Played at high speeds, chess sounds like fencing. There’s the shuffle and thump, the high, resonant clacking when pieces collide. It’s a frantic, musical and decidedly vicious affair. With all the mulling removed, the game reveals itself for what it is: a duel to the death.

Kassa Korley excels at all kinds of chess, but particularly this one, the clock-slapping endgame known as “blitz.” Last Saturday afternoon in the tournament room of Manhattan’s famous Marshall Chess Club, he beat Raven Sturt, an expert-rated player ranked 11th in the country in his age group, in under three minutes three times in a row.

To be fair, though, Korley is ranked seventh in the country in the same 14-and-under age group. And he admits that his friend often wins. The pair have risen together through the chess rankings in the last few years, jumping 700 ranking points to above the 2000 level without coaches. They credit the games they play against each other for their success. But Kassa’s 2119 rating is particularly astonishing for a young, self-taught player.

“Kassa’s a superstar,” said Richard Rodriguez, 15, as he watched Korley greedily scooping up his opponent’s pieces. “Not to long ago, he was a fish” — chess slang for mediocre player — “and overnight he became expert-rated.”

Korley and Sturt make for something of an odd couple. Sturt is quiet and reserved, with a philosophical bent. Korley is loquacious and at ease, with perfectly molded dreadlocks stretching down his back, Nike Airs bouncing under his chair and a Bob Marley cap cocked just so. He’s a natural-born ambassador for his sport, ready with phrases like “what drives me in chess is the beauty of the game.” They spend most weekends here at the Marshall, playing two-day tournament games, with two 2-1/2-hour games per day. In the break between games, they go around the corner to the basketball courts on West 4th Street and shoot hoops.

The basketball doesn’t help their chess game and, at their current level, probably neither does the blitz. It might even hurt. (“One time, I went to this tournament in Pittsburgh — it was the nationals —and I played blitz like 50 times before my round, and I lost in 15 moves,” Korley said. “This was like three years ago. I felt really bad.”) But they balance out an undercurrent here at the Marshall that could prove more dangerous than a poorly thought-out move.

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Madness hangs in the air at the Marshall Chess Club. It’s in the faintly institutional stink of the unwashed elders who gather every weekend, sometimes every day, to feed the addiction they caught in their youth. It’s in the audacious dreams of the young up-and-comers, who make the place a second address because they think they might have something that nobody else has. And most of all, it’s in the ghost of Bobby Fischer, the mad genius of American chess, who played here often and has been dead less than a month. His full-page New York Times obituary is pinned to the bulletin board at the top of the stairs, one of the few things in the creaking building not yet touched by age’s yellow.

Fischer, to date the only World Champion to hail from the United States, was a Cold War hero who made chess cool for a whole generation of Americans. Much ink has been spilled over the effects that his descent into mental illness — marked by anti-Semitic rants on the radio and an unfortunate post -9/11 interview in which he said that America had it coming — had on the game. But at the Marshall, he is clearly still an idol.

He learned his chops in his home borough of Brooklyn but got his reputation in Manhattan, playing the devotees who gathered in Washington Square Park, at the Marshall and at the since-closed Manhattan Chess Club. He was holding his own against the best of them by the time he was 12. At 14, he became the youngest player in history with a master’s rating, 2231.

At a table next to the one where Fischer – his rating then in the stratospheric 2700s — sat in 1965 to participate in Cuba’s 4th Capablanca Memorial tournament via teletype machine, Korley and Sturt retrace Sturt’s former victories from a folder unironically marked “great chess games.” Many players retrace old games to identify mistakes, but the exercise in this case evokes a Native American warrior showing off his scalp belt.

There is a unique arrogance that comes with being 14 years old, and a weird power in straddling the fault line between childhood and adulthood that exceeds the capabilities of either realm. Korley and Sturt seem acutely aware of how fleeting that power is.

“Kids learn faster than adults,” Sturt said. “They are just better at learning.”

Korley agreed. “Their minds are like a sponge. Soak it all up.”

Both are now facing the possibility that their child-mind sponges might have reached maximum absorbency. They’ve begun devoting more time to reading chess books and pondering the expensive possibility of getting chess coaches.

“At least 95 percent of the kids we play have them,” Korley said. The adults, of course, don’t because there is little to be gained. “I don’t want to say it’s too late, but they have jobs and have more going on in their lives.”

Korley worries about how little time he has before this happens to him. “Right now, I’m really focused on my improvement because I realize, in a couple years, I’m going to have a job, too. I mean, I’m 14, I’ll be 21 before I know it. I’m going to college. I’ll have to major in something. I’m not going to have time anymore. So these next few years are really crucial leading up to college, the make-or-break years. If I don’t see rapid progress, I can’t take this up for a living.”

Korley alternates between playing down his desire to be a professional chess player and admitting that he does, indeed, want to be the next Bobby Fischer. Perhaps that’s because someone who admits the latter runs the risk of becoming, well, the next Bobby Fischer.

In one breath, he will brag that the he held his own against the chess gods out in Washington Square Park when he was nine, earned their respect and comparisons to that troubled American master. In the next, he will assure you that “this is not the only thing I do. Not even close. I have so many interests.” As a freshman, he is a starter on the JV basketball team at Dalton. “I think it’s really great that I have parents who aren’t chess freaks. A lot of parents push their children too hard, and that’s why they don’t stick with it. I could quit tomorrow, and they wouldn’t care.”

But Korley himself clearly would. His eyes are on the prize. America is overdue for another World Champion, and why shouldn’t it be him?

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Kassa Korley could one day be the Barack Obama of chess: graceful, personable, startlingly smart but graced with the social skills not to scare people with his intelligence, verbally gifted, of a mixed and global heritage that reads as “African American” in the U.S. but of course is much more complicated. He has triple citizenship: Ghana, Denmark, U.S. It was his step grandfather, a master-level player who he visits in Denmark every summer and every other Christmas, who first sharpened his skills.

Bobby Fischer’s downfall came from his treating the world as if it had no borders – defying American sanctions against Yugoslavia in 1992 in order to rematch his old rival from the Cold War days, and in so doing becoming an international fugitive. If he ranted against the U.S. in his later years, it should be remembered that his native country’s foreign policy forced him into hiding and exile.

In contrast, Korley exemplifies a new kind of globalism in which people move effortlessly between continents and cultures. His father, a photographer, has three numbers on his professional website, with country codes representing Jamaica, Denmark and the U.S. His mother lives in Harlem. The world may be flat, but his world is flatter than most.

And at the end of the day, it’s this flatness that’s most alluring about chess as a sport, the promise that the chess board, with it’s mirrored sets of identical pieces, is the world’s closest thing to the Platonic idea of an even playing field. In Russia, Gary Kasparov’s ability to dominate this field has helped give him political power to stand up to Vladimir Putin. What could such a star do to today’s United States?

Korley is not the only teenager hanging around the Marshall trying to find out. But he is certainly one to keep an eye on. “I always like the opportunity to play someone better than me,” he said. “Because I have nothing to lose.”