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

by Paul Hoffman

  I returned to the press room to study the position. Vaganian was pounding Joel’s king and could always force a draw by perpetual check, but there was no reason for Vaganian to bail out with a draw if he could find a knockout blow. The assembled journalists realized that the Armenian had an easy win if he simply shifted his light-squared bishop to the edge of the board and forced an exchange for the opposing cleric. It was an obvious move. The chess reporters, me included, were much weaker than the players on the stage. If we found the move, surely a grandmaster of Vaganian’s caliber would, too. I rushed back to the tournament hall to watch the expected denouement.

  Joel was still sitting there stoically, and his opponent was lost in thought. Ten minutes passed and Vaganian had not found the move. Joel, for sure, had seen the winning continuation because his normal poker face was now grim; he was waiting for the guillotine to drop.

  My head started to ache, as if my own game had gone awry. I didn’t want to watch him suffer. I had asked him once how he handled losing.

  “Very badly,” he said. “Very, very badly.”

  “What do you do?” I asked.

  “I smash the pieces. I send them flying. At least that’s what I did when I was a kid. I remember playing a very respected international master, a nice old man in his seventies. I was sure I was winning, but somehow I made a mistake and lost. I was pissed off. The man saw that I was unhappy and tried to console me, saying that I had played well. I told him to go to hell and smashed the pieces. Of course, what’s allowed when you’re about twelve doesn’t look good when you’re a grown-up. So I had to stop that. Losses still affect me a lot but I’m quieter about them now. Which may be a bad sign, actually. You have to really hate losing to play your best.”

  Another ten minutes passed and Vaganian was literally scratching his head. I thought I detected a fleeting look of bemusement on Joel’s face. Could it be that his opponent would not find the coup de grâce?

  Five more minutes passed—twenty-five minutes in all—and still Vaganian had not played the “obvious” move. Joel was pallid again. The tension was too much. Joel was a take-charge kind of guy—someone who taught himself Russian at the age of twelve because he knew he was going to be a chess professional—and here he was in the uncomfortable position of having no influence at all on his destiny. His fate was in the hands of an opponent who, after playing well earlier, was now apparently having trouble concentrating. Yet another minute passed before Vaganian, his neurons finally synchronized, shifted his bishop to the flank. The Armenian grandmaster stood up and paraded around the stage, confident of victory.

  Seven moves later Joel extended his hand in resignation. He did not abuse the chessmen or tell Vaganian where to go. In fact he did not say anything at all. He looked dazed. His eyes were watery, and there were beads of sweat on his forehead. He rose quietly and paused to look at the other top games on the stage.

  Then Joel descended into the main tournament hall and walked slowly into the adjoining espresso lounge, where other competitors who had finished their games were imbibing beer and vodka. An attractive woman asked Joel if a friend could take a picture of the two of them. A Russian television crew cornered him for an interview. Another journalist turned on a tape recorder and asked him a series of questions. I could not follow the conversations—they were in Russian—but I could see that he was straining to smile and appear upbeat.5 He was in demand for interviews in Moscow because of his language skills, his reputation as a strong player, and his new role as president of the Association of Chess Professionals, an organization dedicated to getting more money and better playing conditions for tournament regulars.

  When the last journalist was finished, I put my hand on Joel’s shoulder. “You’re a sport,” I said. “I don’t know how you do it.”

  “Fuck this!” he said. “It’s horrible to have a long tournament come down to one game and everything blow up in your face.” He walked away to decompress, and I went off to have lunch with his friend Pavel Tregubov.

  “I know how Joel feels,” Tregubov said, “to play on the stage and have your game collapse in front of the entire chess world.”

  I SAW JOEL A FEW HOURS LATER AT THE CLOSING CEREMONY. PLAYERS, journalists, fans, and friends all came together for rounds of cheap champagne. A few of the players still wanted more chess after nine days of tournament play; they commandeered the computer monitors in the espresso lounge and played bullet chess (one minute per side) on the Internet. Magnus Carlsen, a thirteen-year-old Norwegian wunderkind, was taking on all comers in person in five-minute games.

  Joel, on the other hand, was eager to abandon chess for the evening and invited me to join him for dinner with Misha, a friend and lapsed tournament player from St. Petersburg who had come to watch the game. First, though, we had to wait an hour until 8:00 P.M., when Joel was supposed to receive his prize-fund check of $800. The loss to Vaganian had cost him dearly: if he had won, he would have received about $18,000. Joel did not get his check until 10:00 P.M.—waiting is still a national pastime in Russia—by which time we had spent too much of it on pricey beer in the hotel bar.

  When Joel excused himself to get a jacket, Misha asked me where Joel’s chess game had gone astray. Let’s just ask him when he returns, I said. By this time, six hours had passed, and I was eager to hear Joel’s dispassionate analysis of the game. “No,” Misha said, “He’ll go ballistic. We need to give him time to recover.” As the evening unfolded, the time Joel needed would prove to be even more considerable than Misha had anticipated.

  Misha took us to Taras Bulba, one of his favorite Ukrainian restaurants, in the inner ring of the city. Like most dinners in Russia, the meal began with vodka. The waitress presented us with a flask of vodka, cranberry juice, kvas (a thick brown nonalcoholic beer made from wheat), and a plate of small pickles each wrapped in snow-white lard. The custom is to clink shot glasses, swallow the vodka in one gulp, chew the lard, and wash everything down with large quantities of cranberry juice and kvas. When Misha passed around the lard, he offered a toast to Dr. Atkins.

  The meal in Moscow improved after the lard. We consumed flaky cabbage and meat pies shaped like empanadas, three varieties of wild mushrooms in a garlicky cream sauce, crispy chicken croquettes, and a thick potato casserole—with vodka after every few bites. Joel excused himself to go to the restroom, and while he was gone I pressed Misha on when we should bring up the chess game. “You have to be patient, Paul,” he said, “or he’ll chop your head off. Police interrogators don’t just ask a suspect if he murdered his wife. They win his confidence first and then spring the question.”

  When Joel returned, Misha explained that he was studying French. Joel begged him to say something, anything, in French. Misha became sheepish and refused. It was easy to be intimidated by Joel’s command of languages—fluent French, English, Russian, German, Spanish, and a smattering of Japanese. If you closed your eyes, Misha said, and listened to Joel speak Russian, you’d think he was a native speaker. (His English was also free of any trace of a French accent.) His Russian was so good that when the Moscow police stopped him once for a routine check of his identity papers, they became suspicious when he produced a French passport. They apparently wondered if he might be a spy, but he talked his way out of the situation by claiming that he taught Russian at a French school. Misha said that in Soviet times Russian children were told that their language was the most complicated in the world. He had learned from his French lessons that this wasn’t true: his French-to-Russian dictionary was three times the size of his Russian-to-French one, and the English-to-Russian dictionary was even thicker.

  It was past midnight, and with all the champagne, beer, and vodka in us, the meal degenerated into a series of bad jokes and tasteless toasts. “We tell Estonian jokes,” Misha said, “the way Americans tell Polish jokes.” Historically Russians have considered Estonians to be politicheskaya prostitutki (“political prostitutes”) because they switched sides during World War II and the Russian
Revolution.

  Two Estonians are sitting on a bench, Misha said. After half an hour, one of them says, “I really like New Year’s. Yes, I like New Year’s a lot.” A half an hour passes and the other one says, “I really like sex. Yes, I like sex a lot.” Another thirty minutes goes by and the first man says, “I prefer New Year’s to sex because it happens more often.”

  It was 1:00 A.M., and Joel seemed to have unwound. I looked at Misha questioningly. Was this the moment? Misha shook his head. He proposed we retire to a special club he knew. “Joel,” he said, “you’ll like the place because you think you’ve been everywhere in Moscow. Paul, you’ll love it because you’re from Woodstock. It’s a private druggie club for the snowboarder and cliff-jumping crowd. You won’t find it in any guidebook.”

  “OK,” Joel said. “Let’s go.”

  We left the restaurant and followed Misha to a large building, constructed in the Khrushchev era. It was the headquarters of FAPSI, one of the intelligence agencies affiliated with the KGB. “They make the eavesdropping devices,” he said, “and do the high-tech cryptography shit.”

  The guard station near the building was unoccupied. Behind the building was an empty parking alley with a rope stretched across it to discourage access. “Very high security,” Joel said, as he lifted the rope for Misha and me to duck under.

  Misha led us down an icy alley to a plain metal door in a windowless section of the building. “This is it,” he said. Without Misha, I wouldn’t even have noticed the door. It was not lit, there was no identifying sign or number, and it was blocked in part by a small mound of snow and litter plowed from the alley. It was also diminutive, like a shed door or the entrance to a Hobbit hole.

  Misha looked around to make sure no one had followed us. Then he slid a tiny panel aside, revealing an electronic combination lock. He punched in three numbers and struggled to release a pin next to the lock. It wouldn’t move.

  “Damn,” he said, “they must have changed the combination. I could call my friend but it’s too late. He has a kid.”

  “Do you know his cell phone?” Joel asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, call it,” Joel said. “He’ll have turned it off if he went to bed.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Misha said. Joel was good at applying to life the kind of coldhearted analysis that served him so well at the chessboard.

  Misha phoned his friend, who said that the combination had not changed. Misha tried again and still the pin wouldn’t budge. Joel took over and, with a firm yank on the pin, managed to open the door. We went inside and pulled the door shut behind us. I heard it lock in place.

  We were now in a dark tunnel, descending, I imagined, into Middle-earth. We came to another door with an electronic combination lock and a tiny pad to which Misha pressed his thumb. It must be reading his fingerprint, I thought. Perhaps the thumb pad, as well as contributing to security, was an inside joke—a reminder that we were in the bowels of an intelligence building. Misha had no trouble with this door, and we found ourselves navigating a smoky hall. “There used to be a big picture of Osama bin Laden on the wall,” Misha said. “It made me uncomfortable.”

  There are times at the chessboard when your opponent makes a move and you’re not sure whether it is a feint or a real attack. You can work yourself into a paranoid sweat imagining that the move is the start of a brilliant plan known only to your adversary. You can frantically rearrange your chessmen in the hope of somehow parrying the nebulous threat. Alternatively, if you’re in a confident mood and can’t figure out the purpose of his move, you can assume it has no purpose and jauntily proceed with your own game.

  I was similarly conflicted as we made our way along the dark passage. Where were these guys taking me? I didn’t know them well. I had only spent a few hours with Misha and a couple of evenings with Joel. And why was his Russian so good? I had promised my wife that I was going to be cautious in Moscow, and here I was letting two drinking buddies lead me to a secret club under the KGB. What if I had been in Washington, D.C., and two men I barely knew offered to take me down a concealed passageway to an opium den under the Central Intelligence Agency? I would have dismissed the existence of such a place and thought them mad for even suggesting it. And if they persisted in leading me to a basement door in the back of the CIA building (although how, with no guards in sight, could it really be the CIA?) and insisted there was a nirvana drug haven inside, I would not have entered. And this was lawless Moscow, not American-friendly Washington. Why hadn’t five days of watching Joel launch sneaky attacks on the chessboard honed my sense of danger?

  Even if the promised club lay at the end of the hall, I feared that all those cigarettes, bongs, and joss sticks would surely make it a firetrap. If a clumsy celebrant knocked a candle over, would there be a way out of the underground inferno other than this narrow hallway with its electronic locks? And what if the club was raided? Had I suffered through Midnight Express for nothing?

  I considered my options. I could scramble my chessmen in a feeble attempt to guard against these vague threats. Or I could charge blithely ahead. I reminded myself how often, at the chessboard, I had hunkered down against attacks that never materialized because they weren’t actually in the position. After all, I was working on overcoming my inner chicken. To overcome my overly cautious habits, I had also recently switched my opening-move repertoire to such explosive crowd-pleasers of yesteryear as the King’s Gambit, in which White offers a pawn in return for easy development and control of the center. After you’ve given up material—the proffered pawn—you don’t have the luxury of making prophylactic moves against nonexistent threats. If you don’t make the most of your position, your opponent will quickly catch up in development, consolidate his position, and, after judiciously swapping pieces, win in the endgame when his extra pawn advances to the far side of the board and morphs into a mighty queen.

  The King’s Gambit should be assayed only by White players who press forward full throttle and never second-guess themselves. And so, in a similar spirit, I chose to put aside my anxieties and enjoy the rest of the night. Later, when I told Matt about my adventure, he agreed that I had done the right thing. “Joel projects total self-confidence and control,” Matt said. “I’d follow him over Niagara Falls in a barrel if he proposed it.”

  The club was a warren of windowless rooms. First, we entered a small theater. The seats came from vintage Soviet-era Aeroflot planes whose propellers were mounted on the walls and ceiling. A half dozen hipsters were watching an American war movie that involved a daring helicopter rescue. The crowd looked pretty upscale. “These people have money,” Misha whispered, “but they think Russia is too commercial. Instead of spending a hundred thousand dollars on a Mercedes, they buy a Range Rover.”

  Next we passed through a cozy dining area where a woman in a bright red dress was eating a crepe. “They serve food twenty-four hours a day,” Misha said. We walked through a billiards parlor and a small room with two twin beds. “Any member can spend the night here,” he said.

  We ended up in the tearoom and settled into low cushy chairs next to a bookcase crammed mostly with French literature. Joel approved of the reading selection. We had the tearoom to ourselves except for a young woman in dreadlocks who was curled up on a couch writing in a journal. The décor was 1960s college chic—beads, netting, candles, incense, and large regal hookahs that rivaled any I had seen in Woodstock or the Village: I could have been sitting with my dad at a poetry reading on Bleecker Street. Misha suggested that we start with Paraguayan tea, which was sipped through fancy straws from individual spherical pots. The tea was not for the faint of heart; it tasted like tobacco.

  Next Misha ordered us a hookah. “Are you going to join us, Paul?”

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  “It’s quite mild,” he said.

  “All right.”

  “Will melon be OK?”

  I said sure, not really knowing what I was agreeing to.
r />   Three young women in long batik dresses started to prepare the water pipe. They treated it as a valuable totem, and they handled it gracefully and deliberately, as if they were enacting choreographed roles in a religious ceremony. One woman carried water in a silver pitcher. Another removed tobacco from an ornately embroidered bag and gently tamped it down in the bowl of the pipe. The third lit a foot-long match with great flourish. The women took turns adjusting the fire in the bowl and puffing on the long tube that snaked from the pipe. When they were satisfied that the draw was right, the most blissful of the three brought the hookah to our table.

  “Whenever I come here,” Misha said, “the women always look the same to me. I’m never sure if I’ve seen them before. They always prepare everything in the same exact way. I guess they all went to tea-and-hookah school.”

  The smoke was as mild as Misha promised. I would not have described it as melon, but it was vaguely fruity. It left a heady buzz that swept away any residual worries I had about the wisdom of my subterranean adventure.

  “I like it here,” I told Misha. “I want to be the first American member. But how can this place exist under the intelligence building without the authorities knowing? They must see people coming and going.”

  “Of course they know. I’m sure there are members who are informers. The place is certainly bugged. I’m sure they hear everything we say right now.”

  “Really?” Joel said. “Then we should say something interesting. Perhaps, Paul, you want to share your impressions of Putin with our larger audience.”

  I laughed and inhaled more melon.

  “This is the new Russia,” Misha said. “No one cares if you hate Putin. You can criticize the government all you want, even denounce it.”