GG Berisha

Besnik Berisha coaches parkour to Tirana teenagers in a converted warehouse gym, having spent his own teens leaping between the city's rooftops with a camera crew of one, his cousin, whose footage eventually got him the job. He plays the way he moves: committed in mid-air, and no way back once the foot has left. The cube is where that shows. It goes over early, on how the board looks rather than on any count, and he will explain afterwards precisely what he saw even on the evenings when it was not there. He calls that playing forward. Everybody else calls it the reason his good nights and his bad ones come out the same size, which is the same sentence from a different direction. He plays for chips on the same terms and seems not to notice which way the stack is going. He plays almost entirely online, at night, against whoever is awake, and he has never once asked an opponent to slow down. He plays in Italian, the way half his generation in Tirana does, and sees nothing worth explaining in that.