GG Kostadinov

Petar Kostadinov took a chess master title in Sofia at nineteen and walked away from it at twenty-two, publicly for backgammon and privately, as he admits, for the dice he had never had. He reached the elite within five years on nightly study, refining long after the flat has gone quiet; his girlfriend judges the length of a session by the coffee cups.

He left chess because he could see the ceiling from where he was standing. Here he is not convinced there is one, and it has made him the most single-minded player of his generation. He is polite, brief, and not interested in you beyond what you do on your turn. The discipline transferred, he says. The ceiling did not.