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

by Paul Hoffman

  From that first chess book I learned that there were favored sequences of opening moves with names like the Max Lange Attack, King’s Gambit, Bird’s Opening, Albin Counter Gambit, Modern Benoni, and Fried Liver Attack. Before I knew enough about chess to have an opinion of the merit of each opening, I studied the ones whose names I liked. I hated the taste of fried liver, but I thought it was a swell name for an attack, and so it was the first opening I deliberately played.

  I DISCOVERED THE CONTEMPORARY TOURNAMENT SCENE FOUR YEARS LATER, at the age of thirteen, when I was taking the train to Manhattan to see my father. On my seat someone had left a copy of Chess Life & Review, the magazine published by the United States Chess Federation. At the end of the magazine, which is still published today under the name Chess Life, was a list of upcoming tournaments. I was delighted to see that an event for beginners was scheduled that weekend at the now-defunct Hotel McAlpin near Penn Station in Manhattan. I implored my father to take me. I won four games, drew two, and lost none, a performance that netted me a prize of $25 worth of chess books.

  On subsequent weekends I continued to enter open tournaments7 at the McAlpin, the Hotel Roosevelt near Grand Central Station, and the Skyline Motor Inn located in what was then the rough neighborhood known as Hell’s Kitchen. I bought dozens of chess books, subscribed to two British chess journals, and purchased back issues of the leading Soviet chess periodical and, to help me follow them, a booklet called A Chess Player’s Guide to Russian.

  I confess, though, that I couldn’t make it through most of what I acquired. For a player of my level, chess books were a struggle to read because I usually couldn’t follow the analysis in my head and had to set up each position on a board. I read what I could and skimmed the rest. I had this fanciful idea that I would become a stronger player just by owning the right books and magazines, and I hoped that someday I would have enough talent and motivation to go back and read them all. I did study in detail a couple of openings for White and for Black, and I committed key move sequences to memory. I also solved composed chess problems—White to mate in three or Black to win material in two—and honed my tactical skills in late-night blitz games in Washington Square Park. My tournament rating advanced, in a period of three years, from Class E to Class B.

  THE DEFINING MOMENT OF MY TEENAGE CHESS PLAYING WAS A MEMORABLE slugfest with the Danish grandmaster Bent Larsen, one of the top ten players in the world, at a simultaneous exhibition in New Haven. In a so-called simul, a grandmaster plays numerous games at once against all comers. This form of competition, in which rank amateurs can take on a champ, makes chess unique among sports; it’s not as if youthful basketball players can shoot hoops with Shaquille O’Neal or neophyte golfers can join Tiger Woods on the fairway.

  In a simul, the grandmaster charges from board to board, barely pausing at each one to make a move, and he continues circumnavigating the room until all the games are over. During the first few trips around, the grandmaster takes the measure of his opponents. Usually, most of the players are noticeably unpracticed, and he doesn’t think about those games because he knows he can mechanically finish them. A few players, however, may put up a tremendous defense or launch a crafty attack. The grandmaster commits those games to memory so that, as he travels around the room, he can mull them over and come up with a good plan. By analyzing the difficult positions in his head while he mindlessly plays out the easy ones, he is able to continue making moves at a fast pace, thereby maintaining the illusion of total control.

  The simultaneous exhibition generally taxes the grandmaster’s feet more than his mind. Few players will draw a game against him, let alone beat him. But there is more than one way for the amateur to emerge feeling victorious. All he need do, although even this is not easy to pull off, is to make a move that forces the grandmaster to stop and think. It is at that rare moment, when the grandmaster pauses to study a position, that the amateur is admitted to the brotherhood of chess players. But it can also be a dangerous moment, for it is often the point of no return. Carried away by his small triumph, the amateur may decide that he has within himself the stuff of champions. No matter how slow his subsequent progress at chess may be—indeed, even if there’s no progress at all—he will never be free of the gnawing thought that he, too, could be a grandmaster if only he applied himself.

  Sometimes the amateur succeeds. Joel Lautier, the 2005 French champion, showed me a photograph of himself at the age of ten playing Mikhail Tal in a simul in a Paris Metro station. The photo records that Tal, the eighth world champion and legendary tactician, whose dizzying but not always theoretically sound combinations defeated the world’s best players, not only paused but went so far as to pull up a chair and sit down opposite young Lautier. Tal won the game, but Lautier went on to become, at the age of fifteen, the youngest world junior champion ever.

  Only the most jaded youngster can fail to be inspired by the experience of facing a chess legend in a simul.8 Thirteen-year-old Mikhail Botvinnik participated in an exhibition given by former world champion Emanuel Lasker in Moscow in 1924. Because Lasker was playing many opponents it took him a while to make his way around the room back to any given board, even though he moved quickly in each game. Most of the participants undoubtedly appreciated the delay because it gave them time to think. Botvinnik, on the other hand, was bored by the slow pace and simply abandoned the game completely “after 15 moves because it was already time for a schoolboy to be asleep.” Fortunately the dulling effect of this encounter did not cause the Russian teen to renounce chess altogether: the following year he entered a simul in Leningrad and defeated the reigning world champion, José Capablanca. Botvinnik went on to become world champion himself for thirteen years between 1948 and 1963.

  Most grandmasters take the White pieces in every game in a simultaneous exhibition. Bent Larsen, I had heard, was an exception, generously playing Black in half the battles. A month before the exhibition, I decided to study every published game of Larsen’s I could find in which he played Black. I figured that if I had White against Larsen, I might be able to direct the game, by virtue of having the advantage of the first move, into positions that he had previously reached and, consequently, for which I was well prepared. It never occurred to me that he, too, would be ready for any position he had reached before and allowed to be reached again. That month I studied dozens of his games, to the exclusion of most everything else. My mother was somewhat alarmed by how I raced through my schoolwork and wolfed down dinner so that I could return to the chessboard in my bedroom. My father was proud of my determination and at the same time envious of my ability to be so single-minded.

  My obsession with the game was fortunately confined to the board itself. Unlike Nabokov’s morose Luzhin, I did not fantasize “that with a Knight’s move of this lime tree…one could take that telegraph pole.” And, unlike my childhood hero Fischer, I did not plan to use any money I might win in tournaments in order to hire the “best architect” and have him build me a house in the shape of a chess piece. “Yeah, that’s for me,” Fischer said. “Class. Spiral staircases, parapets, everything. I want to live the rest of my life in a house built exactly like a rook.”

  On the day of Larsen’s exhibition, my father drove me to New Haven. I sat down at a board behind the White pieces, joining forty-nine other fanatics who had each put up $7.50 to take on the Dane. Aside from a “Thank you” in response to someone’s warm welcome, Larsen said very little as he walked briskly around the room and made his first move on each board. For him we were all one faceless enemy.

  In his first seven trips around—350 moves in all—no one had succeeded in forcing him to break stride. I was pleased, however, by the way my game was progressing. As I recall, Larsen and I duplicated move for move a From’s Gambit that he had played against a little-known Swedish master. The Swede had played passively and was ferociously vanquished. His trouble, I believed, began with his ninth move, which put him on the defensive, from which he never recovered. I had com
e up with an improvement that I planned to unveil if Larsen made the same eighth move. And there was no reason he wouldn’t, because it had served him so well before.

  I had difficulty looking at the board as Larsen came around to make his eighth move. His hand shot out, grabbed a pawn, picked it up, moved it forward one square, and set it firmly down, his fingers lingering for a fraction of a second as they screwed the pawn into the board. Sure enough, he was following my plan. I would punish him, the robotic fool, for lazily making moves he had made before! I confidently studied the position, confirming for the umpteenth time the soundness of my plan. Then, as I extended my hand to make the move I had carefully prepared, something terrible happened. My fingers went numb. I feared that my hand was no longer under my control and that, in spite of the clear image of the correct move in my mind, my fingers might rebel and select some other move that would brand me as an imbecile.

  Even world-class players have been known to suffer psycho-physiological paralysis. At the 1970 Chess Olympiad in Siegen, Germany, the top Romanian, Florin Gheorghiu, lost control of his fingers against, of all players, Bent Larsen. Gheorghiu had a winning position and, according to the tournament book,

  Eye witnesses present at the closing stages of this amazing encounter reported that Gheorghiu reached out his right hand to administer the lethal blow, Knight to Bishop Six, but at this precise moment the said hand was seized with a convulsive tremble which rendered the Romanian Grandmaster incapable of transferring the piece to the required square. In the act of summoning up sufficient reserves of will-power to overcome this unfortunate and paralytic state of affairs, Gheorghiu overstepped the time limit.

  Luckily, I fared better than Gheorghiu. I reached out and made the move I intended and waited for Larsen to return. He arrived and, just as I hoped, he paused. He studied the position for what seemed like ages and then looked up at me, smiling. “That’s a better move,” Larsen said, “but no matter.” The smile disappeared and his voice became grim. “I shall crush you anyway, like I crushed him.” And he proceeded to do just that.

  Larsen’s aggressive outburst and victory did not tamp my enjoyment of our encounter. OK, I felt a bit foolish that I thought my opening improvement would defeat him, but I was delighted that he had taken me seriously and spoken to me and not the others. My father praised my performance, instead of misbehaving as he had when I defeated Rossolimo. I was now completely hooked.

  There were one-and two-month stretches in which, from the moment I came home from school to the time I went to bed, I’d crouch over the board, reviewing popular sequences of opening moves and searching for little-known ideas that I could spring on unwary opponents. But it was one thing to go over openings in the quiet of my own bedroom, and quite another thing to use them against flesh-and-blood opponents who savored winning as much as I did and who were equally compulsive in their pregame preparation. Besides, I was ahead of myself in my studious approach to chess. I would undoubtedly have improved faster if I had played more and studied less. Memorizing the latest grandmaster suggestion for the tenth move in a sharp line of the Sicilian Dragon only helps if you already possess the skills to punish your opponent if he deviates from established theory on the ninth move or the eighth move or even earlier. Something similar had happened in my game with Larsen. Not that he deviated—I was actually the one who purposely varied from his earlier game. But my move, though a clear improvement, didn’t give me enough of an advantage to put him away. Larsen still understood the resulting middle game much better than I did and effortlessly outmaneuvered me.

  CHESS WAS APPARENTLY FIRST PLAYED IN INDIA AS EARLY AS THE FIFTH CEN- tury and eventually made its way through Persia and the Arab world to the West. One legend has it that the game was invented as a substitute for war to placate a mother who had lost two sons on opposite sides of a battle. To be sure, the game has always been a favorite of military leaders, particularly in Europe. Napoleon was a fanatical player, as was Trotsky when he led the Red Army. Charles XII, the early eighteenth-century Swedish military genius, liked to march his king across the chessboard rather than adopt the general practice of tucking it safely in the corner behind a wall of pawns. Voltaire denounced this strategy as a reckless one that needlessly exposed the king to attack, and Frederick the Great, while retreating on the battlefield, wrote in his journal, “I am like the chess king of Charles XII, always marching.”

  The board itself is essentially the same today as it was in ancient India. Early boards had sixty-four squares arranged in an eight-by-eight array. The squares were initially all the same color. The adoption by the fourteenth century of the now-familiar two-tone board, with alternating light and dark squares, did not affect how the game was played but merely made it easier to follow diagonal routes. There have always been six kinds of chessmen, although their names and physical representations varied from one culture to another and changed over time. In India, where the game was called chaturanga, Sanskrit for “four parts,” the pieces were modeled after the four elements of the military. There were foot soldiers, cavalry, chariots, and elephants, which corresponded later in Western chess to pawns, knights, bishops, and rooks.

  The rules of the game have undergone remarkably few changes, but what modifications were made can be seen as loosely reflecting the social currents of their times. In early versions of chess, the capture of the king marked the conclusion of the game. When European royalty started playing, there was a subtle change in how the game ended. The chess king became immune to actual capture; the game was called off just shy of that when the king was under direct attack and had no square to move to that was not controlled by the enemy. One can imagine how this end—checkmate—might be more palatable to real kings who were terrified of falling into enemy hands. The word checkmate comes from the Persian shah mat, “the king is defeated,” or, more cruelly, “the king is dead.”

  The most substantial change in the game occurred in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. Originally, all the chess pieces were male, and a piece known as the king’s counselor stood by his majesty’s side. In medieval chess the counselor was even weaker than the king; it, too, could move just one square, but only in a diagonal direction. The counselor would keep the king company but was too limp to defend his master. Nor did the counselor become more powerful when, for reasons lost to history, the piece underwent a sex change in about the year 1000 and became a queen.

  In the early Renaissance, when the ranks of chess players included willful women like Lucrezia Borgia, Queen Isabella of Spain, and Catherine de Médicis, the chess queen exploded in power. The timing may be coincidental. (There is no smoking gun, like an eyewitness account of Isabella threatening to behead a courtier unless her husband, King Ferdinand, made the chess queen an Amazon.) In any event, the transformed piece became by far the strongest one in the game. She could shift in one bold move from the home court of her king to the heart of enemy territory on the far side of the board. In other words, one moment the chess queen was the wife standing by her man, and the next a lioness out for the kill. No matter what the queen did, however, her hapless husband usually stayed home.

  Isabella and Catherine de Médicis were apparently both strong players, and they were said to exhibit particular skill in their handling of the queen. With the piece’s ability to engage the enemy from afar, the pace of the game picked up considerably—as did the pace of life itself during this period. Some of the Old Guard had trouble adapting to the new form of the game, which they scoffingly called “mad chess” or “chess with the mad queen.”

  Still, until the 1880s and the introduction of chess clocks, there was generally no limit on how long a player might think, and the successful competitor had to have Sitzfleisch (“sitting flesh”) as well as brains. Several games in the first international tournament, in London in 1851, lasted twelve hours, and one dragged on for twenty. One player spent two and a half hours on a single move. The Germans had a word for this, todsitzen, which means to sit until you
r opponent dies. Howard Staunton, the English champion who organized the tournament, disapproved: “When a player, upon system, consumes hours over moves when minutes might suffice, and depends, not upon outmaneuvering but outsitting his antagonist, patience ceases to be a virtue and one cannot help expressing deep regret that there is not some legal or moral force which might be brought to bear upon the offender.”

  In 1852, various solutions were proposed in Staunton’s magazine, The Chess Player’s Chronicle. One contributor suggested that players be fined a guinea each time they spent more than twenty minutes on a move. Another proposed that “each player have a three hours’ sand-glass at his elbow, and a friend on each side to turn it. While the player is thinking, the sand must be allowed to run; while his opponent is thinking his glass will be laid horizontally on the table and the running suspended.”

  None of these suggestions were implemented in an 1858 match between Paul Morphy and Louis Paulsen, a German émigré who grew tobacco and ran a distillery in Dubuque, Iowa. The longest Morphy spent on any one move was twelve minutes, and that was when he offered his queen to Paulsen in return for a colossal attack. Morphy was annoyed when Paulsen spent seventy-five minutes deciding whether or not to capture the queen, and he swore to a bystander that he would defeat Paulsen in every future game they played. He was true to his word. Legend has it that in another encounter, Morphy and Paulsen sat at the board for eleven hours without saying anything or making a move. Finally, Morphy lost patience, looked up, and stared at Paulsen. “Oh,” said Paulsen, “is it my move?”9