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

by Paul Hoffman

  Kramnik must be a masochist. On November 25, 2006, with not even two months’ rest after his stressful victory over Topalov, he jumped back into the man versus machine fray by taking on a new and improved Deep Fritz in a six-game match in Bonn, Germany. The first game was drawn, and then in the second, in a position that would likely have led to a draw, Kramnik made the most basic and catastrophic error in chess. In a position in which he had plenty of time on the clock, Kramnik succumbed to amaurosis scachistica—chess blindness—and failed to see that the machine was threatening to mate him on the spot. When he didn’t simply parry the threat, the machine pounced and checkmated him.

  “I cannot really find any explanation,” a stunned Kramnik said after the match. “I was not feeling tired. I think I was calculating well…. It’s just very strange. I cannot explain it.” By overlooking a mate in one, the fourteenth world champion now has the dubious distinction of making the worst blunder ever in the history of championship chess. Not surprisingly, for an activity in which a player’s psychological readiness is as important as his knowledge of the Sicilian, Kramnik did not recover. He never beat Fritz once and lost the match 4–2.

  5

  AN AMERICAN IN MOSCOW

  “In Russia, truth almost always assumes an entirely fantastic character.”

  —FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

  DURING THE ESPN MATCH, THE ELEVATORS AT THE NEW York Athletic Club were a good place to hear chess gossip. An acquaintance of mine named Andrew, who was a newcomer to chess but fascinated by the scene, rode them frequently in the hope of meeting famous players who had come to watch Garry Kasparov confront the computer.

  “I met Jennifer Shahade,” he gushed to me. “You’re friends, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “Is she the U.S. women’s champion?”

  “Last year she was. Now it’s Anna Hahn, a trader on the Nikkei.”

  “I need to meet her, too,” said Andrew. “I Googled Jennifer. Her favorite book is The Brothers Karamazov. I’m going to read it this weekend. Does she give private lessons?”

  “Yes, and she’s looking for students.”

  “How good do I have to be before she’ll coach me?”

  “She works with beginners.”

  “OK, but I don’t want to embarrass myself. I’m heading to a Village chess shop tonight to work on my game.”

  After another elevator ride, Andrew told me that he had overheard a young man in a dark suit explaining how to beat Kasparov. “What nonsense!” Andrew said. “I can’t believe the guy was so arrogant.”

  “Kasparov has been known to lose,” I said.

  “Not to this guy. No way. He was a businessman. He wasn’t Russian. He looked too normal to be a strong player. He was just a braggart.”

  Andrew was mistaken. The man was Joel Lautier, a thirty-year-old grandmaster from Paris and full-time chess professional, who is one of the few human players to achieve a plus score against Kasparov in classical chess. During the Russian’s reign as world champion, they played ten games and Lautier ended up one game ahead. Three of the encounters had been decisive, with the Frenchman winning two of them.1

  I corralled Joel between games at the New York Athletic Club and interviewed him over drinks. I was impressed by his intensity, self-confidence, and total devotion to chess. “I’ve had very strange dreams,” he told me, “in which the entire universe operates not by physical laws but according to the rules of chess. A person says good-bye, turns into a rook, and moves off horizontally the way a rook does. I like Nabokov because of the very real way he portrays how the game can take over your life.”

  When Joel was thirteen, he trained with Yacob Murey, an untitled player who emigrated from Russia to France via Israel.2 Murey was a walking chess encyclopedia who had a wealth of original ideas about the openings. “He looks like a tramp,” Joel continued. “He dresses badly and is not too clean. He doesn’t know how to properly eat what’s in front of him. He speaks only about chess, as if it is the most important thing in the world, and he talks about the game even with nonplayers who can’t follow what he’s saying. They think he’s a madman. If you spend a couple of days with Murey, you forget that anything else exists in the world besides chess—it’s a wonderful feeling. It is important to meet such people because then you realize how rich and deep the game actually is.”

  I asked Joel what it was like to face Kasparov. “Obviously I enjoyed myself,” he said. “Garry is an anxious player. He absolutely hates losing, and that fear of defeat drives him to work extremely hard and play well. He’s a comedian at the board, and I think he knows that. He makes all these faces. In our games he was not too emotional until he was losing. Then he’d start swearing and muttering to himself in Russian. I understand the language so I could really enjoy the show. Russian is very rich when it comes to curse words. What he said cannot easily be translated into English.”3

  Joel first beat Kasparov at Linares 1994 in a thrilling encounter in which Joel had two queens. “It was absolutely crazy,” he recalled, “with three queens on the board.” After Kasparov lost, Joel asked him if he wanted to analyze the game.

  “There is nothing to analyze,” Kasparov responded, and he bulldozed his way out of the room.

  “Some unfortunate fan approached him for an autograph,” Joel recalled, “but Garry shoved him up against the wall. A defeated Kasparov is a serious beast.” Kasparov had calmed down by dinner, however, and he proved willing to discuss the game in the dining hall. Then he invited Joel back to his hotel suite, where they analyzed the game for two or three hours. “Garry is a very complicated, two-sided person,” Joel told me. “He can be extremely combative and hostile, and then he can do something unexpected and very generous, like going over the game with me for an evening. You have to admire his genuine love for chess.”

  I asked Joel what their relationship was like these days. “Not good,” he said. “I don’t think he likes people who have a plus score against him.” Joel may also be on Kasparov’s bad side because of his suggestion that the champion’s on-and-off-again relationship with FIDE strongman Kirsan Ilyumzhinov was governed less by what was good for chess and more by what was good for Kasparov. “There’s a joke chess players tell,” Joel told me. “Kasparov once said, when he broke with FIDE, ‘I will not take Ilyumzhinov’s dirty money.’ After Kasparov had a rapprochement with FIDE, he was asked why he was now taking the dirty money. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘it’s because I discovered the money was laundered.’”

  Joel’s role as one of Vladimir Kramnik’s seconds in the 2000 World Championship can’t have helped his relationship with Kasparov either. “He probably sees me as the enemy because I assisted the man who dethroned him. I don’t have bad feelings toward him. He’s a great, great player.”

  JOEL NEVER WORKED SO HARD IN HIS LIFE AS THE TIME HE HELPED TWENTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD Kramnik prepare for Kasparov. For six months before the match in London, he and two other grandmasters aided Kramnik full-time. “Vladimir was incredibly organized,” Joel said. “He divided the openings he was thinking of playing among the three of us and had us analyze them individually for days.” Joel initially worked from home in Paris. “Sometimes I looked at chess for ten hours a stretch,” he said. “Kramnik would rotate among the three of us, visiting me for two or three weeks at a time to go over my analysis and push it even further.”

  The match itself, which lasted three and a half weeks, was even more grueling. Each game started about 2:00 P.M. and finished by 6:00 or 7:00 P.M. Afterward, Kramnik would do a brain dump of everything he’d thought about during the game, and the three seconds would write it all down, to dissect it later in case a subsequent game followed the same course. Then they’d go for a walk and eat dinner. At 10:00 P.M. they’d resume preparation. Kramnik stayed with them until 2:00 A.M. They continued analyzing through the night, until Kramnik rejoined them between 10:00 and 11:00 A.M. Then they’d show him what they’d looked at.

  “I was impressed that in one hour he could go th
rough all of our analysis—eight or nine hours of it—checking every line, learning the moves by heart in the process, and actually exercising his critical eye on them,” Joel said. “At some point, he’d say, ‘I don’t like this particular line. You should check it again before the next game.’ It was amazing that he could instantly spot the critical places without our having to tell him.” Then they’d take another stroll, eat lunch together, and walk Kramnik to the board. Game time was when the seconds were finally free to sleep, but of course they wanted to be awake for the finale of each encounter.

  Joel’s work with Kramnik did not translate immediately into his own chess success. “I actually played much worse,” he told me, “because it was very depressing. I saw that he was so much faster than me and could instantly feel things on the chessboard that took me time to figure out for myself. There were many occasions where he wouldn’t trust a variation before he even did any calculations. He is a very intuitive player. He often decides immediately on his next move and spends his thinking time confirming his choice. When I play, I make a lot of my decisions by vigorously calculating everything. I close in on the right move by methodical, step-by step analysis. Instead he feels the right move. That skill is very hard to learn—it’s more of a gift.”

  World-class players generally make tough bosses, but Joel found Kramnik to be pleasant and kind. “Most strong players are completely self-centered,” Joel said, “because they are used to doing things alone. They are blind to how other people feel or else simply don’t care. Garry can be charming, but he can also behave terribly, especially after a defeat. Vladimir is extremely well balanced and almost never loses his composure. There were tense moments in the match—like when Kasparov shifted to the Nimzo-Indian Defense, for which we were not as well prepared—but Vladimir didn’t take it out on us. He remained calm.”

  The secret of Kramnik’s victory in the sixteen-game match, in which Kasparov astonishingly did not win a single game and lost twice, was his deep understanding of his opponent’s psychology and his ability to translate that knowledge into an opening for which Kasparov was not temperamentally suited. It wasn’t a question of busting one particular line in the Najdorf that Kasparov liked to play, or one specific line in the Grünfeld—it was a question of employing a whole new opening system that would take the world champion out of his comfort zone. It had to be a system that Kasparov had not faced before in match play and one that Kramnik himself had never employed, so that it would be a complete surprise. Moreover, it had to be a system that would be hard for Kasparov to master during the match, with his team of seconds and computers in overdrive. The so-called Berlin Defense to the Ruy Lopez met the criteria and had the additional promise of getting the queens off the board on the eighth move, making it harder for Kasparov to play his signature attacking game. Kramnik knew that Kasparov would suffer psychologically without his lady.

  “There was one big problem with the Berlin,” said Joel, laughing. “It’s absolutely horrible. It’s very passive and unnatural. It takes a long time to get your king to safety. White pushes back your pieces with his pawns. It’s hard to coordinate your rooks because they’re not connected. You have to make funny moves to even get the rooks out. White definitely has an advantage, but it’s not so easy for him to play. You reach an endgame right in the opening, so Black’s loss of time isn’t that bad.

  “We kept telling Vladimir that the Berlin was crap. But he kept insisting that we look at it. Vladimir has a classical chess upbringing and normally he wouldn’t even consider playing such a passive defense. But he knew Garry would hate the tortuously slow pace even more than Kramnik himself did. Vladimir kept ordering us to explore the Berlin further.” Kramnik discovered many subtle ideas and nuances and convinced himself to like the defense. By the start of the match, he had played the defense in training games with Joel and his other seconds, and it had been very hard for them to draw him with White. “His match strategy was brilliant,” Joel said. “Garry was tortured—but for me the Berlin is one of the most depressing things in chess. I’d give up the game if I were forced to play it.”

  JOEL LAUTIER WAS BORN IN TORONTO, IN 1973, TO A JAPANESE MOTHER AND a French father, both computer specialists. His first language was English because his nanny, and the rest of Toronto, spoke English. “My parents talked to me in French,” he recalled, “but I responded to them in English, which was a strange way of communicating.” When he was three, his family moved to France, and he started playing chess six months later. Joel’s father was obsessed by the Fischer-Spassky match, which had taken place just before Joel was born. His mother taught him the moves and his father helped him improve. “In a sense I already had the routine of a chess professional when I was five,” Joel said. “Every day I played a long match against my mother when she came home from work.” In the morning, his father would help him prepare for the match; later that evening, the two would go over the games. “The fact that chess is my career,” Joel said dryly, “was not an improvised choice.”

  Joel’s first chess memory, from the age of five, was his father bringing home a board without any coordinates on the sides. “He’d point to a square and say, ‘Pretend you’re White and tell me the coordinates,’” Joel recalled. “And I’d say, ‘e4.’ ‘Now pretend you’re Black,’ he’d say, and he’d point to a different square and ask me the coordinates. That’s how I started learning blindfold chess.” Joel mastered mental play when he was ten, during his two-hour commute to a new school. Each day he brought a book of chess puzzles with him and solved them in his head on the long ride.

  Joel said that as he became increasingly involved in the chess world, his father’s only concern was “whether I could make a living.” In 1988, when Joel became world junior champion at the age of fifteen—the youngest person ever to do so—his father realized that it was a realistic possibility. (Although Joel had skipped a grade in school because he was academically gifted, he never graduated from high school, because his senior-year final exams in Paris in 1990 were inconveniently scheduled at the same time as the World Championship Qualifying Tournament in Manila.) In January 1995, Joel’s ranking in the world peaked at number twelve. When I first interviewed him in November 2003, he was number thirty-two. “My ambition is to break into the top ten,” Joel told me then. “I’ll be sad if I don’t at least try.” Joel conceded that he can’t calculate as fast as he could when he was twenty years old, but believes he can give younger players a run by concentrating on aspects of the game that they’ve neglected. “With their computer databases,” he said, “they may know the latest opening wrinkles. But after the opening, the gods have placed the middle game. And after the middle game, the endgame.”

  Joel’s holistic approach and his emphasis on fundamentals are very Russian, which is no surprise since he learned the language when he was twelve so that he could read Russian chess books, immerse himself in Moscow chess culture, and study with a top Soviet coach. His high forehead is topped by a thick black coiff; my first impression of him was that he could have passed as an apparatchik in the Brezhnev-era politburo. “If you’re going to be a great classical chef,” he told me, “you must learn French. If you’re going to be an opera singer, you have to know Italian. If you’re going to be a chess player, you must learn Russian.” Joel added that while there may be many drawbacks to Communism, the Soviet system produced “many damn good players.”

  LIKE JOEL, I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN FASCINATED BY RUSSIA, AND CHESS WAS JUST part of it. I was in first grade in 1962 when Nikita Khrushchev stationed nuclear warheads ninety miles from Florida. I remember the “duck and cover” drills during the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which we practiced hiding under our desks. (The whole country was then subscribing to the delusion that this would protect the children of America from nuclear attack.) For me, though, Russia has a mystique beyond Cold War intrigue, because my father was a disillusioned Communist.

  Some of my earliest memories of my father involve his flirtation with Communism. Whe
n I was four, I accompanied him to the polling station in Westport for the U.S. presidential election in 1960. We went early in the day, and when he emerged from the voting booth, I asked him whether he had chosen Kennedy or Nixon. He leaned down to whisper in my ear, and the old ladies who were manning the polling station on behalf of the League of Women Voters moved forward to overhear. “Eric Hass,” my father stage-whispered.

  “Eric Hass?” they buzzed. “Eric Hass?” The ladies were all aflutter trying to figure out who he was. Alas, my father had not started a trend. When the ballots were tabulated later in the local paper, there was only one reported vote for the Socialist Labor Party candidate. Some years later my father cast a vice-presidential vote for the Black Panther activist Angela Davis. I don’t know whether he voted for her because she was the Communist Party candidate or out of neighborly affinity: she had been incarcerated a couple of blocks from his Village apartment, in the infamous Women’s House of Detention, which we often walked past on my weekends in the city. The inmates would press their faces to the tiny barred windows, shout obscenities, and describe in violent and sexually graphic detail what they wanted to do to the men on the street. The women made me nervous and my father laugh. They were like characters in the novels he taught at the New School.