It was one of the most spectacular chess events in history, the revenge match between Garry Kasparov and the IBM super-computer Deep Blue, played out in New York at the beginning of May 1997. I was part of the Kasparov team and spent over two weeks in Manhattan. One memorable New York encounter was with a young lady named Anjelina Belakovskaia (or Анжелина Белаковская, as it said on her card). She was a bright, vivacious personality, and I was thrilled to learn that she was a WGM and the current US women's champion (she later went on to win the title two more times). So out came my camera and I did an interview with her.
In this interview Anjelina gave me her take on Kasparov's play after game two. At the time our normal video format consisted of frames that were 320 x 240 pixels in size. In some cases, when extensive video was required in my reports, I reduced the size to 132 x 99 in order to fit them on a CD. The interview with Anjelina has found its way on Youtube. This is what she said:
"My name is Anjelina Belakovskaia and I am a professional chess player, an International Woman Grandmaster and the current United States Women's Champion. I don't think I am able to criticize World Champion Garry Kasparov, but I don't really like his strategy in the opening, how he plays against the computer. Because he tries to show us that you cannot play real chess against the computer, you have to play very safe, very positional style. Maybe I agree you have to play more positional than tactical, but I don't think you cannot start games with regular moves, e4 or d4, and play just regular variants from openings theory. The computer plays very aggressively, played g5 and g4 and f5, and all grandmaster think it was a big mistake – the computer opened it king. It's true, but I really like the style of the computer. The computer plays interesting..."
You can also listen to her speaking after the fourth game.
These were interesting discussions, and I invited Anjelina to a dinner with the Kasparov delegation and some dignitaries. In the restaurant she saw that she would be sitting next to a person she did not know. It was Garry's trusted second Yury Dokhoian. She asked me "Who is he?" and I told her Yury was Garry's cook. During the meal when she discovered the truth, I got a fist shaking across the table. Afterwards Yuri said to me: "Nice girl, but why is she so interested in food?" There were other fun incidents during the match, which made me seek her company. That is when I got to know the her story.
Anjelina grew up in Odessa, Ukraine. When she was six, she learned to play chess, from her mother. At nine she was a reserve in the Soviet Olympic team, and soon had a budding chess career – World Champion among Students (USSR Team), Woman International Master, Ukraine Women Chess Champion and USSR Champion among Young Masters. At 21 she won $900 in a match and considered using it to buy a car. But at the urging of her father she decided to travel to the World Open in Philadelphia instead. However Communist regulations only allowed her to take $100 in cash with her. When she was in the US she called her parents and told them that she wanted to stay in America.
Unfortunately Anjelina spoke only about six words of English. She got a job slicing watermelons at the street fairs, making coffee and cappuccino at the Italian bar, all in order to support her participation in chess tournaments. It was quite rough for the girl – until one day she discovered chess hustlers playing for money in Washington Square Park. She joined in and won $35. "I was rich!" she told us, "I knew I could live well on this kind of income." Unfortunately the hustlers soon stopped accepting her challenges and her source of income dried up. She had to return to her odd jobs.
However, survive she did, and started to thrive. In 1999 she became a naturalized US citizen and began graduate work at New York University, earning a Master's degree in Mathematics in Finance. After that she started work as a derivative trader in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This year she relocated from Tucson to Phoenix, AZ, as she got a full-time offer as a Senior Lecturer in Global Finance at Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University.
Her position has recently evolved into "Associate Teaching Professor in Global Finance". Currently she is teaching over 200 students in six classes, on subjects from "Principles of Finance for Global Organizations" to "Global Financial Management", to "Derivatives and Risk Management", to "Navigating Global FinTech Innovations". Her goal is to help her students acquire new knowledge, while also getting used to chess-influenced methods and techniques of using logic in problem-solving.
In 2003 Anjelina married Lawrence Berstein and the couple have three children, Brian, Connor and Ariela. All love chess: Brian made it to the Top 100 when he was seven, Connor was very close a few years ago, and Ariela was also in the Top 100 category for girls when she was eight or so.
Here's a comic panel (click for a full-size version) that appeared some years ago and sums it all up very nicely:
