chess has been viewed as a measure of intellectual potential for centuries, and Kamp was eager not only to promote the Church of Immortal Consciousness but to dispel the notion that it was a death cult or a dangerous militia group. What if he could boost the profile of the Collective with a successful chess team? The group’s children were in a unique position to undertake such a project. They shared a sense of common mission, instilled in them by Kamp. Traditional schooling was easily ignored. And chess could become a means to privileges: trips to McDonald’s and Taco Bell and out-of-town tournaments.
The kids played for hours every day, with a sense of freedom, and, for a time at least, they had a lot of fun. In 1996, the Shelby School—an unchartered charter in a tiny town on an Arizona mountainside, which the kids attended—placed fourth at the national elementary-school championships, conducted by the United States Chess Federation. In 1997, the school won the U.S.C.F. Super Nationals scholastic championship. In 1998, it won the national elementary-school championship, the K-9 championship, and finished in the top fifteen of the K-12 championship, despite not having any high schoolers. “Cults work,” Rensch writes. “Until they don’t.” Rensch won the national elementary-school championship that year. Trina, channelling Duran, told Rensch that chess was his Purpose.
For a time, Rensch was moved to a house that the Collective owned in Phoenix, to be near the city’s chess club, a hangout for oddballs, chess enthusiasts, and one honest-to-God chess genius, a raging alcoholic named Igor Ivanov, who’d defected from the U.S.S.R. and suffered the usual deprivations of a vagabond professional chess player. Ivanov became Rensch’s personal coach. Most mornings, Rensch would find the man sprawled naked on a bed, and would dutifully fix him the day’s first screwdriver. After Rensch’s rise in the game slowed, when he was fourteen, he was taken from his mother and installed in the home of Kamp’s right-hand man—who happened to be Rensch’s biological father, and who seemed to harbor no feeling for him. Kamp told him this was all for the good of his Purpose.
Rensch’s Purpose, according to Kamp, wasn’t just to play chess. It wasn’t even to become a grand master, though that was the marker of his ambition. His Purpose was to save chess. Doing so, as Rensch puts it in his book, “would prove to the world that [Kamp’s] spiritual vision held the key to understanding human nature and the meaning of life.” Rensch was convinced. “I believed it because I was a child and it’s what I’d been raised to believe,” he writes. But he also wanted to do it for his own reasons. He wanted to make the game seem fun and normal, not “dysfunctional and weird.” He wanted to make it so that the pinnacle of chess achievement didn’t look like tormented, self-destructive figures such as Ivanov but a guy like him, Danny Rensch.
At the age of eighteen, not long after winning the national high-school chess championship, Rensch’s eardrums exploded on a flight on the way home from a tournament. He tried to return to serious competitive chess in his early twenties, but it was becoming clear that his progress had stalled and his goal of becoming a grand master, let alone a top one, was fading. By then, he was married—in the Collective, early marriages were common—and had two kids. (He and his wife, Shauna, eventually had two more.) He was still driven by a belief in his chosen status, but his life was a mess. He began to make a little money coaching chess. He also started drinking, taking painkillers, suffering from panic attacks, and compulsively buying up chess domain names: chessface.com, chesscoachlive.com, and so on. The one he wanted, Chess.com, was already taken. But, at a tournament in 2008, he met the guys who owned it—Erik Allebest and Jay Severson—and badgered them into giving him a job. Only later did he realize that he was lucky that he didn’t badger them out of one.
Maybe they were lucky, too. In 2010, they created ChessTV, with Rensch as its star. I first encountered Rensch in 2016, on a Chess.com YouTube show called “ChessCenter.” My boyfriend, now my husband, had introduced me to the game, and I’d quickly become obsessed, waking up at 4 A.M. to play on my phone. Some couples watch Netflix together; we watched Sicilian Defense instructional videos. We also tuned into live streams of pro tournaments, and we caught up on news by watching “ChessCenter,” which was a little like ESPN’s “SportsCenter,” if “SportsCenter” ’s soundstage was the walk-in closet of a law office in Payson.
