Waitzkin has the extraordinary capacity to master multiple arts at an expert/championship level.
Josh Waitzkin became an International Master of Chess in 1993 and won the U.S. Junior Chess championship that year and again in 1994. Chess isn’t his only interest. He loves sports and grew up playing baseball, basketball, and football, and he also loves to fish. But chess is what Waitzkin was known for as a youth.
Waitzkin as a child prodigy (photo joshwaitzkin.com)
He first noticed the game while walking with his mother in New York City’s Washington Square Park. He was six years old at the time and wanted to play chess with locals. He was good at it, too. His parents took notice and encouraged Josh to study the game with chess master Bruce Pandolfini.
By the time he was ten, Waitzkin played a game where a sacrifice was made of his queen and rook in exchange for a checkmate in six moves. While studying at NYC’s The Dalton School, he led the school’s chess team to seven national team championships between his third and ninth-grade years. Along the way, he snared eight individual titles.
In 1999, Waitzkin enrolled at Columbia University, and you would have thought he’d continue to make a splash in chess. That was not to be. He lost his love for the game and hasn’t played in a U.S. Chess Federation tournament since 1999.
So, that was nearly a quarter-century ago, and you would think his name would fall out of the limelight. Not so. Fred, his father, penned a book, Searching for Bobby Fischer: The Father of a Prodigy Observes the World of Chess. Published in 1993, the book is still among the Top 500-selling chess books on Amazon.com. The film Searching for Bobby Fischer (Paramount Pictures, 1993) is based on the book.
Rather than competing, the younger Waitzkin became an author, writing (among other titles) Attacking Chess: Aggressive Strategies, Inside Moves from the U.S. Junior Chess Champion (1995), and The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance (published 2007, and still a Top 10-selling chess book on Amazon.com). He also remained sports-active, focusing on Tai Chi Chuan (link to his Art of Learning book) and Jiu-Jitsu, where he holds U.S. national medals. He is a co-founder of The Marcelo Garcia Academy.
What’s next for Josh Waitzkin? It will definitely be something, not just “some thing” … but something. That’s who Waitzkin is and what he does.
