Danny Rensch grew up in a village on the edge of a large forest, in the mountains outside of Payson, Arizona. He spent his days with traveling children’s packs, built forts, playing cops and thieves in the woods, or splashing in a septic pit, without half-time shit and bears and javelots that sometimes descended hills in search of food and water. When Rensch was nine years old, he saw a film, “Research for Bobby Fischer”, about a boy from New York who plays chess in a public park with homeless men and discovers that he is a prodigy. Rensch and his friend Dallas found a cheap set of chess and started playing constantly. One day, Dallas took Rensch to play chess with his grandfather Steven Kamp.
Kamp was not only Dallas’ grandfather; He was the leader of a cult to which almost everyone in the city, Tonto Village, belonged. The members of the Church of Immortelle Consciousness, also known as the Collective, followed the teachings of a Dr. Pahlvon Duran, who, according to them, lived the last of his many lives as the English in the 15th century. Duran spoke to the collective thanks to the wife of Steven, Trina, and he preached that the goal of life was to fill his “goal” and live “in integrity”. The ego was discouraged. Thus was private property. Families were transferred from home to house and have sometimes been reconfigured also. Rensch had only learned recently that Dallas was in fact his half-brother.
Like most of the collective members, Rensch often had enough to eat. Sometimes he had no shoes. Kamp had his own house. He had cheerios and cigars. He also had books on failures and his own wooden complex. He had followed the world championship in New York between Garry Kasparov and Viswanathan Anand. Kamp, a good chess player, saw that Rensch had talent. “The failures made me special,” writes Rensch, in “Dark Squares”, his new memory, “and being special in the eyes of Steven Kamp is to be special in the eyes of God”. (Kamp could not be joined to comment. He has already denied that the Church of immortal consciousness was a cult.)
Failures have been considered as a measure of intellectual potential for centuries, and Kamp was eager not only to promote the Church of immortal consciousness, but also to dispel the idea that it was a cult of death or a group of dangerous militia. What if he could increase 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 the common mission, instilled by Kamp. Traditional education has been easily ignored. And failures could become a means of privileges: trips to McDonald’s and Taco Bell and tournaments outside the city.
The children played for hours a day, with a feeling of freedom and, for a while, they had a lot of fun. In 1996, the Shelby School – a charter not determined in a small town on a mountainside in Arizona, which the children attended – placed fourth at the national primary school championships, produced by the American failure federation. In 1997, the school won the USCF super national school championship. In 1998, he won the national primary school championship, the K-9 championship, and finished in the first fifteen in the K-12 championship, despite not having high school students. “Cults work,” writes Rensch. “Until they don’t do it.” Rensch won the National Primary School Championship that year. Trina, channeling Duran, told Rensch that failures were his goal.
For a certain time, Rensch was transferred to a house that the collective had in Phoenix, to be near the city’s chess club, a hangout for the strange, chess enthusiasts and an honest chess genius to God, an unleashed alcoholic named Igor Ivanov, who had defected from the USSS and suffered from the usual procurement of a professional vagabond. Ivanov has become a personal coach of Rensch. Most of the mornings, Rensch would find the man extended naked on a bed and conscientiously repair it the first screwdriver of the day. After Rensch’s rise in power in the game has slowed down when he was fourteen, he was removed from his mother and installed in Kamp’s right man’s house – who was Rensch’s biological father, and who seemed to have no feeling for him. Kamp told him that was everything for the good of his goal.
Rensch’s goal, according to Kamp, was not only to play chess. It was not even to become a great master, although it was the marker of his ambition. His goal was to to safeguard chess. Doing it, as Rensch says in his book, “would prove to the world that [Kamp’s] The spiritual vision held the key to understanding human nature and the meaning of life. Rensch was convinced. He wanted to ensure that the ultimate in the success of failures did not look like tormented and self -destructive figures such as Ivanov but a guy like him, Danny Rensch.
At the age of eighteen, shortly after winning the national school chess championship, the Rensch eardrums exploded on a flight on the way back to a tournament. He tried to return to serious competition failures at the beginning of the twenties, but he became clear that his progress had blocked and that his goal of becoming a great master, not to mention this one, wasomed. At that time, he was married – in collective weddings, the first marriages were common – and had two children. (He and his wife, Shauna, finally had two others.) He was always motivated by a belief in his chosen status, but his life was a mess. He started making some money coaching failures. He also started drinking, taking pain relievers, suffering from panic attacks and buying compulsive failure domain names: Chessface.com, Chesscoachlive.com, etc. The one he wanted, Chess.com has already been taken. But, during a tournament in 2008, he met the guys who owned him – Erik Albest and Jay Severson – and harassed them to give him a job. It was not until later that he realized that he was lucky that he did not harassed them in one.
Maybe they were also lucky. In 2010, they created Chesstv, with Rensch as his star. I met Rensch for the first time in 2016, on a YouTube Chess.com program called “Chesscenter”. My boyfriend, now my husband, had presented the game to me, and I had to quickly be obsessed, waking up to 4 AM To play on my phone. Some couples look at Netflix together; We watched educational Sicilian defense videos. We also passed on live flows of professional tournaments, and we caught up the news by watching “Chesscent”, which looked a little like “Sportscent” by ESPN, if the sound scene of “Sportscenter” was the closet without an appointment of a law firm in Payson.
