Chess Grandmaster Plots Credit Strategy

Derivatives Strategy, January 2001 || Vol.6, No.1

By Nina Mehta

Credit derivatives attract a lot of brainy types, but Anjelina Belakovskaia may be the first chess star to set her sights on the business. An international grandmaster since 1993, when she was 24, the Russian-born strategist is a three-time U.S. Women’s Chess Champion and has twice led the U.S. Women’s Olympic Chess Team. Last month, she also slammed shut her last textbook on volatility theory when she graduated from the masters program in mathematical finance at New York University’s Courant Institute.

Now she’s looking for a job in credit derivatives.

Why? Call it the native appeal of chess. “Like in chess, everybody sees the same pieces of information,” she says. “Everyone sees the same prices for the underlying instrument, and the structures people create at different institutions are the different games—but someone’s always winning, and someone else is losing. You have to evaluate all the information, create the strategy, execute it, manage your risk, and it doesn’t matter how strong is your belief you’re right—you have to be sure you don’t lose all the money of the company.” And, she adds, you must be fast.

Belakovskaia’s arrival at the doorstep of the credit markets was roundabout. In 1990, she won $900 in prize money (roughly her salary for 10 years) for playing on the winning U.S.S.R. team in the World University Chess Championship. She was invited to the World Open in Philadelphia the following year. “I didn’t want to go,” she confesses. “I wanted to buy a car, a new model #9 Zhiguli.” But her father tabled her vehicular plans and former world chess champion Mikhail Tal, a.k.a. the Wizard of Riga, helped her finagle a plane ticket—no mean feat back then, even for a chess great.

The border police allowed Belakovskaia to leave Mother Russia with only $100 (her father lugged home the rest of her booty in a suitcase). Stateside, she borrowed funds to pay the tournament’s $215 entrance fee, later selling her chess books and travel chess set to repay the loan. Then she ditched her return flight.

Five dollars a game

Belakovskaia’s conversation is a solid brick of Russian forthrightness and hardscrabble optimism. “I thought this was a cool country, land of opportunities,” she remembers. “Everyone lives in houses, has cars and exploits their skills and abilities to fulfill dreams. I thought, ‘I am young. I should try it.’” Soon enough, she says, she’d heard about the alfresco chess scene in New York’s Washington Square Park.

Once there, an older Russian lent her his seat and board and taught her to say “five dollars a game” in English. She won two games; afterwards, people played for just $2. The first day, she pocketed $36. The second day, $30. The third, zilch—there were no comers.

So she ran through a string of jobs to fund her travels to chess meets. She worked in small firms as a foreign exchange trader (successful) and stock trader (less successful), as a watermelon-seller and sandwich girl. She provided live Internet commentary for the 1997 chess match between Garry Kasparov and IBM’s Deep Blue II, and acted in the movie “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” using her earnings to pay a lawyer to get her a green card.

She also opened two chess schools in Brooklyn (separated by a forced sojourn to what was then Yugoslavia to help the national chess team win a division title). Ultimately, she taught chess to 1,000 public-school kids in Brooklyn, and her smitten students—impressed by her tight clothes and tutelage—wrote to Mattel to suggest the toy maker create a chess-playing doll called “Anjelina 2000, the Barbie with Beauty and Brains.”

Belakovskaia takes all this tumult in stride. Fueled by the thrill of new challenges, she had stopped playing in tournaments when she entered the NYU program. She still plays simultaneous games for fun, facing 15 to 25 boards at once, and she spars on the Internet. But her eyes are focused on structured products, credit derivatives, and fixed-income and equities trading. A plum job: structuring and pricing emerging-market basket default swaps. Of course, she admits, she’s also heard tell of a bank chess league.