King's Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game

by Paul Hoffman

  MY FATHER’S RELATIONSHIP WITH ME WAS SO COVERTLY COMPETITIVE THAT it took me half my life to become a writer. When I was young, my father applied his rapacious black pen to any writing of mine—a letter, a school essay—that he could get his hands on. No sentence I wrote went untouched. No matter how sensible any particular editorial correction of his might be, the cumulative effect of his marking up one page with two or three dozen changes was to leave me feeling unmoored and resentful. He did this throughout my school years, and I always hated how he clinically dissected every sentence; wasn’t there a single phrase worth saying something nice about—or at least leaving unmolested? Hadn’t I expressed one interesting thought that wasn’t in need of revision? I couldn’t help but feel that he was trying to score points and parade his verbal intelligence.

  My father’s persistence in correcting me was very debilitating but at least it led to a good result: I learned how to write. My prose had been stiff and convoluted, as if I thought that inaccessible meaning signaled a deep, sphinxian intelligence on the part of the author. My father disabused me of the notion that good writing required long words, long sentences, and a thicket of relative clauses nestled within other relative clauses. He taught me that complex ideas were best expressed in unadorned language in which the words themselves did not distract or overpower the message.

  During his lifetime I was nevertheless intimidated by his command of literature—we couldn’t even discuss a book like Charlotte’s Web when I was a kid without his offering some brilliant insight into the pig’s motivation—and I avoided the humanities in school. I was an avid reader of nonfiction but skipped The Catcher in the Rye, and most other novels, until I was an adult. In grade school I gravitated toward the sciences and mathematics, subjects about which he knew little. In fourth grade, I wanted to be an animal behaviorist; I liked reading Konrad Lorenz and the stories of the orphaned ducks that latched onto him as their mother and waddled after him. Although watching animals was emotionally satisfying, it wasn’t intellectually challenging. By the time I left high school, I wanted to be a physicist and had grandiose notions of determining the fate of the universe. When I graduated from college, I thought about going back to school for a doctorate in philosophy of science.

  Now I regret that my father didn’t live long enough—he died in 1982, when I was twenty-six—to see me manage to turn what he’d taught me into a profession. By the end of his life, I had already been an editor at Scientific American and was the author of a monthly column of mathematical brain teasers for another science magazine, so he was at least aware of the first step I took on my journey from man of science to man of letters.

  But it was in 1987, when I became the editor in chief of Discover—after Time Inc. had lost tens of millions of dollars on the magazine—that I really put my father’s skills to use. After all, it was second nature for me to call an article about a new fetal-imaging technology “Womb with a View,” rather than a sober title that would have attracted only the most committed readers. Combining low and high culture in my approach to science journalism, I brought a pop sensibility to Discover’s covers, while at the same time augmenting the actual scientific content of its articles. The circulation soared to over a million. Discover won awards and finally turned a profit, and I acquired somewhat of a reputation in the magazine industry as an editorial boy wonder.

  Even though my dad had been oddly competitive with me, as an adolescent I preferred the weekends with him to the weekdays with my mom. At the time I believed that she didn’t love me because she seemed to dismiss me so readily. When I suggested grilling hamburgers for dinner at one of the barbecue pits at the beach a few miles from our home, she refused on the grounds that rain might ruin our cookout. But the sky was clear, I said. It could change, she countered. I guess it theoretically could, I said, but the day is beautiful and in the unlikely event of rain we can always return home and cook the meat on the stove. Too much trouble, she said, although she wasn’t busy and was in fact planning to labor over our meal. When I shared my acceptance letter from Harvard with my mother, she said nervously, “That’s a real school. It’s a lot of work.” She had similar reactions when I got into Yale and Princeton—I was at the top of my high school class, and she was acting as if I should go to a junior college. When I was finishing my senior year at Harvard and Scientific American offered me a job, she said, “That’s a real magazine,” as if she expected me to work as a hot dog vendor. And in 1988, when I won a National Magazine Award for a profile I’d written for The Atlantic Monthly of the mathematician Paul Erdös, my mother responded, “I didn’t know the article was that good.” If my father’s problem was taking me too seriously, my mother’s was not taking me seriously enough.

  MY PARENTS HAD CONFLICTING ACCOUNTS ABOUT THEIR FIRST DAYS TOGETHER. My father said it was love at first sight when he met my mother in a used bookstore in the West Village, where she worked part-time. He said he sent her up a ladder, on the pretense of wanting an out-of-reach novel, so that he could get a better view of her legs. She claimed that they got involved only after they started sharing an apartment as a matter of convenience because neither of them had enough money to live alone. She said the sex wasn’t very good and that my father was so ambivalent about their relationship that he proposed they visit the Central Park Zoo and get married only if a certain Asian civet called a binturong happened to make eye contact with them.

  The female binturong is known to biologists for the unusual anatomical feature of a false penis. Leave it to the perverse streak in my dad to stake the future of his relationship with my mother on a freak of nature. He may have expected the binturong to be asleep because the animal is nocturnal and they were going to the zoo during the day. This particular binturong was having a restless time, though, and looked them right in the eye.

  Regardless of how my parents met, they were a sharp-looking couple, judging from photos I have of them from the mid 1950s, before I was born: they are blowing smoke rings as they lounge happily against the arch in Washington Square Park. My mother was a model for Vogue then—the editor in chief had stopped her on the street when she was sixteen—and my dad resembled a handsome Diego Rivera. (In time he’d look more like Rodney Dangerfield, so much so that strangers would mistake him for the comedian and ask for his autograph, and he’d convincingly play along.) Early in my parents’ marriage he put on at least seventy pounds and started chain smoking. My mother mocked his weight and said that he should hire himself out as a mold for bathtubs. He certainly did not take care of himself, and over the years I’d run into friends of his who hadn’t seen him for a while and they would marvel that he was still alive.

  I never saw my mother and father argue. She’d yell at him a lot but he wouldn’t respond. Then she’d scream at me instead because I’d fight back. My father did have a subversive way of provoking her: within her hearing, he’d tell me stories about an intolerably bitchy llama named Leopold (my father loved gender-bending) that bore a remarkable resemblance to my mom. These stories drove her nuts because he denied that the llama was my mother, and she worried that he was turning me against her.

  I have a brother, Tony, two years my junior, who always retreated to his room as soon as my mother started hollering. At the time I thought I had a raw deal because he was off doing whatever he wanted while my parents fought through me. Now I realize that Tony must have grown up feeling neglected because, for better or worse, I was the center of attention.

  IT WAS MY DAD WHO INTRODUCED ME TO CHESS. WHEN I WAS FIVE YEARS OLD, I fell in a pile of old leaves in the woods and was stung by a swarm of yellow jackets. To keep my mind off the pain, he got me a chess set. And so, from my very first moments with chess, I welcomed the game as a distraction. (It was far more narcotic than Candy Land, which I’d played enthusiastically at the age of three with a kindly psychologist named Mrs. Perrutz; my parents believed that it was never too early to start therapy.)

  The rook, my father said, begins the game immobilized
in the very corner of the board but makes its power felt in the middle game and endgame when the board is less cluttered. The rook glides horizontally or vertically across any number of squares. The bishop moves diagonally, he told me. While the rook has the potential to visit every square on the board, the bishop can occupy only half of them. If the bishop starts on a light-colored square, it is confined to light squares for the remainder of the game. Likewise for the dark-squared bishop. (The fact that the light-and dark-squared bishops can never occupy the same squares prompted Boris Spassky to say of his ex-wife: “We were like bishops of opposite color.”) The queen is the strongest piece; she has the power of the rook and bishop combined because she can move like either of them. The knight is the only chessman that can jump over the others, and its gait is the hardest for beginners to fathom. When the knight moves, it traces the letter L (an L in any physical orientation), by moving one square laterally and two squares perpendicularly. The pawn is a slowpoke. It advances only one square at a time except when it first moves and has the option of getting a head start in the world by venturing forward two squares.

  Chessmen are not allowed to violate the laws of physics, so no two pieces are permitted to occupy the same square at the same time. You can move to a square possessed by your adversary by capturing the occupying piece—Oh yeah!—and replacing it with one of your own. Pawns are the only chessmen that capture in an unusual manner. The other chessmen can capture an adversary on any square to which they can move. The pawn can’t do that; it is prohibited from taking a piece on the square directly in front of it. Instead the pawn can capture an enemy on either of the squares diagonally in front of it. (Some commentators have suggested that this is because real soldiers would have thrust their swords at an angle.) But the pawn, so plodding and restrictive in its movements, is also a dreamer. If the lowly foot soldier can inch its way clear across the board to the opponent’s home rank—and that usually happens only late in the game, if it happens at all—it can morph into a queen or any other piece. As a child, I liked how all the pieces moved, but I was particularly pleased with the pawn’s ability to assume a totally new identity.

  THE VERY FACT THAT MY DAD HAD TO TEACH ME HOW THE PIECES MOVED did not bode well for my prospects of becoming a champion. The giants of the game, if we trust their memoirs, are rarely taught the rules of chess but assimilate them on their own by watching others play. José Raúl Capablanca, the post–World War I champion from Cuba who was more famous than Fischer in his time, learned the moves at the age of four by observing his father, a Spanish cavalry captain, play a fellow officer. “Without disturbing the silence that prevailed,” Capablanca recalled,

  I took a position at the table where I could view the proceedings comfortably. My boyish curiosity soon grew to wonder, and very shortly, after observing how my father was moving those peculiarly shaped figures from square to square of the board, I felt a sudden fascination for the game. The impression came upon me that this curious game must have a military significance, judging from the interest the two soldiers manifested. I then began to concentrate my mind on discovering how the pieces moved; and at the conclusion of the first game I felt sure that I had learned the rules for the movement of chessmen.

  The men continued to play for the next two days. On the third day, “there occurred an incident which launched me upon my chess career,” Capablanca wrote.

  As I looked on, my father, a very poor beginner, moved a knight from a white square to another white square.2 His opponent, apparently, not a better player, did not notice it. My father won and I proceeded to call him a cheat and to laugh. After a little wrangle, during which I was nearly put out of the room, I showed my father what he had done. He asked me how and what I knew about chess. I answered that I could beat him; he said that that was impossible, considering that I could not even set the pieces correctly. We tried…and I won. That was my beginning.

  Kasparov, not to be outdone by his great predecessor, began his own autobiography, Child of Change, with a story of unexpected childhood genius. “My parents used to like solving the chess problems that were published in our local Baku [Azerbaijan] newspaper, Vyshka,” Kasparov wrote. “At the time, I did not play chess, although I was always close by, studiously following each move of the pieces on the board. Once, to my parents’ utter amazement, I suggested how to solve a problem. My father said, ‘Well, since he knows how the game ends, he ought to be shown how it begins,’ and with that he began explaining the rules to me.”

  Karpov, in his memoir Karpov on Karpov, said he learned the rules at the age of four while sitting on his father’s lap and watching him play friends, although he confessed, in a rare show of modesty for a world champion, that he needed to ask his dad to explain the concepts of castling and capturing en passant.3 But even at four, Karpov began to understand the essence of the game and showed himself to be a master psychologist at reading other players’ emotions:

  I felt the harmony of the game, the way in which the pawns and pieces move about. Their invisible cohesion, hitherto incomprehensible to me, became perfectly real. Sometimes, though, the impression of harmony vanished. I still didn’t understand why this was so, but I sensed that something was not quite right. From the tension in Father’s knees, on which I was sitting, or from the withdrawal of his hands embracing me, I realized that he too had seen something wrong and didn’t like his position.

  David Short started the biography of his son, Nigel Short: Chess Prodigy, with the words “Nigel’s first exposure to chess may not have been as dramatic as that of the infant Capablanca, but his family still remembers it vividly.” He then told the story:

  I suppose I was a better player than Capablanca senior—at least it took Nigel a couple of weeks before he started denting my ego…. Wethink Nigel was six when he sat intently on the arm of a chair and watched me explain the moves to his elder brother, Martin, two years his senior…. After half an hour or so I was ready to pack the game away, but Nigel pleaded to play. “You’re too young,” I told him. “I’ll teach you when you’re a bit older.” Mother’s intervention prevailed and a rather bored father had to reset the pieces. The boredom vanished almost immediately. Hardly anything needed to be repeated. Nigel had picked up an amazing amount.4

  I MAY NOT HAVE HAD A PROPER CHAMPION’S BEGINNING, BUT EVEN IN MY swollen, stung condition, I took to the game. Nothing on the chessboard seemed to be left to chance or luck. Although I made many foolish moves and hardly knew what I was doing, I realized that the chessmen were under my command. The appearance of the pieces and board appealed to me. The beauty of chess was its very starkness: six kinds of pieces, all elementary in design, interacting on an unadorned board.5 The pieces cried out for me to make sense of them, but in their austerity offered little help. I promised myself that I would learn to coordinate them and discover their secrets. I stopped short, however, of painting a chessboard on the ceiling of my bedroom, as had the young Bobby Fischer.

  In the two weeks it took my body to purge itself of yellow jacket toxins, my dad and I played dozens of times. A year later he would start losing to me. (Aha! At last I was like the young Kasparov—“It became difficult to drag me away from the game, and a year later I was already beating my father.”) Throughout elementary school in Westport, I played chess during my free periods but not as often as I wished, because few of my classmates knew the rules. I cannot recall losing, and the lack of opponents made me turn to other games. I played gin and 500-card rummy with my dad, and on weekends we had spirited Scrabble contests. He was proud of my obvious talent at games but needed me to believe that he, too, was a natural. I remember him confounding me at Scrabble with words like ai (a three-toed sloth), ko (twelfth-century Chinese porcelain), and oe (a violent whirlwind off the Faroe Islands) and acting as if they were part of his normal vocabulary.

  In fourth grade I discovered my first chess book on my father’s shelves. I cannot exaggerate my excitement at learning that games between topflight players were recorded i
n special notation, preserving them forever. I was astounded that the book analyzed games played more than one hundred years ago and that, after all that time, chess authorities did not always agree on which player stood better in certain thorny positions.6 There was something very satisfying about setting up the disputed positions on my own chessboard and reaching my own conclusions about how, say, Lionel Kieseritzky could have repelled Adolf Anderssen’s mating attack in London in 1851. Moreover, I was tickled that I could record the moves of my own games with the same notation the grandmasters used. I learned what was called English descriptive notation; P-K4, for example, means the pawn in front of the king moves to the fourth rank. Today players use algebraic notation, in which each square is uniquely defined by a letter and a number. The files or columns are labeled a to h, and the rows 1 to 8. In algebraic notation, the move P-K4 would be rendered e4, or more expansively e2-e4, indicating that the pawn in the second row in the e-column moves to the fourth row.

  This gave me the idea of inventing a cryptic chess notation of my own so that I could play the game long-distance with my closest childhood buddy, who now lived in Cape Cod. (Chess had barely figured in our friendship when we were together, but we liked the challenge of figuring out how we could play remotely.) I assigned a male first name to each of the sixty-four squares and a last name, too. Then I’d place a collect call from “Michael Mastin” to my friend. He’d decline the call—sparing my family the phone charge—and he’d know that I had moved the piece on the Michael square to the Mastin square. Later I’d get a collect call from, say, “Damian Touby,” and then I’d know that he had responded by shifting the piece on the Damian square to the Touby square. This stratagem required our parents—and anyone else who answered the phone—to decline the calls and remember the names. It worked beautifully for a couple of weeks, until an AT&T auditor found it suspicious that fifty collect calls had been declined between the same two phone numbers.