Last month, in Moscow, Fabiano Caruana played chess for two weeks at the Candidates Cup, whose winner, each year, goes on to face the sitting world champion. By the end, the twenty-three-year-old American—born in Miami, raised in Brooklyn, with no formal education after middle school other than chess-studying stints in Madrid, Budapest, Lugano, and elsewhere—was one game away from earning the right to challenge Magnus Carlsen, the twenty-five-year-old Norwegian who has been the best chess player in the world for much of the past six years, and who, in 2014, achieved the highest chess rating in history.

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