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

by Paul Hoffman

  The timing device that eventually became standard in every tournament is made up of two clocks, one for each player. When it is your turn to move, your clock is running. After you make a move, you immediately press a button that shuts off your clock and starts the opponent’s. Each clock face has a tiny red flag whose staff is attached to a pivot mounted just to the left of twelve o’clock. Normally the flag hangs vertically, but when the minute hand approaches the hour, it catches the flag and starts pushing it into the horizontal position. When the minute hand reaches the precise hour, it disengages the flag, which swings back abruptly to the dangling, vertical position. The clocks are set before the game so that the time expires when the minute hand reaches the hour. The function of the flag is to eliminate arguments about when the time is over; the time is over when the flag falls.

  Today flagless digital clocks have largely replaced the clocks of my youth. They show the time to a hundredth of a second and flash 00:00 when the time has elapsed. In blitz chess, each side typically has five minutes for the whole game. In rapid chess, twenty-five minutes. In classical tournament chess, an average of two and a half to three minutes a move. There is often more than one time control in classical chess. For instance, in the 2006 World Chess Cup, each player had ninety minutes for the first thirty moves and then was granted an additional hour for all the remaining moves. According to tournament rules, there is no difference between a loss on time and a defeat by checkmate.

  All chess players know the tyranny of time. Many celebrated games have involved one player making the last move of the time control with only hundredths of a second to spare. Emanuel Lasker, who was world champion for an unprecedented twenty-seven years, from 1894 to 1921, reportedly never wore a watch.

  I myself am a horrible blitz player. Even though I am serious about chess, I’ve played too few chess games in my life, compared to other people of my rating, for the moves to have become second nature. In blitz I think too much and lose when the flag falls like a little guillotine. Or else I blunder grotesquely when I’m in a frenzy to beat the clock. Like Lasker, I never wear a watch.

  A systematic way of identifying the world’s best chess player was a late development in the history of the game. The accolade world champion was apparently used for the first time in 1886, when Wilhelm Steinitz, from Austria-Hungary, and Johanne Zukertort, a Riga-born linguist who spoke Arabic, Turkish, and Sanskrit, agreed to play a match in New York for that title. Steinitz was a diminutive man (he barely cleared five feet) who rejected the reckless attacking chess that was common in his day. He disposed of Zukertort with a cautious, methodical, scientific style that he described as the “accumulation of small advantages.” After Steinitz, there were four world champions—Emanuel Lasker, José Capablanca, Alexander Alekhine, and Max Euwe—who haggled over the terms of matches in back-room negotiations. Until the World Championship was organized by FIDE, in 1948, world title bouts were private affairs, with the reigning champion often imperiously refusing to put his title on the line unless the prospective challenger came up with enough cash and satisfactory terms and conditions.

  FIDE was founded in 1924 at the first international chess team competition, which was held at the Hotel Majestic in Paris and staged concurrently with the Paris Olympic Games. The federation’s effectiveness was initially undermined by the absence of the one chess superpower, the Soviet Union. It did not join FIDE until 1947, following a year of chaos when world champion Alekhine died and there was no process in place to determine his successor. FIDE, whose motto was Gens una sumas, Latin for “We are one people,” brought welcome standardization to the process of choosing a champion by establishing a three-year cycle. The cycle began with a series of zonal tournaments in designated geographical regions, or zones, around the world. The United States was a zone, for example, and the U.S. Championship was a zonal tournament. The winners of the zonals came together for an interzonal championship, with the eight highest scorers advancing to a Candidates Tournament. The Candidates was either a round-robin event or a series of knockout matches that produced a challenger to the chess throne. The challenger and the world champion then played a gruelingly long match, typically twenty-four games. If the champion retained his title, the three-year cycle began anew. If he lost, he had the right to a rematch a year later.

  This system worked pretty well until 1993, when world champion Garry Kasparov and challenger Nigel Short bolted from FIDE because they felt they were not being sufficiently consulted about the details of their forthcoming match. The two men set up their own organization, the Professional Chess Association, to run the match and continue the century-old tradition of lengthy World Championship bouts with each game played at a classical time control. FIDE went ahead without Kasparov and Short and staged its own World Championship—a series of short knockout matches played at a controversial faster time control. Even though the PCA eventually disbanded, the existence of two rival World Championships continued for thirteen years, confusing chess fans and corporate sponsors who wanted to know who the true king was and who was just the pretender.10

  The competing titles were finally unified in October 2006. FIDE is now one of the largest umbrella sports organizations in the world, representing 159 national chess federations and more than five million registered players. And yet the international chess scene is far from harmonious—the unification match almost went down the toilet, as it were, over allegations that one of the players had cheated when he was in the privy.

  The insanity in chess extends all the way to the reputation of the game’s ruling czar, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, a businessman who has been the president of FIDE since 1995. Ilyumzhinov has another job: he is the authoritarian Buddhist president of Kalmykia, a desolate, poverty-stricken semiautonomous Russian republic on the northwest coast of the Caspian Sea. Ilyumzhinov has been accused of human rights violations, money laundering, drug and caviar smuggling, and letting his countrymen suffer while he drained the republic’s coffers to promote his personal passion. He is notorious for such odd proclamations as: “In my country there is only one man who plays politics, and that is me. The other men have to work, the women have to bear children, and the children have to play chess.”

  Ilyumzhinov is friends with many of the world’s most brutal dictators, and he has turned to them, rather than Fortune 500 companies who are afraid of his unsavory reputation, to fund chess. He was close to Saddam Hussein, whom he said deserved the Nobel Peace Prize—so close, in fact, that he was apparently the last foreign leader to see Hussein’s son Uday before the United States invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003. Ilyumzhinov cajoled Hussein into funding and hosting the 1996 world title bout between Anatoly Karpov and the American prodigy Gata Kamsky, but the match never took place there, because the U.S. State Department refused to let Kamsky travel to Baghdad. Ilyumzhinov suggested Tehran as another venue for a title match, but Washington vetoed that as well.

  In 2004, Ilyumzhinov was true to character in selecting inhospitable locations for both the women’s and overall World Championships. The women’s event was scheduled for late May in Adzharia, a rebellious region of Georgia whose feisty leader, Aslan Abashidze, was blowing up bridges to isolate his territory from the rest of Georgia. Although the region was on the brink of civil war, FIDE insisted that Adzharia was a safe place for chess, but jittery players recalled the 1999 World Junior Championship in Yerevan, Armenia, where a coup broke out during the games and the tournament organizers tried to conceal the uprising by attributing the gunfire to a holiday celebration. When Abashidze himself, who had guaranteed the chess queens of the world $700,000 in prizes, abdicated to Moscow two weeks before the championship, Ilyumzhinov scrambled to move the event to Elista, the capital of Kalmykia. The FIDE World Championship took place a month later in Libya, funded by $1.5 million of Muammar Gadhafi’s personal assets.

  Grandmasters joke that they may have to go to North Korea to play in a World Championship. Wealthy despots who can spend their country’s money on the ga
me without answering to anyone are an endangered species in the twenty-first century. Chess players, who by their very nature are always thinking one move ahead, are understandably worried that Ilyumzhinov is running out of friends who can fund their magnificent obsession.

  WHEN I ENTERED MY FIRST RATED TOURNAMENT, IN 1970, MY FATHER WAS the editor of Lithopinion, a handsome graphic arts and public affairs quarterly that the lithographers union published in order to show off the beauty of this form of printing. My father worked directly for the president of Local One, Amalgamated Lithographers of America, who lived up to my stereotype of a union boss. When the guy took my dad and me to lunch, around the corner from their offices at Thirteenth Street and Fifth Avenue, he would pay from a rolled-up wad of $50 bills and never ask for change. If we dined at a steak place and the check came to $36.53, the waiter would keep $13.47. If we ate in a coffee shop and the bill came to $13.27, the waitress won the lottery—she’d go home with $36.73. My father was embarrassed when I told his boss that he should tip less and give my dad a raise.

  I was always more direct than my father. As a child I usually said whatever I was thinking. I remember a couple who visited our home when I was three or four. They did not sit on the couch together but sat as far apart as the furniture in our living room allowed. “What’s the matter?” I asked. “Is your marriage in trouble?” There was self-conscious laughter—my intuition was correct. In time, of course, I learned to stifle observations that might unnecessarily hurt people. Now, as I watch my young son Alex struggle to understand what thoughts he should keep to himself—“That woman is really fat, Dad”—I am nostalgic for the time in early childhood when I spoke freely and said whatever was on my mind.

  For the Winter 1970 issue of Lithopinion, my father wrote an article called “Chess: Once the Game of Kings, Now the King of Games” about the passions that chess inspires. He didn’t tell me he was writing the piece. I learned about it by accident one afternoon in Washington Square Park when an artist with a large sketch pad sought my permission to draw me at the chessboard and publish the picture. I asked him where the illustration was going to appear and he said Lithopinion. I didn’t know if my father planned to conceal the article from me forever or intended to surprise me with my picture in the magazine. In any event, I made sure that I read the article when it came out.

  The piece began by recounting a joke:

  Wherever chess nuts gather (and that’s almost anyplace, except Red China where the game is banned because it represents “Western decadence”), international grandmasters (the world’s best players), patzers…, woodpushers (mediocre players) and kibitzers (non-playing compulsive advice givers) swear the following dialogue actually once took place:

  CHESS PLAYER NO. 1: “My wife threatened to leave me if I don’t give up chess.”

  CHESS PLAYER NO. 2: “That’s terrible.”

  CHESS PLAYER NO. 1: “Yes, I shall miss her dreadfully.”

  Yet, if you listen to the words of poet William Butler Yeats, it may be true that the game of kings (or the king of games) also binds lovers together—at least in an attempt to slow time’s steady erosion: “They know there was nothing that could save them,/ And so played chess as they had any night/ For years…”11

  Whether it triggers apartness or engenders togetherness, chess is an obsession for many of the 15 million Americans (conservative estimate) who play it more or less regularly…. Edward Lasker, an American chess luminary, recalled that when Harry Nelson Pillsbury toured Europe in 1902 giving blindfold exhibitions daily he came to his (Lasker’s) hometown: “The men in charge of arrangements had permitted me to take a board, but my mother forbade me to go out in the evening to play chess. Little do mothers know what an all-consuming fire the passion for chess can be. After brooding all day over the tragedy into which my mother was about to turn my life by preventing me from playing with the famous chess star, I ran away from home!”

  The question, of course, is what is there about this “game in which thirty-two bits of ivory, horn, wood, metal, or (in stalags) sawdust stuck together with shoe polish are pushed on sixty-four alternately colored squares” (George Steiner’s description) that makes children leave home, men leave their wives and women leave their senses.12

  I was pleased with my picture in Lithopinion, and I found my dad’s prose catchy and engaging but also glibly contrived. The opening joke was amusing, but I was bothered by the fact that I had never heard anyone in the chess world swear that the dialogue had actually taken place.13

  When I reread the article in college, seven years later, I debated in my mind the journalistic ethics of what he had done. I wondered why he couldn’t just tell the joke without embellishing the context. The way he wrote it, any knowledgeable reader who thought about his words would know his rendition couldn’t literally be true. Did he really expect chess fans to believe that “wherever chess nuts gather” they swear by the dialogue? Or was he so enraptured by the punning phrase “wherever chess nuts gather” that he didn’t care if it was true or not? Or was he, from the very start of the article, trying to clue the discerning reader in to the fact that he was playing a game, much like the game he was writing about? Or was I the one with the problem because I was unnecessarily deconstructing and ruining a perfectly enjoyable article? To be fair, the joke my father told was completely harmless and—so what if the context was false?—it accurately captured the addictive nature of chess.

  I now think that my focusing on the innocuous chess-nut story was a way of avoiding my discomfort with the rest of the article. My father had written all about me. On the one hand, that made me proud. On the other hand, he never asked me if I was comfortable being his subject, or whether he could share our private conversations with the world. He never said he was interviewing or profiling me, and his descriptions were not altogether flattering. He recounted, for instance, how I chatted up an opponent during an important game. I was fourteen and my adversary was a girl a year or two older whose rating was 1069. I did not yet have a rating. It was the final round, and I had a minus score of three wins and four losses. I needed a win to break even, and she needed a win to receive a trophy for being the top scoring girl in the tournament.

  The game lasted a long time, almost three hours. Having finished their own matches, the other players crowded around these two. I sat over on the side, trying not to be a chess father, and pretended to read a book. Occasionally, the ranks of the kibitzers would part for a few seconds and I’d see my son’s face, calm and smiling, as he chatted with the girl. She was pretty, true, but he was usually so serious during a chess game. I couldn’t understand it.

  The girl’s father joined me. He was a teacher and he made a stab a correcting student papers. Suddenly he jumped up, walked over to the game, studied the position on the board, and then came back.

  “Your boy’s in trouble,” he said. “She’s got his queen.”

  A few minutes later he got up again, looked again, came back again. “I don’t know,” he said, “he’s got his rooks doubled.”

  Back to the table, then back to me. “I think she’s got him.”

  I looked at my watch and realized we’d be lucky to make the last train back to Connecticut. There was so much chattering at the table—I could hear his voice—that surely he wouldn’t object if I reminded him it was getting late.

  I went over and said, “We don’t have much time…” when he cut me off with a “Please don’t bother me now.”

  Uncharacteristic. Puzzling. But I guessed the pressure was getting to him.

  Report from the girl’s father: “I think she’s in time trouble.”

  Further report: “I know she’s in time trouble.”

  Final report: “She has just two minutes to make fifteen moves.”

  A voice cried out—not Paul’s, not hers—“It’s a mate!”

  The kibitzers moved off and I saw Paul shaking hands with the girl. She left and I took my son aside.

  “What happened?” I asked.


  “I won,” he replied. “I checkmated her just as the little flag fell indicating her time was up.”

  I have always been particularly irritated by this last quote. I would never have said “little flag”—that’s a writer’s prissy touch. I was very familiar with the flag, and so was he. I would have said just “flag.” Once again, his description of the game, even if he occasionally fabricated my words, got across the larger emotional truth of how tense chess could be; but it also demonstrated how wrapped up in my own playing he was, and how energetically he lived through me. The article concluded:

  In the cab to the train station he apologized for snapping at me during the game. “When you said the word ‘time,’” he explained, “I was afraid you’d remind her she was in time trouble. That’s why I kept talking to her—to keep her mind off the clock. I don’t feel this was wrong because I think some of the boys there were kind of trying to help her. So I kidded with her and made the most complicated moves I could—there towards the end—so she’d really have time problems. But I beat her before the clock did anyway.”

  “You seemed so calm,” I said.

  “Calm above maybe, but I was shaking under the table.”