Floridian: That pawn is going, going, gone!

That pawn is going, going, gone!

Tony Rook has become a player in big-league chess by bringing something new to the game: He's a play-by-play announcer.

By DAVE SCHEIBER, Times Staff Writer

In the cerebral world of chess, the name Tony Rook has suddenly become an international sensation.

He's not a grandmaster or new child prodigy on the chess scene. He's not even much of a player.

But Rook, a.k.a. Tony Heinz of Portland, Maine, has given the professional game something it never knew it was missing until now:

Play-by-play announcing.

Barely six months ago, he was a young information technology entrepreneur suffering from a case of career checkmate.

"I'd worked with computers for 10 years, and run a few Internet companies and I was just feeling burned out," says Rook, 31. "So I just decided to take a leave of absence, and figure out what I wanted to do next."

He never guessed that his next move would make him, almost overnight, the Al Michaels of chess.

But here he is: calling the action -- and frequent inaction -- of a different world-class chess match several times a week, getting rave reviews from seasoned chess champions and drawing listeners from more than 100 countries.

And he does it without even being at the matches.

Rook, you see, broadcasts over the Internet from the guest bedroom of his Maine condo.

Surrounded by a complex of transmitters and his trusty desktop PC, he follows each move of a given match by logging onto the Internet Chess Club (www.chessclub.com). Officials from that site always monitor each development in a match, and a chess board graphic instantly displays the moves on screen.

Rook then re-creates the showdowns and atmosphere like the old-time radio baseball announcers, who often did their play-by-play by dramatizing Teletype updates.

Now he's even got a color commentator in the role of John Madden: international chess grandmaster John Fedorowicz, one of the top players in the United States.

But Fedorowicz isn't at the matches, either. Nor is he sitting with Rook in Maine.

He's in his New York City condo, logged onto the same chess club site to follow the game. Root patches Fedorowicz into the broadcast over a high-speed connection, and the two banter back and forth like it's Monday Night Football.

They may be a thousand miles -- or an ocean -- away from the games. But over the Internet, it sounds like they're in a board-side booth, as with a recent duel between superstar Garry Kasparov and chess computer Deep Junior at the New York Athletic Club:

TR: "We've got a great move on the board, John! Knight to g4. Check!"

JF: "Well, we have to see how the computer wants to play this . . . This should be a pretty lively game!"

TR: "We do have a new move from the computer -- move 14 for white is h3.

JF: "Here we go -- it seems like whenever the computer doesn't know what to do, it plays h3. Kasparov's gotta like that!"

Rook also has a "sideline correspondent" named Hangin' (after Hangin' Pawn) at matches -- to phone in additional details, sometimes from the nearest men's room so he doesn't disturb the players.

"He'll call in from a cell phone at live events and go, 'Oh! You wouldn't believe what Kasparov is doing. He's pulling at his face right now. He's FREAKING OUT."'

All this transpires over Rook's own Web site, www.chess.fm, where an animated likeness greets visitors each morning with daily announcements -- moving its mouth in synch with the real Rook's voice.

The gears began to churn for Rook's brainstorm soon after he took his leave of absence. A chess hobbyist, he remembers sitting on the porch and commenting to his wife Erin, a marketing director at a ski resort: "I can't believe nobody in the world has a chess radio show."

Rook decided to pitch the idea to National Public Radio. He was met by a yawn. "I wasn't surprised I guess," he says. "So I talked it over with Erin, and she thought it was absolutely crazy, too, and I put in a shelf for a few weeks."

Then one day, while taking a shower, another idea hit him. A huge Internet chess event was coming up: U.S. national champion Larry Christiansen vs. a computer named Chessmaster 9000. He jumped out of the shower and looked at the calendar. "I realized I had four days to pull something off, so I grabbed the phone," he says.

The first call was to the president of the Internet Chess Club, where competitors of all levels around the world meet on the Web to play. Rook described how to wanted to use the club's server to broadcast the match. But the president wanted to think it over.

Undeterred, Rook promptly called the makers of Chessmaster 9000.

"I said, 'I've got this wild idea,' and I gave them the exact same spiel," he says. "And they said, 'Well, if it's okay with the Internet Chess Club, we'll be okay.' And I said, 'Oh, they're tickled to death!"'

The ploy worked. The chess machine makers contacted the club president and decided it was worth a try -- as long as Rook didn't do any advertising during the match.

"I was ecstatic," he says.

It was a Thursday now. The match was only 48 hours away. And Rook needed help to make his plan work. Fortunately, he had forged Internet friendships with chess lovers all over the world. He called a pal in Hungary to serve as commentator, tapped an acquaintance in New Mexico to tackle technical problems, coined his new surname, Rook.

By 9 a.m. Saturday -- an hour before the match -- all was set.

"Then, out of the blue, 15 minutes before we go on, my phone rings -- it's (chess champ) Larry Christiansen!" says Rook. "He's heard what I'm doing and wants to know if I'll put (grandmasters) Joel Benjamin and Susan Polgar on the air. It was amazing."

The first broadcast drew 83 listeners. But by the second match that night, the word was out.

"We maxed out our server and crashed it," Rook says. "The same thing happened in the third and fourth matches on Sunday. All told, we logged over 4,000 audio hours of listeners from all over the world -- places like India, Pakistan, even Afghanistan."

Rook ditched his $19-a-month Internet provider and shelled out thousands for a new server that could handle the heavy Web traffic. "I maxed out my credit cards and emptied my bank account to keep things going," he says.

But a funny thing happened. Both the Internet Chess Club and a competitor realized there was a hit in the making, and vied to form a partnership. Rook chose the Chess Club, which picked up the costs and agreed to pay the play-by-play man a salary.

Rook is now president of Chess.FM Media Group, overseeing production and advertising, and running a site that has become the CNN for the chess set with news, updates, features and more.

Since the partnership began three months ago, Rook is busier than ever. For the match between Kasparov and Deep Junior, 15,400 people logged on to listen. In January, 81,000 chess fans -- from beginners to champs -- listened to Rook and Fedorowicz.

"It's not yet turning a profit, but we're bringing in revenue and we're still growing," Rook says. "I've gotten thousands of e-mails from chess fans who love what we're doing. It blows my mind. I mean, my wife really thought I'd gone off the deep end. But now, she just shakes her head in amazement."