Bob Ferguson, chess master and Washington's next governor, preps for Trump rematch

At West Berlin’s chess championship in 1984, Danish master Klaus Berg faced off against a nerdy-looking teen from Seattle called Bobby Ferguson.

The match lasted only 19 moves. Ferguson suddenly sacrificed his queen, throwing her deep into enemy territory to check Berg’s king.

“This guy gave up his queen. Why?" said Duane Polich, publisher of the Northwest Chess magazine, and a friend and supporter of Ferguson's political career. He recently wrote an endorsement of Ferguson for governor in the magazine.

During an interview with KUOW, Polich recreated this 40-year-old match, which he said demonstrates Ferguson’s penchant for calculated risk.

Ferguson's opponent, Berg, would’ve looked about a dozen moves ahead and realized his king would get cornered in the cascade of maneuvers following the capture of Ferguson’s queen, Polich said.

Berg resigned. Ferguson’s risk paid off.

In the mid-80s, Ferguson was a rising chess master with the ability to beat three people at the same time while blindfolded. Not long after his victory over Berg, Ferguson decided not to pursue a career in competitive chess and set off on a path that would eventually take him into law and finally to the governor's mansion next year.

“If I had another life to live, I’d be a professional chess player,” Ferguson said. “I knew when I gave it up, I was better at chess than I was going to be at anything else I ever did with my life.”

Ferguson does not think chess has made him a better politician. A better lawyer, maybe. But he often uses chess as a metaphor for politics or life.

Past chess champ, future governor

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t’s hard not to see Ferguson's political career as one of calculated risks that have largely paid off, though Ferguson’s critics characterize them as power-hungry or punctuated with an obsession to win.

In 2017, as attorney general, Ferguson became a national figure (and a name on TIME Magazine’s 100 influential people list) when he made Washington state the first to sue the Trump administration over its travel ban. That same year, Ferguson wrote an op-ed comparing Trump’s first actions as president to the “King’s Gambit,” an aggressive chess opening that can only be countered with the right preparation, Ferguson said.

“If we're playing a game of chess, my job is to anticipate every move you make,” Ferguson told KUOW in a recent interview. “If you make a move that I did not anticipate, that's a five-alarm fire.”

Now, Trump has won a second chance at the presidency, and Washington is the only state in the nation seemingly immune to his influence.

While Trump picked up new votes in every state in November, he got roughly the same number of votes in Washington as he did in 2020. Even in Republican-heavy Congressional districts in central and southwest Washington, Trump’s handpicked candidates lost.

But Ferguson hasn’t revealed a legal strategy or an anti-Trump plan for his time as governor. He won’t automatically adopt an aggressive stance against the administration, he said during a post-election press conference. He’ll support the next attorney general, former U.S. Attorney Nick Brown, in lawsuits if Trump violates the Constitution or does something Ferguson thinks will harm Washingtonians or infringe on their rights.

Publicly, he’s not jumping to the hypothetical scenarios many liberals have, based on Trump’s comments or campaign promises. If he’s still thinking several moves ahead, he’s not revealing what he sees.

But to imagine what kind of governor he might be, it’s useful to look to his past as a politician and a chess player.

'Maybe I could be good at this'

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hen Bob Ferguson was 9, he saw a magnetic chess set in a catalog. He’s not totally sure why he asked for it for Christmas.

“I think I just liked the way the pieces looked, you know?" he said. "I don't think it was any more complicated than that.”

When he got the set, the first thing he did was put one of the knights in the toaster.

“It got burned to a crisp. I think I've still got it somewhere,” Ferguson said.

As he learned where the pieces should actually go, he felt an ineffable connection to the game – the rooks in particular, and how they moved, just made sense.

“I always knew where they belonged. I didn't have to think about it,” Ferguson said.

It could’ve ended at childhood curiosity, but Ferguson’s father Murray, a Boeing engineer, liked to encourage his kids’ interests. Murray would take his son to Boeing’s employee chess club, bring his papers, and sit in the back and work while Bob got beaten again and again by the adults.

“I’m pretty sure I lost every game that first year at the Boeing chess club,” Ferguson said.

But the chess club informally adopted him, and Ferguson began winning. Pretty soon, he was club champion. At 12, he played a 10-time Oregon state champion to a draw. His memory of that moment is clear.

“‘Whoa, wait a second,’” Ferguson thought. “‘Maybe I could be good at this.’”

Ferguson became obsessed, learning some Russian to read Russian chess magazines. He signed his name "Bobby F.," like his hero Bobby Fischer.

"I wasn't doing any schoolwork. If I had free time, I was playing chess," Ferguson said.

Ferguson won Washington’s state championship twice in the ‘80s, and traveled internationally, attaining a master rating that fewer than 1% of all tournament players reach.

“He can look a number of moves ahead and anticipate the permutations,” said Tom Ferguson, Bob’s older brother. “He's got that gift and the ability to hold a game in his mind.”

Ferguson’s actual course in life was foreshadowed even earlier than 9, and also tied to his father: His parents were committed and active Republicans, and Ferguson grew up with them throwing fundraisers in the home.

'They labeled me a Republican'

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oday, Bob Ferguson is the standard-bearer for the Washington State Democratic Party. But two decades ago, he was just an anti-establishment upstart. As a young Democrat, he fought his way onto the King County Council by knocking off longtime Democratic incumbent Cynthia Sullivan.

Ferguson started off as a small-government Democrat. He criticized light-rail overspending, and after he beat Sullivan, Ferguson voted with the Republicans to shrink the size of the council from 13 members to nine.

Democratic leadership did not welcome him in.

“They labeled me a Republican. I think the first three years in politics, every newspaper article referred to me as an ‘independent Democrat,’” Ferguson said.

Two years after he was first elected, Ferguson got redistricted into another tough race against another Democratic incumbent endorsed by the county executive and the mayor of Seattle. He won that election, too.

“There is nobody better at campaigning than Bob,” said Reagan Dunn, a Republican who served with him on King County Council in the ‘00s and ran against him for attorney general in 2012.

“If you remember 'Top Gun,' the first one, he's a little bit like the Iceman. He flies, no mistakes,” Dunn said. ”It's really hard to get a bead on him to make an attack.”

'The results speak for themselves'

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erguson’s critics would disagree, pointing out times such as last year when the Attorney General’s Office was fined for withholding evidence – or in 2016, when Ferguson had to let a lawyer go for allowing the state's expert witnesses to delete emails that should have been preserved.

It’s a trend that could stem from an overemphasis on winning at all costs, said Rob McKenna, Ferguson’s Republican predecessor as attorney general. McKenna met Ferguson when the young chess player was an undergrad considering a run for University of Washington student body president. The two are friends today.

“There's a school of thought that organizations take on the character of their leadership,” McKenna said. “Being very aggressive and demanding wins can result in people deciding to cut corners.”

Less charitable critics have villainized Ferguson as a calculating opportunist. Brandi Kruse, a right-wing podcaster, dressed up as Ferguson for Halloween this year – complete with a chess board.

“I today am dressed as a power-hungry attorney general and all of you are just pawns in my pursuit of power,” she said, knocking over chess pieces on the board. Ferguson would go on to win the governor’s race days later.

(Ferguson says it drives him “a little nuts” when people in media or films denigrate the use of pawns. “‘Pawns are the soul of chess,’” he said, quoting French composer and chess player François-André Danican Philidor.)

Ferguson usually responds to criticism by pointing to restitution and settlement money he’s won for the state and Washingtonians: nearly $260 million for victims, over $500 million to consumers and debtors, more than $1.5 billion to state, tribes, and local governments, and over $300 million to grow the Attorney General’s Office.

“What I'd say to critics, who I don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about, but – the results speak for themselves,” Ferguson said.

Controlling the center

In the meantime, Ferguson has consolidated support from the state Democratic Party’s boisterous left wing. This year, progressives stayed relatively quiet when Ferguson rolled out plans to spend $100 million to hire police and backed away from his 2021 stance on decriminalizing drugs.

“In chess, you like to control the center of the board as soon as possible,” said Kamau Chege, the director of the Washington Community Alliance. “He read the board one way and moved forward on a priority that I think he still believes – which is, people should get treatment for their drug problems. We shouldn't be spending tens of thousands of dollars a year keeping them in jail cells. But the board changed.”

Ferguson likely saw public safety as a potential weakness in his run for governor against a former cop and Republican congressman, Dave Reichert.

So, using millions of dollars in fundraising he’s accumulated over years of preparation for this year’s race, he flooded the airwaves with ads about Washington’s lowest-per-capita police staffing and his plans to fix it.

Those promises to fund police more heavily, however, may be tough to realize: The state is staring down a budget gap of several billion dollars in the coming years that the next administration need to backfill.

Ferguson has signaled openness to progressive priorities like limiting rent increases, but he also wants to work with Republicans to introduce legislation. He will likely be a more hands-on, involved executive than his predecessor, Jay Inslee, according to McKenna.

When it comes to Trump, it’s not clear how much Ferguson can do under current Washington law, according to Hugh Spitzer, a law professor at the University of Washington. As Ferguson has said in press conferences, the president has a lot of power.

“Bottom line is, the governor needs to look for a statute for his or her powers, and I bet we're going to see some legislative proposals to beef up the governor's powers to protect people in this state,” Spitzer said.

'I’m thinking about that game, and trying to win'

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rime years for chess players are a lot younger than prime years for politicians, and Ferguson hasn’t played in a tournament since he was in his 30s. (He’ll be 60 in February.)

In 2019 at a campaign fundraiser, he took on 18 players at once, beat 14, played three to a draw, and lost to one. He told a reporter it was more exhausting than a day at the office.

But Ferguson still plays every night before bed, closing the door to his office so his family knows not to disturb him. He sits, sometimes with a bowl of ice cream, but no music or other accompaniment, and plays 10-minutes-per-player speed chess on chess.com.

It clears his mind better than anything else in his busy life.

“If I'm playing a game of chess, I don't think about anything else,” Ferguson said. “One-hundred-and-ten percent, I'm thinking about that game, and trying to win that game.”