Jude Acers, master of chess, begins by energetically calling himself the "greatest that ever lived." He does this with a straight face.

Wearing his signature red beret and tie-dyed tee-shirt, the dough-faced gamesman bobs and weaves in front of his audience of challengers behind their chess boards in the center of the gym at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, explaining the rules according to Jude.

Rule one: "Pretend that I'm in the next room with a giant ax," he says, bringing one hand down on the other. "If when you touch a piece, you don't move it, I'm going to chop your hand off." The pretend violence gets a laugh from the 20 maximum-security inmates. But Jude goes on, plowing through the irony like a talking Sherman tank.

Rule two: "Write [your moves down]. Psychologically, you don't want a record of your stupidity, so you play better."

Rule three: "Imitate games by masters." He has brought the "greatest chess books of all time," for the inmates to study. But they won't have time, because after stalking the crowd, Jude chooses his first victim, 30-year-old James Wallace, who, when asked, will gladly give the impression that he is the greatest chess player who ever went to prison for robbery.

Jude simultaneously faces a score of inmates in one of the oldest, most elite board games in history. At 1:19 p.m., the match is on.

Jude is on a mission. His lightning-speed speech is full of name dropping tangents and self-important asides: "[Bobby] Fisher stayed with me four days in Baton Rouge, La., in 1964. I knew Janis Joplin very well. The Rolling Stones. I shot basketball with the Doors…"

But listening between the wild boasts of the high life and $5,000 weekend chess payoffs, you hear that he cares about the game, that it means everything to him. And he's angry that the chess hall of fame is full of middle-aged white men.

"The U.S. Championship has never had a black person or a woman in it," Jude claims. Therefore, the U.S. Chess Federation is dead. They mean well, but the fact that in 50 years they have not included 280 million people, black people, women, Asians and so on, dooms them."

Tom Brownscombe, scholastic director of the U.S. Chess Federation in New Windsor, N.Y., replies, "If he's saying that there are more white people playing chess than black people playing chess and it would be nice if we could promote chess among African-Americans, I would agree." But, he adds, no effort is actively being made to push the game in low-income communities.

"Chess has been often viewed as a very elite game, not one open to the public," says Douglas Forrester, president of Benecard Services, a New Jersey company helping to promote Acers' tournament play and the sponsor of his prison visit. "[Jude's] desire is to open the game up to those who often are excluded for whatever reason."

What's behind Jude's passion is, perhaps, his past. He spent his fractured childhood in North Carolina and his adolescence in Louisiana, the product of an abusive father and unstable mother. There were stints in orphanages and a stretch in Louisiana's state mental institution for teens, periods during which Jude says he "learned to live alone." But chess was his saving grace. By age 17, he was rated a master by the federation.

He's been rated as high as number 43 internationally, and he set the world record in 1976 for playing the most simultaneous matches.

Now his plan is to save the game from the creaky elitism that he believes has dominated its play for a half century.

There are two Judes. The one you first meet gives you his full attention. This Jude has all the drive of an infomercial huckster. The other Jude, circling between the three tables in the middle of the prison gym, is Buddha, lips pursed, all concentration and four-word sentences. "What have you got?" he asks, before examining his opponents' moves and toppling their pieces in exchange.

The inmates smile at each other, nodding their heads over their boards, choosing their attacks and sacrifices as Jude passes around and around, wearing a path in the carpet under the tables, playing his game.

His opponents aren't novices. Day after day, bound within the walls of the state's only full maximum-security prison, they play each other during recreation, seeing the same faces across the boards, the same moves. They read rulebooks in the barbershop. Locked up and alone, they shout moves through the air from cell to cell, tier to tier.

"I can always go in my cell, and I play myself. Bring out my book, boom-boom-boom," says 42-year-old James McMillan. "It keeps me out of a whole lot of riff raff."

But Jude's level of play, his style, is unknown to them. He is Jude the Obscure; the only way they'll get to know him better is to stay in the game.

2:55 p.m.
James Wallace, self-proclaimed jailhouse champion, leaves the table with the distinct honor of losing more quickly than everyone else. "He suckered me," Wallace says. "I don't understand it. Didn't see it coming. Two moves, checkmate."

3:15 p.m.
Four men are down. Talk has loosened up, and a running commentary begins. Losers become backseat chess players. The focus shifts to Charles "Tru" Merritt's board, and Wallace can't believe that Merritt, an average player and attempted murderer, has ended up in a strong position against the master. Even Jude sees the dilemma and offers Merritt a draw. Merritt refuses, savoring the next pass, when Jude pauses, tips his king and gives Merritt the game, allowing the soft-spoken inmate to bask in the glory of beating the self-proclaimed greatest chess player in the history of mankind.

"I let him come to me instead of me coming to him," Merritt says humbly. "I stayed low." Accepting applause and congratulations, Merritt will become a marked man in prison (if only in chess).

4:00 p.m.
Jude's trouble continues. Forrest Boyer, doing a life sentence for murder, runs away with enough of the chess master's pieces that the opponents chase each other endlessly. Jude tires and takes a draw. Forrest convinces himself that he's won.

4:15 p.m.
More inmates join the Council of Advisors Beaten By Jude Acers. They hang behind the tables, encouraging the others.

4:27 p.m.
"Gentlemen, you are lightning sudden death," Jude announces, trying to speed play along. "Your time is up when I approach the board." Three inmates decide their time is up well before he gets there.

The final two opponents play bravely, but Jude chases their kings across the boards until they have nowhere left to run. The tournament concludes nearly three-and-a-half hours after it began.

"The competition was ferocious," Jude says, appreciatively. "It was way above average. I'd say in the top 10 percent of all prisons I've played."

With no matches left to play, the gym empties quickly. James McMillan and 19 other inmates file back to their cells and their chess rulebooks. Seven years into a 50-year sentence for aggravated assault, McMillan's immediate future looks very much like his past. He has time, he says, to broaden his play so that when he's paroled, perhaps in eight years, he can spread the word about the game.

"I want to teach inner-city kids how to play this," he says.

There's a Tiger Woods out there: young, black and hungry, sacrificing pawns, capturing queens, marshalling his knights, four or five steps ahead of the competition. McMillan could find him, maybe. Train him. He would tell him that chess is like life. See a move, anticipate another, cut your losses, think ahead, defend, attack, and win. The game would be blown wide open.

Jude Acers to the U.S. Chess Federation: Checkmate.

The Times, Trenton, N.J. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.