78 The EconomistMarch 21st 2020
I
t was the best of times; it was the worst of times. That was the
beginning of a book he had heard about somewhere. He didn’t
remember which one. Or perhaps it was “It was the worst of times,
it was the best of times.” Either way, it described exactly the
months he had spent when he first arrived in 1994 to make his luck
in New York. His mother, despairing that he would ever take a job,
had kicked him out of the house. He carried nothing with him on
the freezing journey from Buffalo except an extra hoodie or two, a
chessboard and a chess clock. Being pretty good at chess, that was
all he thought he needed to make an impression.
He had no contacts in the Big Apple, no friends, nothing. And
nowhere to sleep. Since he liked his sleep, being naturally lazy and
lumpish, this was a nightmare. He tried park benches, the subway,
anywhere he could. One night the best he could find was one of the
stone chess tables in Washington Square Park, where he lay on his
back snoring loudly with chunks of falafel, his favourite and al-
most his only food, stuck to his unshaven face. He was shaken
awake by the brawny tattooed arms of Russian Paul, whose partic-
ular special table this was; in exchange for guarding it for him,
Russian Paul agreed to give him $2 a day to buy more falafel, at
least. So Falafel he became. Since no one, not even his mother,
called him Matvey, this was fine. And so began a sequence of twists
and turns, losses and wins, that culminated in 2007 with his
crowning by his peers, the Giants of Backgammon, as a genius, and
the best backgammon player in the world.
He hadn’t given the game much thought before. Growing up—
moving from Russia, where he was born, to Israel as a child, to Buf-
falo from the age of 14—he had mostly played chess, which seemed
to him a better way to spend the time than going to college. But he
noticed in the park that hustling backgammon, playing tourists
and other “fish”, or “pigeons”, or “marks”, who wandered by and
wanted a game, was much more lucrative. Besides, the more helooked at it, the more fascinated he became. This was both a game
of strategy, working out how to get home and bear off all your
checkers before your opponent did, and also one of sheer chance,
driven by the throw of the dice. It needed not only skill, but luck.
You could do all the planning you liked, but the gods had to be on
your side. Backgammon mirrored life: sometimes safe, sometimes
on the street. He wanted to understand the full truth of it.
Once Russian Paul, in his impatient way, had taught him the
moves, and once he had stopped losing, he was hooked. He was no
genius in his own mind, and his openings were ragged, but he
could survey the vital mid-section of a game and know exactly
what to do, with mathematical precision. Backgammon students
were already turning to computer programs that could analyse and
predict moves, factoring in the near-infinite variations of the dice,
and he did that too; one neural-net program, called Snowie, helped
him more than anything. But there was still a place for old-fash-
ioned intuition and brainwork, awareness of the tiniest advantage,
and this was where he outshone all the rest. When Snowie ana-
lysed his games, they often came out perfect.
For up to 15 hours a day he played. Sometimes this was in the
park, under the trees. Sometimes it was in casinos, reminders of
backgammon’s glamorous days in the 1960s, under gilding and
chandeliers, or in tournaments in lookalike hotel ballrooms all
over the place. There he would wander in, looking like a dumb-ass
in his saggy nylon shorts and yellow woollen hat, so that players
clamoured to take him on and he would sit there chattering and
rocking, sometimes laughing aloud, as he took them to the clean-
ers. But at other times he would just sit in his room—if he could
find a room, afford one or keep one—playing online with the
shades drawn, hour after hour, with his laundry and rubbish piling
up around him. In this one sphere of backgammon, he was not
lazy. He was always learning, looking for the truth.
He hoped for a fortune, too. Backgammon was a gambling
game, and he loved to bet. If he said he could do something—
dance, get married within a year, lose weight—he bet on it, usually
a “ruble”, or $1,000. Such bets sometimes came good, often didn’t,
but winning at backgammon became a near-certainty. He could
earn his living that way, with a board game, even though his par-
ents had said he never could. The fact that he looked like an idiot,
as he cheerfully admitted, irresistibly drew weaker players to-
wards him. Tournaments did not earn him much, but private side-
games were a different matter. If he used the red cube to double the
stakes, then double again, and double again, he could win tens of
thousands of dollars in a game that might not even take an hour.
Fairly often, he won that big. But then, just as fast, he would lose
it again. He bet the money on colleagues who lost their games, or
on sports teams that let him down. He took $1,500 to a flophouse
on the Bowery, where a thief made off with it as he slept. In the end,
he cared much less about the money than the mere fact of having
won it, and being able to gamble it away. Any backgammon game
could produce heart-stopping reversals of fortune, so he was used
to it. Every man played out his luck. And he had nothing much to
spend the cash on: plane tickets, hotel rooms, eventually a flat in
Tel Aviv, where he became part-owner of a poker club. Even as a glo-
bal celebrity who was profiled in Esquire and the New Yorker, he
continued to wear the baggy shorts, sweatshirt and backwards
baseball cap that were his summer wardrobe. He socialised happi-
ly over the boards, but still spent his spare time alone with Snowie
or with online players from whom, too, he won plenty of money.
It seemed to be true that he could not function properly in nor-
mal society. At tournaments he was gregarious and fun in his lum-
bering bearish way, but with girls he was shy, and the famous mar-
riage bet (with the family he wanted) never came off. He also found
America hard to settle in. For years before he managed to return he
longed for the love, warmth and closeness of Israel, the childhood
paradise he remembered—and where the falafel was much better,
too. Backgammon, he knew, was all about getting home. 7Falafel (born Matvey Natanzon), world backgammon
champion, died on February 14th, aged 51The throw of the dice
Obituary Falafel