School portraits / Reported July 2025
Signed up early for villainy
Everyone came over for the checkmate. The next request was a mustache, and the room could not produce one.
Jonathan Corbblah was racing from table to table in the cafeteria at Trinity School in New York, where a class of mostly beginners, many of them kindergartners, had the room in a whirl. It was a Monday, and in the July 2025 Chess Life, Jack Moore described the moment a young voice called out, "Coach Johnny, I just checkmated!" Everyone gathered around the board. News of that kind was never going to stay seated between two players.
He showed them how the young player had pinned his opponent, with a bishop at one end of the board and a queen at the other. A careful adult might hear that explanation and consider the lesson finished. Corbblah asked for something else. "Now twist your mustaches," he said, and he gave a loud, devious laugh. The students had no mustaches. They twirled them anyway and tried to imitate his chortle. You could take them, for that minute, for villains who signed up early. Then he told them that a chess player has to be sneaky.
Then it was back to games and, later, a worksheet. You might sign a child up for chess hoping for concentration. The villain laugh is included.