To learn the game, he practiced on the Chess.com app and watched YouTube tutorials. “Once you learn how the pieces move, it’s just about memorizing positions,” he said, walking toward the beach. “You set up a position. The other person is setting up something else. Then you adapt. Set up and adapt, set up and adapt. It’s very much like acting.” On the boardwalk, he sat at a concrete chess table. While preparing for the show, he would go there to play for research and “lose miserably against strangers,” he recalled. He put out the chess pieces, which looked not unlike the cast of a Broadway musical: a chorus line of pawns, the leads (king, queen), and the supporting players (rooks, knights). His favorite piece is the black king, which he would fiddle with in rehearsal as a nervous habit. “Now that’s embedded in the show. Anatoly carries a black king with him,” he said.journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter