Midnight Empire - First chapter

One of the men Daniel met was Dmitri. Dmitri was twenty-eight and from the Sverdlovsk region to the east of Moscow. He was slender, but had a confident look. He was the son of a mechanic named Boris. Boris had drowned in 2002, swimming in a stream while drunk. Before becoming a mechanic, Boris had been a chess champion, spending his twenties in Moscow at a special academy. Dmitri’s game of choice wasn’t chess but StarCraft. He was a top-ten player in Russia, a specialist in the Protoss race. It was an impermanent achievement, an achievement that took practice, ten to sixteen hours a day, playing and strategising; a real investment of his time. Yet it didn’t pay. When Boris drowned, Dmitri, his sister, Katerina, and their mother, Dasha, were forced to sell their house and move into an apartment in a block that was grey and cracking and had the feeling of nuclear poison.

For a while they did well enough. Dasha kept at her job, working as an electronic book keeper for an accountant, but it turned out that the accountant, Maxim Suvorov, had long had desires for Dasha, for her beautiful blue eyes, he told her. And now that Boris was out of the picture, he made these desires known, first in subtle ways, then more forcefully. But Dasha rejected him, saying it was too soon after Boris, and anyway, as potential lovers they were not suited (Maxim Suvorov, Dmitri heard Dasha explain to Katerina, was not only ‘potato faced’ but a ‘bore’). And so Dasha was sacked, without ostensible reason, and without an income—Katerina was still in school, while Dmitri had his StarCraft—the family’s finances quickly became desperate, so desperate that Dasha, watching bronze sunlight creep across the dusty carpet of the flat, considered exploiting Suvorov’s affections to obtain a loan.

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Instead, she gave her last fifteen hundred rubles to Dmitri. He had been chatting to another, small-time StarCraft player, Samani5, who idolised Dmitri and who had recently switched games, amassing what he would only tell Dmitri was a minor fortune playing online poker. Dmitri had heard of poker, but it hadn’t occurred to him that he should play it. But of course he should play it, because Dmitri was of the opinion, as Boris and his academy instructors had been, that in intellectual games of any kind, the Russian was the superior race.

So Dmitri took his mother’s money, and through an exchange service which charged three per cent commission, deposited forty-eight US dollars and fifty US cents into an online account. Then he began to play. He had read a few articles on basic strategies and played a thousand hands alone using a deck of cards that the family had once used on holidays, yet after an hour’s play online he was down to fifteen dollars. He forced himself to stop and regroup. He went for a walk around the building, rolled a cigarette and smoked, staring at the horizon.

Then he went back indoors and drove his balance up to ninety dollars without so much as thinking about it. Really, this should have worried him, as he hadn’t changed his strategy or done anything in particular to deserve it. Instead, he chose to believe that he was already better than the other players. As in StarCraft, he was a master tactician, and by the day’s end, when he was ready to stop, he was up five hundred and three dollars. He told Dasha, who was watching television in the apartment’s cramped living room, that their money problems were over. He would play poker and make five hundred US dollars per day. Dasha kissed her son on the forehead and he felt real excitement in her body, a shake in her limbs. He showed her the balance on the screen. She got a drink for them both and they sat down at the kitchen table. ‘Boris was always very proud of you, Dmitri. He would never tell you but you can believe me. He would boast about StarCraft: “My boy is top ten in all Russia, and one day he will be the best.”’

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Dmitri went to bed feeling warm and loved, and the next day he lost two hands with flushes to higher flushes and his balance dropped to zero. He could hardly believe it. It was a moment of despair and he sat for a long time.

The first resolution he made was to tell nobody; his second was to get the money back.

He opened a chat connection with Samani5 and asked to borrow five hundred dollars. Samani5 explained that that was more than he held in his account.

What do you have? typed Dmitri.

$231.

Give it to me, typed Dmitri. I am a better player than you. I will return it to you five-fold.

There was a long pause. Samani5 wrote, OK.

Dmitri didn’t play straight away. Rather, he sat for two days with pen and paper and a deck of cards. He found his father’s chess books packed away in a box and read them, looking for anything he could use. One he had never noticed before was inscribed by the grandmaster Anatoly Karpov. Stay ruthless, it said, Karpov 1978. Dmitri thought about how to apply Karpov’s advice to two hole cards, five on the board, and a system of points. He considered various chess theories, opening moves, gambits and counter-gambits, forms of defence. Everything pointed towards merciless attack: bet, raise and re-raise, depending on the skill level of the opponent, on what mettle they had to call you down. But he could also see that this was a game of deep mathematics, itself unyielding. He thought that what was needed was a middle ground, the ability to fold the opponent’s behaviour into the maths, to find the optimal play and to execute it without sympathy. Dmitri soon realised that what he knew was nothing. That it would take effort to master this game. But that would all be in the future. He could still win right now, as long as his opponents were worse players than himself.

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Thankfully, they were. He took Samani5’s two hundred and thirty-one dollars and in two days calmly played it up to more than a thousand. At this point, he withdrew five hundred dollars to give to Dasha. Then he kept going. By the week’s end, he’d collected over three thousand dollars, and he paid Samani5 one thousand, one hundred and fifty-five dollars as promised, by transfer and without comment, staying off the messaging system and ignoring the man’s emails.

Then Dmitri really went to work, seriously and using straight profit, money for which he didn’t have to fear. He played in short two-hour bursts, four tables at once, and he paid for software that tracked his opponents’ moves, showing how often they played, raised and won. Dasha brought him his meals, pelmeni and bowls of stew, and it was while eating that he reviewed his strategies, revising and interpreting and trying to see beyond, to visualise the game’s landscape as would God, to take each play—the win and lose—to its limit. He began to play eight tables at once, then twelve and finally sixteen. On his monitor the cards shrank in size but he was multiplying what he felt was his growing edge.

After a month, he had won more than ten thousand dollars. He shut down his computer and stretched his shoulders and announced this to his mother. In the grim dusk they drank vodka and she asked quietly what he felt. ‘Contentment,’ he said. ‘There is no excitement and there is no thrill. It feels simply as if the world has been made right.’ She nodded and said that his father had been the same, all the way up to the academy where, when he finally encountered players he couldn’t beat, he held them in a reverential awe, as if he himself were an amateur. Yes, despite whatever failings these few men had—and some were bastards who kicked their dogs, hit their wives and molested their daughters—Boris thought they could do no wrong; they had so transcended the ordinary world.

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Six months later, Dmitri, Dasha and Katerina moved from the flat into a house. Word had spread through the StarCraft community of Dmitri’s successes and he was contacted by a casino in Moscow that wanted to fly him west to participate in games there.

‘It is mostly rich businesspeople,’ the manager explained. ‘They are not experts but betting small amounts is not thrilling for them. No limit. Two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar blinds.’ Dmitri considered it. To sit at that table he would need twenty-five thousand dollars, an insane amount to risk all at once. To date, he had won just over one hundred thousand dollars, only fifty thousand of which was in free cash. But if the game was with businesspeople, he might easily come home with that much again. He watched from his window Katerina lying on a plastic recliner in the front yard studying a biology textbook, her face the very picture of dogged concentration, of ferocious Russian aptitude, and he wanted so much to help her, to get her to university.

The flight was smooth, the accommodation luxurious, the afternoon in Moscow (his first time) wonderful. He visited the old chess academy, now the headquarters of an American bank, and felt there an affecting sense of the old masters—Bronstein, Kotov and Boleslavsky—their great intellects, and also a sense of his father, the young Komsomol leader from Sverdlovsk with the strategic, practical mind. In some way, Dmitri felt that he was carrying the flame. But that evening, after only an hour at the table, he had lost his twenty-five thousand dollars. The problem was that the businessmen were not, as the manager had advertised, bad players. They were truly terrible players. When Dmitri tried to bluff a five-thousand-dollar pot he was called by an industrialist from Omsk with the bottom pair. Then he lost everything to a local criminal—a man who probably cooked drugs and whored underage girls—who did not understand that when drawing to a straight, you do not call for your entire stack when your chances of winning are one in five.

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That night Dmitri did not sleep. The sunrise he watched on the plane back to Sverdlovsk was the brightest, the most piercing and revelatory he had ever seen, and he resolved never to play in Moscow again. Not until he could give twenty-five thousand dollars away without thinking twice.

For that entire winter, he played on the computer at home ten to twelve hours a day. Snowstorms and sleet and blizzards and every combination of temperature and wind went on outside but for as long and as hard as he could, he concentrated on the screen.

Dasha eventually told him that it wasn’t healthy. ‘Get a girlfriend,’ she said. ‘Get out of the house.’ And he did have a few romances. Zoya, the daughter of the lawyer who had mounted an unsuccessful prosecution of the local authorities over Boris’s death, a girl who was ‘perfect for marriage’ (said Dasha) but who, when they made love, lay as still in bed as if she wasn’t breathing. And Aljena, a ‘slut’ (said Katerina) who wanted Dmitri to take her only to the two best restaurants in town and not to the cafés that ‘any other boy could afford’ (said Aljena). But neither Zoya nor Aljena lasted long. To truly excel—to be as great as Mikhail Botvinnik or Vasily Smyslov and to die content after an autumn twilight surrounded by grandchildren and a long dynasty of dogs—it was necessary to pare back one’s life to its essentials, to its defining rubric. A woman, for the time being, could only be a distraction, not something he actually required. What he required was perfection: perfection of mind, its precise and indelible rewiring.

And he might have achieved it too, had his body not let him down, if the world was not so cosmically cruel a place as to sow within his success the seeds of his eventual destruction. The pain began as an ache along the ridge of his right index finger, a sometimes twinge. It was his mouse hand. Of course he ignored it for a long time, believing that he could simply battle through.

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But after two months the pain was crippling. He could play for an hour, no more, then his hand refused to obey and his neck and shoulders joined the protest, entering into sharp and agonising spasms that left him wailing in his chair. The doctor, whose name was Borodin, diagnosed de Quervain’s syndrome or Dupuytren’s contracture: he wasn’t certain. But whichever it was, it was an injury of repetitive strain, and it would not heal until Dmitri ceased his gaming—and perhaps not even then.

And so Dmitri spent a week playing left-handed, but it was terrible; he could not keep his concentration, and he gave away money in a string of losing sessions that left him questioning everything he knew about the game and also the nature of his soul. What you do is who you are, he heard on a television program, and who is a losing poker player but a nobody—a wholly vacant space?

He drove to the spot where his father had drowned. By the river, the air had a startling freshness, sharp, cool, gusty. He walked along the bank, away from the swimming spot, to the place where they’d pulled Boris from the water, the spot where a worker from the slaughterhouse had tried to perform CPR. Then he cried, the first time since the day of the funeral. Strictly, it wasn’t sadness about his father, but sadness about change; the fact that nothing stayed the same, that the water that went by here was water never seen again.

He went home then and did not touch his computer. Instead, he began to frequent the cafés that Aljena had thought so commonplace. There, he read books and he smoked. In the afternoons he went to see films. It was, he knew, a search for meaning. Slowly, he had transformed himself into nothing, but now he would make something of himself, first by consuming the great Russian novels and movies, the achievements that had made his country what it was.

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Three months into this, the pain in his hand had almost gone. Traces remained, little stings, but he saw them as useful reminders. In this period, he used his computer only once, transferring his winnings ($537,502) from the poker site to accounts at Troika Dialog and Rosbank. And he met a girl, Lilia; or rather he re-met her—she had gone to his school, they had once performed chemistry experiments together. Thus he found contentment again, in Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Eisenstein and Lilia. It was a very good few months for him, lost days of books and conversation and sex, and when Lilia said it was time for her to return to Moscow (she was studying European history at the State Linguistic University) he decided that he loved her and that he would go too.

So they moved into a rented apartment near the city centre, Lilia going to school while Dmitri sat in Moscow cafés, reading The First Circle and Life and Fate while contemplating taking a course himself, in mathematics.

It was when entering one of these cafés that he bumped into the casino manager, who was rushing to meet a new player, and who spoke over his shoulder, holding the door open. ‘Dmitri, you are in Moscow! You should have told us! Do you have somewhere to stay? Take my card. Join us at the game.’

But he didn’t play. He went to talk to a professor of mathematics, a specialist in game theory at the State Technical University who was very busy, who didn’t have time to talk except to say that Dmitri could enrol only once he had taken the department’s admissions test, held on the twelfth of June. Dmitri explained that he didn’t want to do undergraduate studies, that he wanted to do original research. He explained a concept he had been thinking about, how a player facing only one opponent could fashion a style that was mathematically unexploitable.

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‘What you are describing is already known,’ said the professor. ‘Take the test and do your undergraduate work first.’ Disappointed, Dmitri went to the university’s bookstore and purchased the textbook used in the game theory course. It was true, the strategy he had theorised was called the Von Bormann function. There were many other things too, formal definitions for plays and approaches that he felt his gut understood. This excited him: the fact that he had come to these conclusions not through science but by natural mind. There were other theories too, axioms and functions, equilibriums and values, which were new to him, that he began to think about how to exploit.

That evening, after taking Lilia to dinner, he went back to the casino, to the poker game with the businessmen.

‘I played all night, Daniel. At 7 a.m., when the table broke, I had made a hundred thousand dollars. The following night, I made thirty-four thousand and the night following that, one hundred and forty-five. Since then I have been playing all over the world, sometimes in very tough games, sometimes in very loose games with maniacs who have a lot of money. Now I live in America in an enormous house with my wife, my daughters and my mother and sister.

‘But why do I tell you this? Why do I tell you my story? It is because I am wondering, Daniel, I am wanting to know what you are doing at my table. You are not a rich businessman. It is obvious you cannot afford the money in front of you. I do not say this aggressively, or arrogantly, or with strategic intent, but tell me, my friend, because you look like an honest man, you have honest eyes—what is going to happen to you when you lose?’

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