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

by Paul Hoffman

  We had no money to pay for a room in the hotels where the tournaments were held, so we improvised. At a competition at Grossinger’s, a well-known Borscht Belt resort in the Catskills, we simply slept on the floor in a new wing that was under construction and we were awakened the next morning by bewildered workmen. In another hotel we slept in the playing hall itself, under four rectangular, cafeteria-style tables that had been used for tournament registration. We simply pushed the tables flush to the wall and, for an element of privacy, realigned the tablecloths so that they extended all the way to the floor. The night watchmen did not detect us when they shined their flashlights around the room. Once we got some rest on the pews in an unlocked church—after getting into the sacramental wafers and dressing up in purple robes. In bridge I finally found some camaraderie: my teammates were smart and fun and didn’t want to live in a house adorned with the ace of spades. Our group dissolved only when we all went off to different colleges.

  FISCHER’S MISANTHROPIC GHOST STILL HAUNTS CHESS, BUT NOW, AFTER THE turn of the twenty-first century, the game has an improved image thanks in part to the rock-star status of Garry Kasparov, world champion from 1985 to November 2000. Kasparov has worked tirelessly to establish scholastic chess programs in dozens of countries. He is an urbane, well-spoken millionaire who retired from tournament play in March 2005 to plunge into Russian politics as the front man for Free 2008, an organization that was intent on blocking Vladimir Putin from amending the Russian constitution so that he can seek a third term in 2008. (Kasparov subsequently founded United Civil Front, a social movement dedicated to stopping Russia from returning to totalitarianism.) Kasparov is to chess what Tiger Woods is to golf, Wayne Gretzky is to hockey, and Michael Jordan is to basketball—except that he dominated chess longer than these men ruled their respective sports. For a fifth of a century he was the number one rated chess player in the world. He is so well known that Pepsi once made him the focus of a Super Bowl commercial, in which an elevator and a vacuum cleaner attacked him after he defeated one of their mechanical confederates, a computer, at chess. Pandolfini’s students think Garry Kasparov is a god. “Unlike Fischer or Morphy, Kasparov does not behave like he is on leave from an asylum,” Pandolfini told me.

  And yet even Kasparov isn’t entirely able to abide by social conventions. Like Fischer, he can barely conceal the contempt he feels for his opponents. I once watched him play thirty-four games simultaneously against teams of school children in Manhattan’s Puck Building. It took him just two hours to defeat all of these beginners. And yet even though his opponents were only a fifth to a third his age, the world’s highest-rated player could not restrain himself from his fabled glowers and glares. In one game, he was impatient when two eight-year-olds who were collaborating did not resign in a hopeless position. He rolled his eyes and shook his head whenever he reached their board. Finally, as he marched two pawns deep into his adversaries’ home territory where he could soon promote the foot soldiers into queens, he growled, “How many queens do you think I need in order to win?”

  I first met Kasparov through Pandolfini in November 2000, when Bruce was the master of ceremonies at a Manhattan charity event in which the Russian played twenty-one games simultaneously against amateurs. Kasparov had been dethroned as world champion two weeks earlier by his protégé Vladimir Kramnik, and this was the first time he had played in public since. Kasparov grimaced and grumbled when a boy offered him a draw in a position in which the boy stood much worse. Pandolfini tactfully warned the crowd that if any draw offers were to be made, the champion would make them.

  After nearly two hours, Kasparov had disposed of everyone except Nelson Farber, an attorney in his late thirties. Farber had managed to frustrate Kasparov’s efforts to pull off one of his trademark flashy attacks. At one point, the Russian stared, squinting, at the ceiling for several minutes, shaking his head disapprovingly. Farber sat there stoically, only to subsequently blunder in a position that looked dead even; when he finally acknowledged defeat, Kasparov broke into a wide grin and pumped his hand.

  Pandolfini and I went to dinner with Kasparov afterward, and I asked him whether Farber could have drawn the game if he hadn’t made the error. “Of course,” Kasparov replied, as if I had asked the world’s dumbest question. “For a moment before he blundered, I thought of offering him a draw. But I didn’t like the way he looked. He was too smug and self-confident. I wanted to crush him.”

  Later, I contacted Farber and told him that Kasparov hadn’t offered him a draw because he looked too confident. “Confident?” Farber said. “That’s ridiculous. I was scared shitless. It was a Walter Mitty moment with everyone crowded around the board and Kasparov staring off into space for ages. I thought etiquette required me to move instantly, but here he was taking a lot of time. There was a moment when we exchanged smiles. My smile was ‘I’m happy to be here, amazed I lasted this long.’ His smile was ‘I’m going to kill you.’”

  KASPAROV’S AGGRESSION EXTENDS WELL BEYOND THE CHESSBOARD. HIS AP- proach to casual conversation is as vigorous as his chess. When he learned early in our first dinner that I had run Encyclopaedia Britannica, he tried to seize the initiative by displaying his knowledge of U.S. history. Even though we were now ostensibly on my terrain—he was playing Black, as it were—he stumped me with a series of obscure questions, on Civil War battles, I think. When he told me the answers, his bemused grin said, “Ha, I’m a Russian and I know more about the Civil War than the American-born president of the most prestigious encyclopedia!” Kasparov was unrelenting with the trivia interrogation, and finally, to silence him, I joked that I had only read volume A. I encouraged him to ask me anything about Angola, aardvarks, or Antigone. He laughed, and I changed the subject to Russian politics, a topic he could not expect me to know much about.

  By the end of the meal I was sick to my stomach, and when I got back to my hotel room and took off my shirt, I saw that my chest was a topographic map of welts and hives. This was my first outbreak of idiopathic angioedema in the half year since I had left Chicago. I had been so involved in talking to the chess god, even as he tried to upstage me, that I’d ignored the warning signs. My chest and legs had started itching at dinner, but I’d tried to suppress the urge to scratch them by concentrating on what Kasparov was saying. Two hours later, however, I was checking myself into an emergency room—a crazy end to a crazy evening.

  After the ER docs stabilized the swelling, they questioned me about what I had eaten for dinner. I couldn’t think of anything unusual. I now wonder if it was possible that my allergic reaction was exacerbated by my emotional state. I had intense, conflicting feelings about the evening. I was thrilled, of course, to meet Kasparov—he was smart and engaging on subjects far afield from chess—but I was also unnerved by his insane competitiveness, directed first at Farber and then at me.

  Our dinner stirred up all sorts of issues. I have never gotten along with alpha males and am unsure about the line between acceptable competitiveness and nasty aggression. I had difficulty in gym class not just because I was inept but because sports seemed too brutal to me. When is the urge to win not just about performing optimally and more about breaking your adversary, physically or psychically? Assuming your opponent is not a jerk, is it immoral to want to destroy him? To me this kind of attitude, which is common in chess, detracts from the nobility of the game. Chess is said to be a safe way to sublimate aggressive impulses. But is it harmless just because the aggression isn’t physical? The idea of “healthy competition” may be a myth when it comes to chess. Can you really play a friend, go for each other’s jugular, and be buddies afterward?

  I have watched thoughtful chess players wrestle at different levels with these issues. Pascal Charbonneau avoids playing chess with his girlfriend, who is an international master. Nor will he play a game with me, although he’ll happily help me for hours with my own chess (although I must wonder if he is actually conflicted about the reverse possibility—that he’d derive unwholesome pl
easure from trouncing me). Nigel Short has eliminated the possibility of playing chess with his wife by humiliating her the first time she asked him. He insisted on doing it blindfolded with just fifteen minutes on the clock while she could take all the time in the world while looking at the board.

  As for my own attitude toward competition, I can play card and board games with people I love, but I can’t do it casually. I like to go all out in games. So if I think people I care about are going to misinterpret my determination as aggression, I won’t play. Ann has tried to interest me in Scrabble, but I’ve turned her down because I don’t want to risk upsetting her. She probably has a better vocabulary than I, but I’m convinced I’d consistently beat her because I’m a better strategist. I also have the infuriating habit of appearing as though I don’t give a damn. So she might be deflated to lose to someone who doesn’t seem to be trying.

  My health took a scary turn after my night in the hospital. An allergist in Woodstock ran some tests for obscure disorders and one came back positive for a rare form of neuroendocrine cancer. He tried to calm me by explaining that the result might be wrong, because the test was so strongly positive that my symptoms should be even worse. I reminded myself, though, that my symptoms were disturbing enough for him to test for the cancer in the first place. It was a hellish two weeks while I waited for the result of a retest and occupied myself reading horrific accounts on the Internet of people who had died from the disease. I also read that people undergoing the test should avoid Tylenol, tomatoes, and avocados in the preceding days. As it happened, I had consumed all three the first time around. This time the result was negative. We repeated it a third time for safe measure: I wasn’t going to die.

  My allergist reviewed what we knew about my strange condition. We knew I was highly allergic not just to aspirin but to the whole related class of drugs known as nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories, and we also knew that the facial swelling and hives occurred, too, when I wasn’t taking any of these drugs. Now the chemical basis of aspirin is salicylic acid, an old natural remedy found in the bark of willow trees and other plants. Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, recommended willow-bark tea to ease the pain of childbirth, and Native Americans used it to treat muscle aches and fever. My doctor consulted the medical literature and found that a tiny fraction of people who were allergic to aspirin also had adverse reactions to fruits and nuts that were high in salicylates. Because this extreme kind of allergy was rare, the literature was rather old and unreliable on the precise salicylate levels in various foods, and so I eliminated most of the suspect ones from my diet. I cut out almonds, apples, oranges, and strawberries. Thankfully, the episodes of idiopathic angioedema decreased in severity and eventually ceased altogether.

  I was also doing better with my hand. Before I returned east, I saw a neurosurgeon in Chicago about my chronically tingling fingers. He said that he could operate on my elbow to relieve the pressure on the pinched ulnar nerve but that the surgery could leave my elbow unstable. He told me to wait eighteen months because aggravated nerves generally heal at the rate of an inch a month and the distance between my numb pinkie and my elbow was approximately eighteen inches. Some of his patients, he said, insisted on the surgery because they found the numbness too distracting. I decided to wait. My main difficulty was that I couldn’t sense where exactly my pinkie was. It would protrude at odd angles from my hand and I’d smash it on door frames and the edges of tables. But the tingling was declining and pretty much disappeared according to the surgeon’s forecast.

  As I recovered my full health, Pandolfini gave me chess lessons whenever my work took me from Woodstock to New York. We would dissect my recent tournament games, and he’d point out plans and ideas that I had not considered. We also worked on a psychological issue. My games exhibited the kind of dramatic swings on the chessboard that Sosonko had described—my opponent is winning, he screws up; I’m winning, I blunder; it’s drawish, he’s winning again. We worked on my being Zen, on my smoothing out my internal reactions so that I could stay focused on the game. I had particular difficulty not capitulating if the game suddenly swung in my opponent’s favor. Rather than making my adversary work for the full point, I would in effect pout and roll over. With Pandolfini’s guidance, I tried to arrest my self-defeating attitude. Even a theoretically winning game doesn’t win itself; a fallible human being must correctly marshal his forces move after move if he is going to bring home the victory. If I put up sufficient obstacles, it was not inevitable that my adversary would win “a won game.” Most games, Pandolfini said, are won by the player who makes the next-to-last blunder.10

  I had a chance to apply this lesson when I faced nineteen-year-old Noah Siegel in the second round of a rapid tournament at the Marshall in August 2001. Siegel was a seasoned junior player who was rated nearly four hundred points more than me, at 2333. If our ratings accurately reflected our respective playing strengths, he should beat me 92 percent of the time. I had White and played the Exchange Variation against his French Defense. This variation, in which White initiates a pawn trade on the third move and brings about a symmetrical pawn structure, seems a timid treatment of the French. But no less a player than Bobby Fischer was successful with it.

  Of course I was no Fischer, and Siegel achieved a strong position, with pressure on my queenside. My position was far from lost, but it was the kind of game, with his rooks bearing down on my weak queenside pawns, in which I usually mentally gave up and engaged in ineffectual wood-shifting. This time I concentrated and resisted. We both thought too long in this thirty-minute game, and in the resulting mutual time scramble, I contrived to divert his attention by a desperate attack on his king.

  We each had only half a minute left, and he made a couple of inaccurate moves. My fingers were shaking, and we both clumsily knocked over pieces as we struggled to beat the clock. When we both went under ten seconds, our hands collided. I didn’t know who stood better. Indeed, I had no idea at all what was happening. I was just blindly pushing pieces, playing anything that came into my head, to avoid losing on the clock. I started checking his king. If I was lucky, I thought, maybe I could escape with a draw by perpetual check. He extended his hand and I shook it. “Nice,” he said, and I thought he was monosyllabically congratulating me on my wily achievement of a draw.

  Siegel left without a postmortem. I also exited the playing hall, and took a moment to compose myself. During time pressure I’m not usually aware of feeling nervous—my pulse doesn’t race or my stomach ache—but I get brain-lock. I can’t think clearly. Once the pressure ends and the game is over, the tension overtakes me and I’m scared I’m going to vomit. My antidote is to drink a couple of glasses of water. That cured me quickly this time, and I proceeded to write 12—the numerical value of a draw—on the official scoreboard. Only after I recorded the game as a draw did the final position flash through my mind, and I had the strange thought that I had improbably checkmated him. Not that I could have mated him if I had played a better move but that I had actually mated him. Impossible, I thought. It would be like having sex with a woman I had long coveted and not realizing it. Could I really be that stupid? I ran back into the tournament hall to see if the final position was still on the board. Sure enough, it was. I had hunted down his king, just as I had envisaged. And then I realized he must have been congratulating me on my unexpected victory and had exited abruptly because he was upset.

  The tournament director had already removed the scoreboard on which I had posted “the draw.” I found him and told him, without going into the embarrassing details, that I had incorrectly marked the result. I presented the situation as if I had made the handwriting equivalent of a typo. He raised his eyebrows, and said, “OK, I’ll change it because I know Noah will protest if he didn’t actually lose.” Of course I knew Noah wasn’t going to protest—he knew better than I did that I had won.

  Chess was an insane game. When I lost, I was unhappy. And yet it was necessary to play and risk defeat if I was
ever going to win and relish victory. Here I had succeeded in checkmating the highest-rated player I had ever defeated so far in a tournament, and I couldn’t enjoy it. I was both amused and disheartened by the absurdity.

  4

  RUSSIAN DOMINATION

  “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you.”

  —NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV

  “The loss of my childhood was the price of becoming the youngest world champion in history. When you have to fight every day from a young age, your soul could become contaminated. I lost my childhood. I never really had it. Today I have to be careful not to become cruel, because I became a soldier too early.”

  —GARRY KASPAROV

  LIKE OTHER AMERICAN DEVOTEES OF THE GAME, I REALIZED that Russia was master of the sixty-four squares when I first cracked open a chess book and stumbled on its intimidating litany of exotic Slavic names—Shcherbakov, Nezhmetdinov, Gurgenidze, Kholmov, Yusupov, Psakhis. All serious chess players in the West live in the shadow of Russia, which has towered over the international chess scene for more than sixty years. There is a joke in chess circles that you don’t stand a chance of becoming world champion unless your name is Russian and starts with a K: Kramnik, Kasparov, Karpov, Kasimdzhanov, and Khalifman were all world champions during the past twenty-five years, and another K, Korchnoi, was the strongest challenger to the throne. Russia was such a chess powerhouse that in 1970 a Soviet team defeated the rest of the world’s top grandmasters in an event called the USSR vs. the World. If I had attended high school in Moscow in the 1970s, I would not have made the chess team, let alone played top board. I would have been lost in a crowd of other mediocre fifteen-year-old players.