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

by Paul Hoffman

  He looked out of the window for a while and then said softly, “This is the greatest moment in my life.”

  This final quote was the most upsetting part of the article for me. Not simply because it was untrue but because it felt like such a serious thing for him to lie about—the greatest moment of my life!—for the sake of achieving a pat, writerly conclusion. I had to wonder whether there was anything about me he’d leave intact.

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  THE PANDOLFINI VARIATION

  “The ‘great game’ of chess is primarily psychological, a conflict between one trained intelligence and another, and not a mere collection of small mathematical theorems.”

  —G. H. HARDY,

  A Mathematician’s Apology

  WHEN I TRAVELED TO NEW YORK CITY FOR WORK AFTER I left Britannica, I looked up Bruce Pandolfini, a friend of my father’s from the Village who was now famous, as chess players go, for his televised chess commentary and because Ben Kingsley portrayed him in the 1993 movie Searching for Bobby Fischer. Pandolfini was the only person I knew in the chess world—he was a bridge to my chess past—and I didn’t know him all that well. We hadn’t seen each other for a couple of decades. He and my father had been colleagues at the New School. They met in 1973 when my dad, unbeknownst to me, audited his chess course. My father had helped him with his writing, and in return Pandolfini, who is eight years older than I, had given me half a dozen chess lessons.

  Many strong chess players struggle just to pay the rent, but Pandolfini has managed to make $250,000 a year from the game. A Fortune 500 company once hired him, at $7,500 an hour, to sit with its top executives and share with them the mind-set of a chess master, in the hope that they could apply it to their corporate strategy. Pandolfini has written two dozen chess books, which have sold more than a million copies. He charges $200 an hour for private lessons in New York City and has started them as late as 1 A.M., even though most of his students are under the age of ten. He teaches not just any kids, but those who already display a gift for the game, and he will drop his fee if the parents of a particularly talented child are not well off. “I want to work with the smartest kids,” he told me. “I won’t let a smart one get away.” After we reestablished contact, I accepted an assignment from The New Yorker to write a profile of him.

  In December 2000, I joined Pandolfini and his current students at the National Grade School Championship in Orlando. I was curious to see how kiddie chess had changed since my days of playing, in the early 1970s. I knew from watching Searching for Bobby Fischer that the atmosphere at scholastic tournaments was now even more intense, with parents prohibited from observing their children’s games as my dad had. But Searching for Bobby Fischer was a Hollywood movie, so I didn’t know how much of it to trust.

  As the first round of the championship began, the tournament director ordered the parents out of the playing hall—a hotel ballroom—and the doors were sealed with police caution tape. Inside, 1,442 kids sat at long tables. Over the weekend, they would play six rounds of tournament chess against kids in their own grade—a schedule so tight that no one had time to go to Disney World. The clocks were started, and the room was quiet except for lots of nervous coughing and the occasional sound of a chess piece being aggressively slammed on the board. If a kid needed to go to the bathroom—and some had to go every few minutes—he was allowed to exit through a side door but was told not to speak to his parents, lest one of them blurt out how he could checkmate in two moves. The pushiest parents crowded around the door and, when it opened, craned their necks for a glimpse of their son or daughter (only 10 percent of the players were girls). Did their son’s dour expression mean that he was being mated? Or was he frowning so that he wouldn’t give away the trap he was about to spring? Down the hall from the tournament, dozens of rosy-cheeked young girls were competing in a beauty pageant; their parents were markedly calmer.

  PANDOLFINI’S METHOD AT THE ANNUAL SCHOLASTIC TOURNAMENT IS ALWAYS the same. During the rounds, he relaxes in his hotel room because he, like the parents, is not allowed in the playing hall, and if he appears outside it, he is accosted by strangers who want to know how to turn their child into a world champion. But, as the rounds finish, he races from one student’s hotel room to another, rapidly analyzing their games—finding something the kid did right even in the most one-sided loss—and psyching the kid up for the next round. His students were among the tournament veterans.

  Adam Weser, a nine-year-old from Long Island and one of Pandolfini’s students, had been a co-champion at the National Elementary Chess Championship held in Phoenix in May 2000. This time, he was hoping to be the sole champion out of 199 fourth-graders. His father, Matthew; his mother, Bonnie; and her parents, Naomi and Seymour, had flown to Florida from New York with Adam.

  In the first round, Adam came from behind to eke out a victory. Afterward, Pandolfini, who had coached Adam for two years, joined the family in their hotel room to replay the game. Adam is by nature a counterpuncher: he enjoys defending, being pushed to the brink of defeat and then bouncing back when his opponent has overreached. It is nerve-racking to watch, and Adam’s parents never know whether he is about to lose or rebound to victory, but his approach reminded Pandolfini of his own style when he played tournament chess, in the 1960s.

  “Adam shouldn’t have to live on the edge,” Matthew told Pandolfini.

  “He has so much talent,” Bonnie added. “He should just be able to crush the other kids.”

  Pandolfini ignored their remarks as he examined Adam’s score sheet and replayed the moves. “How are you going to survive this?” Pandolfini asked, shaking his head at the terrible position Adam had got himself into.

  “I’m the best! I’m the best!” Adam shouted in response, thrusting his fist into the air and jumping on one of the beds.

  “If you’re so good,” his father said, “why do you have to play moves like this? You should have moved here.” Matthew reached over and demonstrated.

  “Great!” Bonnie said. “My husband thinks he’s Bobby Fischer. I love my husband. But please, Bruce, put him in his place.”

  “Adam, you’re giving him more material,” Pandolfini said. “What’s this, Bargain Day at Macy’s? How did you get out of this?”

  “My opponent touched a piece he didn’t mean to move,” Adam said, “and I made him move it.”

  “You’ve always been good at enforcing the touch-move rule and, for that matter, every other rule,” Pandolfini said.

  “Then look what happened,” Adam said, demonstrating how he had mopped up the opponent’s pawns. “I moved my rook here! Look at the move. I love it!”

  “You’re a human vacuum cleaner,” Pandolfini said approvingly. “But, next time, take command from the beginning and you’ll play even better.”

  “He certainly can’t play any worse,” Matthew said.

  Pandolfini looked at his watch again. “The round’s about to start,” he said. “Go out there, Adam, and take command.” He patted Adam on the back.

  Adam beat his opponents decisively in the next three rounds; he didn’t need much psyching up. Then, in the fifth round, he lost a bruising back-and-forth battle, after his opponent surprised him on the first move with the rare Englund Gambit, an immediate sacrifice of the king pawn. “Adam cried for half an hour and I couldn’t console him,” Bonnie said. “He kept screaming, ‘They’re going to take my championship away!’”

  During the sixth and final round in Orlando, Adam’s parents and grandparents were camped outside the playing hall, praying that he’d forge a comeback and win. Bonnie read a book called The Panic-Proof Parent, and Matthew paced like a caged tiger.

  “I don’t understand why you put Adam through this,” Bonnie’s mother said. “I wouldn’t do this to my children. And look at your husband—he won’t stop walking or biting his fingernails.”

  “If I didn’t let Adam play,” Bonnie said, “he’d be a lot more upset.”

  This time, Adam’s opponent once again surpri
sed him on the very first move—pushing his queen-knight pawn forward two squares, the unusual Orangutan Opening—but Adam remained calm and built up a winning position. At last, he gamboled out of the hall, his arms raised in victory.

  “What’s this?” Pandolfini said, reviewing Adam’s score sheet. “You had the chutzpah to put four exclamation points after one of your own moves?”

  Yes,” Adam said. “It’s a brilliant move. Besides, writing all the exclamation points shook up my opponent.”

  He ran off, punching the air. At times like these, he has talked about playing chess until he can beat Bobby Fischer. “I wish I could fly,” Adam once wrote in a school assignment, “so that I could play chess with God.”

  IN 1972, PANDOLFINI BECAME THE FIRST SUCCESSFUL FULL-TIME CHESS teacher in the country after his analysis of the Fischer-Spassky match on public television made him a star. Searching for Bobby Fischer, adapted from Fred Waitzkin’s acclaimed book about his son Josh, one of Pandolfini’s top students, was a further advertisement for Pandolfini and chess itself. The movie has an uplifting ending: Josh wins the big tournament, preserves his own humanity (through the very Hollywood but unrealistic device of offering his chief rival a draw in a position in which Josh knows he can beat him), and leads—like Spassky—a happy, robust, balanced life, squeezing in fishing trips with his dad between tournaments. Adam Weser, for one, was so taken with the movie that he demanded chess lessons with Pandolfini. Ben Kingsley portrayed Pandolfini as a stern, enigmatic taskmaster with an Irish brogue who was scarred by a devastating chess loss years before—a character out of a Beckett play. By the time, just before shooting, Kingsley met the real Pandolfini, who is of Italian-Jewish heritage, the actor had fallen in love with the Irish accent.

  The real Pandolfini is neither stern nor aloof, although he did abandon tournament chess three decades ago after playing a game in which he missed a simple win. He has an easygoing warmth to which kids respond. At the end of most lessons, he rewards his students with a Beanie Baby. He is not without his own peculiarities; the parents of his students often have difficulty reaching him, because he doesn’t answer his home phone or cell phone, and sometimes he doesn’t respond to their messages for days. They do not know if he is married or not, and they have never seen his apartment. All they know is that his regular visit to teach chess is often the high point of their child’s week.

  Pandolfini did not start playing chess until he was thirteen—unlike most of his students, who have already entered, if not won, scholastic tournaments by that age. In his early childhood, in Borough Park, Brooklyn, he was preoccupied with baseball and basketball. “It was easy to be hooked on baseball after the first game I watched, at Ebbets Field in 1954, when I was six,” Pandolfini said. “That day, I saw Willie Mays hit a home run and Jackie Robinson steal a base.”

  Pandolfini’s father, a WPA-era realist painter, played chess socially at clubs and coffeehouses but did not teach his son the game, because he thought it was a deadbeat activity. At one point, his father had managed the Marshall Chess Club, on West Tenth Street in the Village, and seen too many people spend their days and nights slumped over chessboards without becoming good players. Pandolfini took up the game on his own, in 1961, when he stumbled upon the chess books in the stacks of the Brooklyn Public Library.

  “I was fascinated by the books, all the little diagrams of chessboards, the cryptic notation in which the games were recorded, and the anecdotes about world chess champions and their challengers,” Pandolfini recalled. “I loved the players’ names—Efim Bogoljubow, Saviely Tartakower, José Raúl Capablanca.” And, like me, Pandolfini loved the names of openings: Anti-Meran, Grob, Semi-Slav Botvinnik Variation. “There was something like thirty chess books in the library,” he said. “I wanted to check out one or two, but I couldn’t make up my mind, so I took them all out and skipped school for a month to read them.”

  During the summer of 1962, Pandolfini began taking the subway from Borough Park to the Village, where he played speed chess at the stone tables in Washington Square Park. “I couldn’t always get a game, because the people there often wanted to play for a quarter, and twenty-five cents meant a lot to me then,” Pandolfini said. In his youth—and mine—the faces at the tables were white and American. Today they are also black and Eastern European—and gambling $20 on a five-minute game is not the only way they make money. The enterprising ones show up at dawn, fend off junkies to stake out a table, and then charge tourists $3 a game for the privilege of playing them. Many of the hustlers talk incessantly during the game, providing an aggressive, expletive-ridden commentary (“You think you can fuck with my queen?,” “Retreat, bitch, or I’ll take you,” “Bend! Resign now and spare yourself the humiliation!”) that is designed to rattle their mark and entertain passersby. Before the filming of Searching for Bobby Fischer, Pandolfini took Laurence Fishburne to the park and taught him how to pass as a chess con.

  Pandolfini entered his first tournament, at the Marshall, in 1963, just before his fifteenth birthday. The club still has the musty aroma of a men’s smoking club, and over the years it has had an A-list clientele. “It wasn’t surprising to see famous people at the Marshall,” said Pandolfini. “Celebrities have always been drawn to chess. Today it may be rock and film stars—Sting, Madonna, Will Smith—who like the game.” In the eighteenth century it was philosophes and politicians—Voltaire, Rousseau, Robespierre, Diderot, Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon—playing chess at the Café de la Régence in Paris. In the 1940s scientists gravitated to chess. “I’ve seen the moves of games played at Los Alamos by Edward Teller, Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman, and Leo Szilard,” Pandolfini said. “Einstein’s son was also a chess player.” In the 1950s and ’60s it was artists and photographers who came to the Marshall. “I remember watching a handsome, well-mannered gentleman play,” Pandolfini recalled. “It was Marcel Duchamp. Another time Alfred Eisenstadt came in and snapped my picture with a Brownie camera. John Cage hung out at the Marshall.” These artists were drawn to chess players, who seemed more mysterious and weirder than themselves and yet were also in search of artistic truth—not on a canvas but on a chessboard.

  In that first tournament at the Marshall, which lasted ten weeks, Pandolfini got off to a poor start and lost four games in a row. Then he drew a game and rallied to win his last five—the final one against a nationally ranked expert. His debut earned him an official rating of 1732 from the USCF; that meant that at fifteen he was considered a better player than about 80 percent of all tournament competitors.

  Pandolfini’s success encouraged him to study the game more diligently. At a used-book store in the Village, he found a two-volume set, in Russian, containing five hundred games played by Mikhail Botvinnik, the sixth world champion and the father of modern Soviet chess. Pandolfini studied the games for a year. Then he resolved to play sixty games from the 1941 Absolute Championship of the Soviet Union in his head, move for move, without sight of the board or pieces. “It was very hard,” he said. “But I forced myself to do it. If I lost a position in my mind, which was quite common at first, I started again from the first move. To remember the moves, I would create a storyline that tied all the logic of the game together. I would impart a reason to a player for doing a move without being sure it was the player’s actual reason. You need a good memory for blindfold chess. But that’s certainly not it alone. I picture the board. I feel things. I feel connecting points. I say a lot of things to myself. I find relationships between the board and the pieces, the way certain squares naturally tie into typical maneuvers. And then it becomes part of you. You develop an intuitive sense of how to handle similar positions and your moves flow naturally.”

  That experience—mastering blindfold chess as a sixteen-year-old—became the core of his future instructional method. Today he teaches by narrative, forming a story out of every game or position. He rarely lets his students touch the pieces when they analyze. He often goes one step further and gingerly sweeps the pieces from th
e board, urging his students to form a mental picture of the position and discover its secrets unencumbered by the physical manifestation of the pieces. (In a crude parody of Pandolfini’s approach, in the movie an impatient Ben Kingsley knocks the pieces clear across the room and commands young Waitzkin to solve a nettlesome problem in his head.)

  Pandolfini was an undergraduate at the Brooklyn campus of Long Island University when the USCF bestowed on him the title of chess master, putting him in the top 1 percent of tournament players. “I remember the game that clinched it,” Pandolfini said. “I played the Caro-Kann Defense against Lawrence Day, a Canadian international master. I was on the verge of defeat, but then Day ran out of gas. I was thrilled. I wondered how far I could go. Did I have what it takes to become world champion? I thought I was the only lunatic who wondered about such things, but then I found that all my chess buddies fantasized about being world champion. But we gave up these illusions when we saw Fischer play. He was the real thing.”

  In 1970, Pandolfini dropped out of graduate school—he was studying chemistry at the University of Arizona—to play in the National Open Championship in Reno, Nevada. “Needless to say, my parents weren’t happy,” he said. “My father knew how hard it was to make a living at chess, and my good Jewish mother wanted me to become a doctor or a lawyer. I had ended up studying to be a chemist because chemistry was the only A I got my first semester in college. But my heart wasn’t in it.”

  At the National Open, he reached the last round tied for second place, only half a point behind the leader, grandmaster Larry Evans, a former United States champion and consigliere of Bobby Fischer’s. In the final, Pandolfini played Evans on Board One. If he pulled off an upset victory, he would tie for first place. They each had two hours to make their first fifty moves, but the game quickly became so thorny—Pandolfini, in what’s now called the Grand Prix Attack, sacrificed his king-bishop pawn to open lines for an early assault on Evans’s king—that both players consumed considerable time working through the maze of possibilities. Toward the end, they each had only one minute for twenty moves.1 Dozens of spectators closed in around them, standing on chairs to get a better view.