Walking through the lobby of the Fairmont hotel in Monaco, home to the Backgammon World Championship, is like striding through an aquarium. Well-tended women, summa cum laude graduates of the Ivanka Trump School of Advanced Moisturizing, move through the first-floor casino as if in schools, their older boyfriends, many of them Russian, in tow.
Call girls, only slightly less well tended, perch on couches and sip cocktails from long straws. One waits for Engelbert Humperdinck or some other sideburned lothario of the s to sidle past in a leisure suit. Yet the Fairmont, in its way, is an up-to-date sin palace.
The hotel sits on a hairpin turn that bedevils Formula One Grand Prix racers and has caused countless crashes. Among these beautiful people, the most elite backgammon players stand out, the way roadies do on an Ariana Grande tour. Nearly all of them are men. Many, if not most, are unshaven introverts in cargo pants or dad jeans.
I peer across the rows of heads. I feel I am plausibly ready, at least in the sense that George Plimpton was plausibly ready to sub in for a few plays as quarterback of the Detroit Lions. I hired a tutor, a pro who lives in Virginia, and took online lessons. I play twenty or thirty games a day. It beats a black-tar-heroin habit.
Victor lives in New Jersey and at the time was a vice-president at Goldman Sachs. I emailed Victor out of the blue, told him I was going to compete in Monaco, and asked: Would he agree to a match with a relative novice, to let a guy know what he was in for? We meet on a warm spring Saturday at Bear and Birch, a Russian banya, or spa, in Freehold, not far from where he lives. You can imagine a Sopranos -style hit going down in a corner sauna.
