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

by Paul Hoffman

  It is understandable that it took seven decades to turn Nabokov’s novel into a movie: there is little action, other than the self-defenestration, as much of the story takes place in Luzhin’s head as he goes mad. The irony is that movies figure heavily in the novel, the first talking pictures having appeared at the time Nabokov wrote it. Despite the efforts of Luzhin’s fiancée to keep his mind off chess after his breakdown, they happen to watch a film that includes a chess game, with the pieces set up in a way that, Luzhin amusingly declares, could not actually occur in a real game. And Valentinov doesn’t exactly kidnap Luzhin in the book. He says he is making a movie that includes a chess game and for verisimilitude wants Luzhin to appear in the film. The movie set is a ploy to get Luzhin to sit down again opposite Turati and finish the game.

  As the credits rolled, Pandolfini joked that he suspected he would not get any new students from the film, as he had from Searching for Bobby Fischer. “Let’s face it,” Pandolfini said, “there are more unbalanced people in chess than in your average profession or activity, although perhaps no more than in other arts. But that’s because the chess community is wonderfully accepting—everyone is welcome to play and you don’t need any social skills to succeed.” And, indeed, everyone is welcome. Chess may be the only sport or game in which a talented nine-year-old can face a seventy-five-year-old master and it’s not clear who’ll win. “The game is a great equalizer,” said Pandolfini. “Go to Washington Square Park and you’ll see Wall Street brokers playing kids from Harlem.”

  Because chess culture has turned a blind eye to how chess players dress or speak (or whether they can speak at all), chess culture is a haven for social misfits. For those who are inclined to escape from the rest of the world, chess offers its own rich world. Devoted competitors replay games from top tournaments, and these are virtually inexhaustible: a single CD-ROM called Mega Database 2007 contains more than 3.5 million games played between 1560 and 2006, with more recent games available on a weekly basis from the Web site The Week in Chess. Chess clubs on the Internet allow anyone, even in the most remote location, to find a strong opponent at any hour. One night, for instance, I played blitz chess online with a lonely biologist at a research station in Antarctica; instant-messaging software allowed us to review the game afterward and chat about penguins.

  “People whose sense of self derives from how they do at chess, because they have so little else going on in their lives, are the ones who are likely to crack up from the pressure of tournament play,” Pandolfini said. “Fischer was a case in point.”4

  Fischer was once asked in a television interview what his interests were besides chess. “What else is there?” he innocently replied. And yet Fischer dropped out of chess and the public eye after beating Spassky in 1972. He joined a fundamentalist religious sect in California, became a zealous anti-Semite, and had various run-ins with the law. The chess world waited for him to return, or at least to publish his favorite games, but all they got was a candy-cane-colored booklet called I Was Tortured in the Pasadena Jailhouse, an incoherent diatribe about his brief incarceration after being mistakenly arrested for a bank robbery. In 1992, Fischer was back in the spotlight, earning $3 million for a rematch against Spassky in Yugoslavia, in violation of the State Department’s ban on Americans conducting commerce there. The games showed little of his earlier brilliance.5 Fat and slovenly, Fischer himself was also unrecognizable. Once a Cold War hero, he now uttered a bunch of obscenities and spat on a letter from the State Department that protested his play. Again he vanished, only to emerge occasionally as a call-in guest on talk radio venting about Jews.6 He lived as a fugitive in Yugoslavia, the Philippines, and Japan.7

  In July 2004, Fischer was arrested by Japanese immigration agents in Tokyo’s Narita Airport on the grounds of being illegally in the country with a revoked U.S. passport. Washington pressed for his extradition, but Fischer was one move ahead of the American authorities and persuaded the Icelandic parliament, which fondly remembered the attention he brought to Reykjavík in 1972, to grant him Icelandic citizenship and a passport. After nine months in a Japanese detention center, Fischer boarded a plane to Reykjavík with his new fiancée, the head of the Japanese Chess Association, and went into hiding yet again.

  WHETHER CHESS IS A PRECURSOR TO PSYCHOSIS IS NOT SOMETHING THAT the parents of Pandolfini’s students want to think about. They are caught up in the more immediate issue of helping their kids adjust to defeat and victory. Today there are thousands of children around the country who play in scholastic chess tournaments, far more than there were in my youth and Pandolfini’s. “You see the same kids and their parents at tournament after tournament,” Fabiano’s father told me. “Chess gives you a big extended family.”

  “Some parents used to discourage their kids’ interest,” said Pandolfini, “but not because they saw chess as a hotbed of insanity. In my day, in the 1960s, the game was disparaged as a shady activity, something that street hustlers did. It wasn’t taught in any school then. Maybe just a few hundred kids played tournament chess, and many of them were, well, strange.” Chess is now mainstream. None of his current students, he said, “want to live in a house shaped like a rook.” They want to play baseball and hockey, go to summer camp, and practice the piano.

  To succeed at tournament chess, you need to be aggressive. “The only goal in chess is to prove your superiority over the other guy,” Kasparov once said. “The most important superiority is the superiority of the mind. I mean, your opponent must be destroyed. Fully destroyed.” For Pandolfini’s students to make it to the highest echelons of chess, they must have the determination to win at any cost—and they must be able to tolerate this unbridled ambition in themselves without being destroyed by it in their opponents. Pandolfini had that determination, but he could not reconcile it with his image of himself.

  “Chess is war,” Pandolfini said. “And it is also very hard work. You have to master on the order of one hundred thousand different chess ideas and concepts, patterns of pawns and pieces. You’re going to lose a lot of games in the process, so you’ll have to be able to make your peace with that, which isn’t easy. Kids have as much trouble as adults facing the fact that they’ve lost because their opponents outwitted them.8

  “Ninety percent of my students give up tournament chess when they get into junior high school,” Pandolfini continued, “and the main reason is that they can’t stand losing. There are other reasons, too, like they discover girls. But they’ll miss competitive chess. I still sometimes wonder whether my quitting was the right decision. I definitely miss the rush from wiping out an opponent. I wish I didn’t have the bloodlust deep within me.”

  THROUGHOUT MY CHILDHOOD, I STRUGGLED BETWEEN WANTING TO BE unique and wanting to blend in with the crowd. Even in grade school, I felt different from the kids around me. In fact, my family and I were different, starting with our physical surroundings. My friends’ homes were white, freshly painted, and ringed by well-manicured lawns. Our house was pale lime, the paint flaked, and we had no grass worth mowing. We lived in the woods on the edge of a steep ravine at the end of a dead-end road. If the Addams Family had lived in a cottage, it might have looked like this. The roof leaked, fungus spouted from the floorboards, and squirrels ransacked the attic.

  Our house was completely cluttered, overrun by my dad’s reams of paper and my mother’s collection of found objects. A gigantic egg-shaped L’eggs panty-hose display, which she rescued from the trash bin of a local pharmacy, had a prominent place in our living room for years while she pondered what to do with it. Visitors mistook it for an avant-garde lamp and fumbled to find the switch. My mother also salvaged twelve-foot cardboard tubes from the garbage of a fabric store. The tubes lay in our downstairs hall for half a decade, with guests tripping on them, before they, too, defeated her and she had me strap them on the station wagon and haul them to the town dump. A large enclosed porch was too crowded to sit in; it housed her button and seedpod collection, which numbered in the thousa
nds and served as the raw material for necklaces and bracelets that she intended to make. I could never decide whether all the clutter was a sign of life compared to my friends’ comparatively empty and sterile homes, with their armchairs wrapped in stain-resistant plastic, or whether the disorder was a complete embarrassment.

  Our religion, or rather our lack of it, also distinguished us from other families. We were atheists—there is no religion recorded on my birth certificate—and this did not sit well in elementary school. During the pledge of allegiance in first or second grade, the teacher noticed that I quietly skipped the words “under God.” She ordered me to say them. When I didn’t comply, she banished me daily to the hall during the pledge. The teacher stopped punishing me only after my father visited the principal and threatened to involve the ACLU and sue the school. Still, many kids refused to sit with “the atheist” in the lunchroom. Initially, I was reserved about my beliefs and was ostracized for them, but as I got older, I fought back by telling everyone how foolish they were to believe in a God who did not exist.

  By junior high school, I stopped saying the pledge of allegiance altogether because I had become a self-proclaimed World Federalist who believed that countries should do away with national borders. But I wasn’t a little Ted Kaczynski. I had close friends, and my outré politics did not stop me from being elected class president. I like to think that my schoolmates were responding to my self-deprecating humor, my intelligence, maybe even my courage in holding unpopular beliefs; they were also seduced by my fanciful campaign platform about students wresting more control of the school from the administrators.

  School sports were where I suffered most as an outsider. I was gawky and uncoordinated. When teams were picked in gym class, it was a toss-up whether I or a hapless fat kid would be the last one chosen. Then I’d be assigned to some inconsequential position—in softball, I’d back up the right-fielder—where I’d see little or no action. If I dropped the ball or otherwise muffed a play, our gym teacher would punish me by yanking me from the game and making me run laps or do push-ups, and then he’d ridicule me because my push-up form was horrible. When, with his tacit encouragement, one lug in the class roughed me up, my response was to skip class. I didn’t tell my parents about the sadistic teacher because I was ashamed.

  My father never came right out and said that he wanted me to play sports. Nor was he, at three hundred pounds, exactly running around with me in the backyard tossing a football. Nevertheless, he liked to tell me stories about his college triumphs as a boxer and a tennis player. He said that when he attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he was the heavyweight champion in his college division. On the tennis court, he said, he held his own against Pancho Gonzales, in the days before the self-trained legend became the best player in the world. These stories only made me feel more inadequate.

  I made the best of my differences, but it was exhausting: I longed for once to be part of a team or a clique. When I entered Staples High School, a sport was obviously out of the question; I fantasized instead about being in a rock band, but I wasn’t musically talented. I was even envious of a small marauding gang of juvenile delinquents in my otherwise tony high school who flunked their classes, walked around with cigarette packs stuffed between their T-shirts and their biceps, and patrolled the town in old cars with souped-up engines and no mufflers. And so, in tenth grade, I signed up for the chess team, naively hoping that it would bring some camaraderie into my life.

  Unfortunately, chess wasn’t much of a team sport—even though, at the scholastic, national, and international levels, there were occasional events billed as team competitions. Staples had four students who signed up for the chess team. Our faculty adviser, an AP chemistry teacher named Mr. Lawrence, would find another high school that had a chess foursome. As our best player, I would square off against their top guy, our second-best would play their second-best, and so on. But my teammates and I couldn’t consult one another during the games, and so it was still essentially an individual competition. I was also stronger than my teammates, and so I didn’t play training games with them in anticipation of our matches. It wasn’t even an organized chess league. We played maybe two or three times a year. We had no spectators, no cheerleaders, and no groupies. When we won, we weren’t rewarded with a ticker-tape parade or even a warm handshake from the school principal. In fact, nobody at school except the four of us and Mr. Lawrence even knew that we had played.

  I nearly always beat the other kids in these matches. When we played home games, in Mr. Lawrence’s classroom, I tried to defeat my opponents quickly so that I’d have more time to peruse his mail-order catalogues for chemistry equipment. This was in the days before Victoria’s Secret. His Bunsen burner catalogues were nearly as hot. Braless women in unbuttoned white lab coats were shown holding Erlenmeyer flasks and demonstrating sterile pipettes.

  CHESS WAS FAILING ME IN DIFFERENT WAYS IN CONNECTICUT AND NEW York. In Westport the chess was easy and boring, and my steak-and-potato teammates were largely uninteresting. The Manhattan chess scene was stimulating and challenging, but the tournaments themselves were very stressful. During the nights between tournament games I did not sleep well. I dreamed about chess—and the chain of mental events was often the same. First I’d see a chessboard, the pieces perfectly centered on their original squares. Then I’d concentrate at length on this familiar, initial setup, trying to make sense of the beauty—and the horror—of the game that mesmerized me. When I was finished pondering the initial position, I’d see the chessmen slide gracefully across the board as they repeated, move for move, part of a game from out of my past or from the annals of chess history—often a fragment of a game I didn’t realize I had committed to memory. (The odd thing was that when I was awake I had difficulty playing chess in my head.) The first game would be followed by another, then another, and so on through the night.9

  Mental chess has been depicted in literature as putting an intolerable strain on the mind. (And not just in literature: the Soviet Union banned blindfold chess exhibitions in 1930 on the grounds that they were a health hazard.) Dr. B, the protagonist of Stefan Zweig’s 1942 novella, Chess Story, is held by the Gestapo in deprived, solitary confinement. He is able initially to maintain his sanity by playing chess with himself in his head. But ultimately Dr. B has a schizophrenic breakdown because the part of his mind that is playing White is bent on annihilating the part that is playing Black.

  Of course I fared better than Dr. B, even if the mental chess made me woozy. The pace of the games in my head gradually picked up throughout the night, reaching a manic crescendo at daybreak. When it was time for me to get out of bed, I was not in a good condition to play an actual game. I never fell asleep at the board—I was too keyed up—but I had to find strong moves while battling a headache and feeling lousy. It wasn’t fun.

  Even though my game continued to improve, the rate of improvement had slowed, and I was not satisfied with my play. Most of my games seemed marred by the absence of a coherent plan or even outright blunders. The games that ran through my head seemed purer. I enjoyed playing chess with myself. On each move, I took a fresh look at the board and followed what seemed to be the objectively correct plan. My judgment seemed better than in tournament play, when the endorphin rush or mental demons interfered with my appraisal of the position. The self-imposed pressure to win can be so intense that it forces the intellectual faculties to a standstill, like the effect of car headlights on a deer.

  I shouldn’t have been so hard on myself. I already knew enough about chess to realize that even the world’s best players made mistakes. The twenty-one-game match between Fischer and Spassky was heralded as the “match of the century,” but it was full of blunders. In a lifeless position in the very first game, Fischer made one of his worst mistakes ever. On the twenty-ninth move, he greedily snatched a flank pawn with his dark-squared bishop, but the pawn proved to be toxic. Fischer thought that he could extricate the bishop if Spassky tried to ensnare it by
hemming it in with adjacent pawns. He had miscalculated, however, and Spassky subsequently trapped the cleric. But my awareness of the fallibility of the top masters didn’t make me any more tolerant of my own lapses. Instead, it made me feel that something was rotten at the core of the game.

  Chess also became increasingly solipsistic for me. Although it challenged my intellect in a way that nothing else had, it did not help me feel part of a group. Certainly the Staples chess team was no substitute for the basketball team, and even at the tournaments themselves, with dozens of people crammed into the playing hall, I still felt lonely. And while in principle I liked that the larger chess world was not judgmental about the misfits who flocked to it, I felt too ordinary to count myself one of them, either. I suspected that the kids I met in the 1970s in Manhattan tournaments really did want to live in rook houses. I simply wanted to live in a house where the paint didn’t peel. In Connecticut I was too different to be normal, and in New York I was too normal to be different.

  During my junior year at Staples, I defected from chess to tournament bridge. I learned the card game from a book along with my friend Josh, who was so good at mathematics that while in high school he was receiving private instruction in number theory from a Yale graduate student. I was good at math, too—although not that good—and bridge involved the quick computation of odds. Bridge wasn’t nearly as stressful as chess—it didn’t take as much work or preparation, and I didn’t dream about the hands I played. For me what distinguished bridge the most from chess was that it was an intimate partnership game. It was like doubles in tennis or ballroom dancing: you had to coordinate your moves. There were also true team competitions in bridge. Josh and I taught the game to two of our friends, Richard and Victor, and the four of us spent part of the summer traveling to regional tournaments. We had a blast competing as a team and reviewing the hands afterward—and we stayed up late playing cards among ourselves.