PAWN SHOP; UNCONVENTIONAL CHESS GURU SHOWS THAT YOU'RE NEVER TOO YOUNG TO LEARN A GAME AS OLD AS TIME.

Byline: Glenn Gaslin Daily News Staff Writer

Max Iscakis, 5, the future of one of the world's most ancient and revered strategy games, reaches into his mouth and removes a wad of purple bubble gum.

He catches one end between his teeth and stretches the rest out, out away from his face, twisting and twisting the moist elastic. He pulls it high above the heads of white wood-carved bishops and knights and pawns. He marches it across an empty field of checkered squares and into enemy territory, sneaking it past the black pawns. The attack ends when the gum runs out, above the head of a black rook, faceless defender of the king.

The chess teacher, a long and lanky man named David Esser, does not see this move. Or if he does, he does not care.

``Never,'' he is saying, standing before a large flat magnetic chess board, waving a pool cue at his eight pupils, ``never have I seen six pawns in the third rank in a grand-master game!''

Max, too, has never seen such a thing. But then, he just started playing chess a few weeks ago. He's 5. He's not a hard-core student of philosophy and strategy, and he hasn't taught the game for the past decade like the man with the pool cue has.

No, Max is a kid. A modern kid. A kid born 1,400 years after the first known version of chess. He and his peers have Nintendo and Nickelodeon to keep them busy. He lives in a world of kinetic, blinking entertainment and knowledge, a world where the crude analog motion of royalty across a piece of cardboard seems ancient, old-school, from another world.

But with the help of passionate teachers, a giant computer and, strangely enough, an ultramodern card game, chess has a future. Not only inside Esser's intellectual clubhouse, a cottage of sorts on the edge of Topanga Canyon called Gym for the Mind, but in classrooms and homes and on the Internet. The classic and classically difficult game is even getting more widespread and younger.

Just ask Max. He's at exactly the right age to begin playing, experts say.

In March, a French 14-year-old became the youngest grand master (the highest level of competition) in history. Last month, several Los Angeles high school chess clubs earned trophies at a national tournament. Youth enrollment in the U.S. Chess Federation, the game's governing body, has increased 700 percent in the last five years.

And the recent victory of IBM's Deep Blue over human champ Garry Kasparov adds a sense of urgency to Esser's mission, to teach kids, to give them a place to play.

Inside the house lined with philosophy books, a fan blows air from the kitchen into the main gathering room, the classroom. Max puts the gum back in his mouth. Somebody else asks about that last move that Kasparov made against the computer, a move that perhaps he could make later. Esser stares at the board, at the last series of moves the world's best player made against perhaps the smartest computer on Earth.

``We're looking at chess genius!'' the chess teacher tells his pupils, his eyes wild, his arms in the air. ``And I don't understand a thing that's going on!''

The road to chess

Consider the life of Nick Benavides: He plays.

Sure, the 10-year-old goes to school, studies and all that, but, like many kids his age, he takes every opportunity the modern world offers him to compete.

He plays basketball, he plays tennis, and he plays soccer.

He hunts digital dinosaurs with a game called Turok on his Nintendo 64, the most advanced video game system out there.

He commands fantasy-realm armies in the PC strategy simulation Warcraft.

And he spends hours and hours on the decade's most pervasive gaming trend: role-playing cards. He collects the complex, ever-growing decks of Magic: The Gathering, which more resembles Dungeons & Dragons than slap jack. Unlike most card games, it requires skill, thought and mental organization. (You know, like chess.)

He builds customized Magic decks, hundreds of cards deep and designed to wage war against his friends. He structures armies. He casts spells. He creates and destroys entire realms of reality.

Sometimes he gets on the Internet to read about Magic cards.

And, on top of it all, he plays chess.

Three or four times a week, at Gym for the Mind or at home with his dad, he steps up to the ancient battlefield of the chessboard.

``It uses your mind more,'' he explains. ``So does Turok, though. I like Turok a lot, but I get stuck on the second level.''

Video games such as Turok and Doom, he says, offer a challenge similar to chess's logic puzzles and long-term war plans.

The difference rests in both reality and imagination. On one hand, the action of chess (and, indeed, Magic) takes place inside your mind as you think through the next several moves.

On the other hand, chess is real. Kids can touch the pieces, pick them up and enjoy the tactile sensation, says Douglas Rushkoff, syndicated columnist, kid-culture analyst and author of the book ``Playing the Future.''

``Now that computers do everything,'' he says, ``kids and adults are desperate for real objects with iconic value.''

He argues that the increasingly chaotic and instant nature of youthdom - ranging from video gorefest Doom to sticky playstuff Gak to ``Star Trek'' plot lines - will define the future of technology and society.

But not everything kids love plugs into the wall, thankfully, and chess should survive into the future.

``Chess pieces are representational,'' he says, ``but their physicality is quite appealing.''

Sport of kings

Now consider the life of a teacher, charged with bringing chess into the modern world, making it relevant and interesting to 5-year-olds chewing bubble gum.

Esser used to believe that chess was the only thing a young mind needed. It was the only thing his mind needed. When the former nutritionist rediscovered the game in the '80s, he couldn't focus on anything else. It slowly took over his Gym for the Mind, the storefront he had initially designed around philosophy and exercise. But during a decade of teaching, his strategy has shifted.

``There's a danger in chess,'' he says now, offering a tour of his complex, the house he stocks with both strategy games and weight-lifting equipment. ``It's such a wonderful game that you need will power not to play it all day, every day.''

In the last few years, with the help of an organization called Chess in the Schools, retired teacher Hal Milner has been bringing ``the sport of chess'' into local classrooms, and recently organized tournaments for high school clubs. Last month, teams from Reseda and Monroe high schools took trophies home from the largest USCF tournament in history, in Knoxville, Tenn.

The best age to begin learning is somewhere between 5 and 8, says Beatriz Marinello, coordinator of the USCF's scholastic division. That's when the human brain develops the ability to focus long-term, she says, to problem solve, to mentally enact scenarios and strategies.

``Once the kids get exposed to the game, they learn the rules very quickly,'' says Marinello. ``Their problem-solving skills get better after a year.''

But today's kids have a hard time focusing on chess for a whole year, says Esser. Their brains feel the tugs of other games, other media, other images. His students used to drop out before the six months he believes it takes to learn to love the game.

So Esser uses Magic to entice them.

In a lively hourlong debate about a great game in chess history, Esser breathlessly replays the moves on the magnetic board, waving his pool cue, asking, ``Who can figure out checkmate in three moves?''

Those who deduce correctly win a set of Magic cards, as does the winner of the afternoon's round-robin chess tournament.

``Nothing prepares the mind to think like the game of chess,'' he insists. ``And Magic teaches imagination and creativity. It is infinite in its system of laws. It's almost chaos.''

Keeping 'em in check

It may not be the most glamorous sport in town, but chess happens in Los Angeles every day.

Some players log on to the Internet daily and attempt to checkmate somebody in Russia. Dedicated high school kids go head-to-head in lunchroom battles. Milner and others teach anxious students after school.

Every Thursday, a club that began as a group of passionate '60s aerospace engineers still meets in West Hills. Two dozen or so players - masters, experts and local chess heroes among them - come with their tournament-quality boards and clocks to do battle.

And inside Gym for the Mind on a Monday afternoon, eight kids study the recent Deep Blue-Kasparov games. Esser, pool cue in hand, explains how Kasparov's ultimate loss to a computer can be a learning opportunity: how to attack somebody stronger, smarter and faster than you, how a chess player can survive against impossible odds.

``Be patient,'' he tells young Max, who has been frustrated, who has lost game after game to older kids. ``You're 5 years old. You're supposed to lose.''

He points to another student, an 8-year-old.

``Dean will probably always beat you.''

Dean Schaffer turns around in his chair to face the youngest in class.

``The more you lose,'' Dean says, ``the better you get.''

The checkered past of chess

You can call chess a lot of things - difficult, mind-consuming, everlasting, a metaphor for love and war - but, please, don't call it boring. People have lost fingers over the friendly little matchup.

The seemingly simple board game has a history as strange, violent and odd as warfare itself, paralleling human progress and morals. For millennia, religious leaders have taken issue with chess' icons, its difficulty, its relation to war, its role in gambling and its knack for stealing hours and hours away from a day.

But kings, philosophers, popes and IBM supercomputers have also recognized it as a brain-builder, a morality teacher and just plain something to do.

With help from chess guru Bill Wall, compiler of an encyclopedic Web site on the subject (www.txdirect.net/users/wall), here are a few highlights from the game's oddest movements through history:

Sometime before 531: A board game involving the four elements of warfare (elephants, horses, chariots and soldiers) is invented in India and then introduced to Persia.

800: Chess becomes popular among the leaders of Islam, despite Mohammed's earlier objection to the grave images on the pieces.

820: Chess introduced in Spain, Italy and Russia.

900: Players in India take competition so seriously that they wager their fingers.

1005: Chess banned in Egypt because of that whole ``grave images'' problem and associations with gambling. Boards are burned.

1027: Canute, king of England and Denmark, goes to Rome for a while and learns chess. Shortly and for centuries to come, it becomes the ``in'' game for intellectuals, royalty and various other hipsters.

1061: Cardinal Damiani of Ostin forbids clergy to play chess, arguing that it takes too much of their valuable worshiping time.

1300s: King Charles V of France forbids chess.

1495: Some victims of the Inquisition are forced to stand as figures in giant games of living chess. They get killed when their spaces are captured.

1575: After a plague wipes out much of Cremona, Italy, locals blame the evils of ``games'' and ban all but chess.

1652: First coffeehouse opened in England, where, beginning a long tradition, folks play chess. Fingers, however, are rarely lost.

1649: Chess has been banned in Russia for centuries, and Czar Alexei sentences those caught playing to whipping and prison.

1786: Ben Franklin writes ``The Morals of Chess,'' which dwells on the more academic, mind-soothing properties of the game rather than the finger-wagering parts.

1800s: Chess is huge. All kinds of people are playing in clubs, taverns, tournaments and such all over the world. Puritans don't like it, though. Formal competition heats up between countries.

1927: The first World Team Championship run by the World Chess Federation held in London. Hungary wins.

1940: Players from the Soviet Union dominate (for decades) international tournaments, bringing the game into a new level of competitiveness.

1963: American chess hero Bobby Fischer, age 20, wins the U.S. Championship with 11 straight wins and 10 whole fingers.

1970: In a bizarre tournament titled U.S.S.R. vs. the Rest of the World, the Soviet Union wins.

1977: In ``Star Wars,'' playing a form of holographic chess involving animated monsters, android R2D2 throws a game against Chewbacca, fearing the Wookie's wrath.

1978: Iran is the only Arab nation to participate in international chess tournaments.

1979: Ayatollah Khomeini takes over Iran, bans chess.

1983: In a movie called ``Wargames,'' a rebellious teen played by Matthew Broderick breaks into a government computer and, refusing its offer to play ``a nice game of chess,'' opts to engage in ``global thermonuclear war'' and put the entire planet in danger.

1988: ``Chess,'' a lavish musical about a bratty American chess champ and his Russian rival, opens on Broadway with lyrics by Tim Rice and music by ABBA.

April 1996: In an attempt to close down gay-oriented groups in schools, the Utah legislature bans all high school extracurricular organizations. Utah becomes the only state in which school chess clubs are illegal.

March 1997: Etienne Bacrat, a 14-year-old French kid, is named the planet's youngest chess ``grand master,'' an official World Chess Federation title earned only by the best of the best.

May 1997: For the first time ever, a computer (IBM's Deep Blue) defeats an international champion human (Garry Kasparov) in a chess match. Thankfully, no fingers are lost.

CAPTION(S):

7 Photos, Box

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) Dean Schaffer, 8, at Gym for the Mind.

(2) Reseda High School Chess Club member Jeffrey Mickelson plots his next move during the West Valley Chess Club tournament. Reseda High did well in the recent U.S. Chess Federation tournament.

(3) West Valley Chess Club tournament player Homer Monteros focuses on the game.

Terri Thuente/Daily News

(4) Gym for the Mind founder David Esser flanked by chess students Jose-Luis Cordoba, 11, left, Harrison Foster, 11, Rebecca Holtzman, 12, Steven Holtzman, 12, Harry Glass, 6, Peter Alison, 9, Jonathan Gibbs, 11, Cody Cohen, 10, Dean Schaffer, 8, Mehrdad Hooshmand, 12, Nick Benavides, 10 and Noah Pasternak, 11.

John McCoy/Daily News

(5) Chaba Mehes, left, records his move while opponent Dana Jackson studies the board at a West Valley Chess Club tournament.

Terri Thuente/Daily News

(6) No caption (Hand moving a chess piece)

(7) Garry Kasparov is seen on a video screen pondering a move against IBM's computer, Deep BLue, while chess fans look on.

Associated Press 

Box: The checkered past of chess (See text)