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

by Paul Hoffman

  “You sound suspiciously like a government agent who is trying to trick us into revealing our true feelings,” Joel said. He was used to looking for traps on the chessboard.

  “An agent? Good guess,” said Misha. “But even the KGB doesn’t care whether you’re pro-or anti-Putin.”

  “So what are they looking for?” I asked.

  “They’re looking for people who aren’t who they claim to be. You say you’re a chess writer from New York. They’ll check that out, and if they discover you’re actually a greeting card salesman from Langley, they’ll observe you further or haul you in.”

  “Maybe it’s you, Paul, who’s actually the problem,” Joel said. “We don’t really know you. You could be CIA. How clever to pretend you don’t speak Russian when you understand everything.”

  “Do svidaniya,” I replied.

  We talked about spying and politics for another hour, and how the Moscow business scene, in its embrace of capitalism, had become more lawless than America in the robber-baron days, with cutthroat businessmen slaying one another and paying friends in the Kremlin to cause tax difficulties for their competitors. At Britannica we had wanted to come out with a Russian edition but were discouraged by stories of Moscow publishers who torched one another’s warehouses to keep rival books from reaching the stores. My father would have been profoundly disturbed that the dream of a Communist paradise had come to this.

  Then our conversation turned back to the club itself. Misha told us that he was friends with two of the founders, now deceased. One of the founders, Aleksei, died the year before when he jumped off a cliff with a parachute. He opened the chute in time, but a strong wind blew him back and battered him against the rocks. As a memorial tribute, dozens of his friends and fellow club members jumped off Ostankino, the huge television tower in Moscow.

  The other founder, Max, died before the club opened on New Year’s Day, 2001. He had $60,000 in cash on him and was driving a Jeep Cherokee to the club so that he could pay the contractor and builder. But he never made it. The car was found intact sometime later on the outskirts of the city. The money was gone, and his body had been shot and burned, a gruesome flourish that was typical of many murders in Moscow. Only one trusted confidant knew he was carrying $60,000, Misha said, so it couldn’t have been an inside job. With that much money on him, he would not have stopped for hitchhikers. He would have stopped only for the police. And the murder investigation was perfunctory—all the more reason, Misha said, to suspect that the authorities themselves were behind it.

  Misha looked at his watch. It was 4:00 A.M.. “We should go soon,” he said. “Even though I came to Moscow to see you, Joel, I’m also here on business. I’m expected to show up in our office tomorrow.” But then as Joel and I reached for our coats, Misha seemed to change his mind. “Let’s stay awhile longer. I can always call in and tell them I’m coming in late because I drank too much. Many places expect that you’re going to miss at least a day a week because of hangovers.”6

  Misha offered the hookah to Joel again. He was smiling impishly as he guided the tube toward Joel’s mouth. “You look good and relaxed,” Misha said, winking at me, “so now I can ask you what’s really on my mind.” He looked at his watch again. “I have waited patiently now more than twelve hours, a respectable amount of time, without asking you what went wrong in your game.”

  Joel stiffened. “If you’ve been that patient,” he said testily, “you can surely wait another twelve hours.”

  “We’re your buddies,” I said. “Both of us came all the way to Moscow—me, thousands of miles—just to watch you play.”

  “You saw me play.”

  “Yes, but I need to understand it.”

  Joel took a deep toke on the water pipe and blew smoke rings across the table. There was an uncomfortable silence. Finally Misha said, “Maybe we should really go.”

  “It’s OK,” Joel said. “We can stay. What happened is not so complicated.” I leaned forward, in anticipation of Joel’s explanation.

  “I knew what defense he was going to play,” Joel continued. “He always responds the same way to d4. I had two basic choices. I could try to grind him down in a long game in which I try to build up small positional advantages. Or I could go for a quick kill. I chose the quick kill but it backfired. He came up with a quiet, effective move, putting his bishop out of harm’s way, so that it wouldn’t be a target for my advancing pawns. Then it was my pawns that became his target and I was really fucked.” The hunter had become the hunted.

  JOEL RETURNED THE NEXT MORNING TO PARIS, AND MATT AND I SPENT AN extra day in Moscow. I visited the famous Central Chess Club, an old baroque building, where generations of Russians had discovered the secrets of the sixty-four squares. The club was in sad disrepair; the tiles on the hall floor were so loose that they’d clack and distract the players whenever someone walked down the hall. Support for chess infrastructure in Russia was an unfortunate casualty of the fall of Communism. In front of the club was a man who wore a tie clasp in the shape of Karpov’s silhouette. He was peddling Russian chess books for 30 cents each, and I bought as many of them as I could carry with me back to the hotel.

  After I dropped off the books and resumed walking around Red Square, two cops stopped me and told me, in broken English, that there was something wrong with my passport. They apparently expected a bribe, but I pretended I didn’t understand English, and they let me go. A few blocks later, a small child dropped a thick wad of bills and gestured toward it, indicating that I should pick it up and return it to him; I had been warned that this was a common scam in which you’d be accused, if you were a good Samaritan and picked up the money, of removing some of the bills. I ignored the boy—although I knew that my father, a fan of three-card monte and other street hustles, might well have played along, just to see what would happen. A T-shirt vendor sold me a nice bright red shirt with a black hammer and sickle. I eagerly bought it—I wear mostly T-shirts—and after I paid him, he sneakily tried to substitute a ratty threadbare shirt for the higher-quality one that I had paid for.

  Moscow was starting to seem like one big con game—and it extended even to the chess. I went to an Internet café in an underground shopping mall below Red Square, where I saw that Lautier’s loss to Vaganian had been published on chess sites across the Web. I was irritated to read commentators suggesting that the Armenian deserved a brilliancy prize because he had worked out the whole long bloody combination in advance, from the initial rook sacrifice to the clinching bishop shift. Anyone who had witnessed the game knew that this was clearly not the case: in fact, it had taken Vaganian some twenty-five minutes to see a conclusion that even those in the press box had quickly spotted. If Vaganian deserved a beauty prize, it was for the intuitive sacrifice itself, not for his ability to foresee every move that followed.

  There is a long tradition in chess of dressing up a game after the fact. The great Alexander Alekhine, world champion for all but two years from 1927 to 1946, was adroit at rewriting history. He presented his games as inevitable marches toward victory in which the losers were able to offer only inadequate resistance. When his real games were far too messy for him to describe this way, he changed the endings to demonstrate his cleverness and passed them off as ones he had actually played. He apparently also invented entire elegantly played games and claimed that they were real. While I was reading about the Aeroflot Tournament on the Web, I noticed that Joel was online, so I instant-messaged him the silly comments about Vaganian’s foresight.

  “That’s ridiculous,” he shot back. “I’m sure he saw that the rook sacrifice wasn’t risky because he could always force a draw by perpetual check. He obviously found the winning move later on.”

  “The comments suggest that he saw everything in advance,” I typed back.7

  “My God, what crap!! If he saw everything, he wouldn’t spend twenty-five minutes on the bishop move. I’m gonna kill him the next time I play him!”

  I LEFT THE INTERNET CAFé AND
HEADED TO TVERSKAYA STREET, MOSCOW’S equivalent of Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. I found a fancy coffee shop and ordered a cappuccino and tarte tatin. A middle-aged man was sitting there at a wooden chessboard with a gnarly hand-carved set. I smiled when he looked at me, and he motioned enthusiastically for me to join him. He gave himself the White pieces and placed a large Soviet-era chess clock next to the board. He conveniently adjusted the minute hands so that he had a full five minutes and I had closer to four. I wasn’t going to argue with him—we didn’t share a common language—and in any event, I was having such a stimulating time in Moscow, I really didn’t care. Whenever he moved a piece, he would not put it down in the middle of the square, as was customary, but in one corner so that it protruded confusingly into two neighboring squares. If I adjusted the piece so that it was more centrally located, he’d push it back so it was off kilter again. He smiled demonically whenever he captured one of my men. He was a clock banger, too, and toppled my coffee in his excitement—fortunately I had already sipped most of it.

  In the face of his annoying behavior, I found myself serenely happy because I was able to play the so-called Slav Defense—and in Moscow, of all places. It was as if I had made a clever visual pun. I was even happier when, despite the one-minute deficit he had given me, I beat him in the time scramble. I had a rare surge of patriotism, or maybe it was just animalistic delight at demolishing this annoying cheater. I had fared better than Napoleon. I had defeated a Russian on his own soil.

  6

  ANATOMY OF A HUSTLER

  “Amberley excelled in chess—one mark, Watson, of a scheming mind.”

  —SHERLOCK HOLMES,

  The Adventure of the Retired Colourman

  “One time, before a game with Najdorf, Tal casually went to the beach, but carefully left his shoes outside his hotel room so that the excitable Argentinean star would think he was busy preparing an opening!”

  —ANTHONY SAIDY,

  The Battle of Chess Ideas

  AS CHILDREN WE HARBOR ALL KINDS OF ILLUSIONS. THAT Santa Claus and the tooth fairy are real. That our parents are omniscient and invincible. In my case, I grew up believing two convenient fictions: that chess was a moral, contained world void of hypocrisy and deception, and that my engaging storyteller of a father was forthright and honest, at least with me. I held onto the latter illusion much longer than the former.

  Back in the 1960s, my father and I had watched disreputable characters in Washington Square Park begin a chess game with an outlandish pawn thrust called the Grob, or the Spike. (Henri Grob was a Swiss painter and chess aficionado who explored this wickedly strange opening move and published the first treatise on it.) White begins with g4, unnervingly shoving his king-knight pawn forward two squares, in contempt of basic chess principles. The flank advance weakens the position of White’s king, doesn’t take possession of the center, and leaves the pawn, which can’t be advantageously defended, subject to immediate attack. White in fact often cavalierly jettisons the pawn, immediately throwing the game into bewildering complications in which the startled and unprepared Black player has to think for himself.

  My father once played the Grob against me, when I was eight or nine. After he made the peculiar pawn advance, he couldn’t remember what to do next and we both started laughing. I loved that he was bad and naive at chess, because he was so skilled and conniving at other games. When I was small, he would drag me to a seedy Ping-Pong and pool hall in Times Square. Sometimes we’d play billiards together, but I usually found it boring because he’d run through a whole rack of balls before I got a turn. I had more fun watching him play table tennis. He was a giant bear of a man, and younger guys in their twenties and thirties eagerly took him on for $100 a game. But this fat guy had sharp reflexes and a surprisingly strong serve, and even when he was huffing and puffing he could volley from way off the table. To enliven the game, he’d then talk the suckers into a rematch of obstacle-course Ping-Pong, in which beer and Coke bottles were randomly positioned on the table—and he invariably won that, too.

  On our trips to Times Square, we’d also visit a place known as the Flea House, where rumpled men played chess and checkers. Although my dad knew that it was foolish for him to play chess for stakes, he’d get in on the action by placing side bets on who would win—and he had an uncanny ability for backing the victors. As for other board games, he played Scrabble for money, but his real preference was cards: bridge, rummy, and, particularly, poker.

  I think my father did well at poker, but I can’t be sure. The train ride from Westport to Manhattan was an hour and five minutes. When we were still one family, my father sometimes commuted to Manhattan on a particular, early morning train where a bunch of men played high-stakes seven-card high low. The game apparently agreed with his wallet, because after my parents separated and he moved to the Village, he occasionally took a predawn train to Westport—not to see my brother or me, but so that he could turn right around and catch the poker train back to the city.

  During a long weekend at Grossinger’s, some Orthodox rabbis paid him to teach them poker. To make sure that they understood the lessons, he engaged them in training games for real stakes. My dad won so much money from them that on the way home to Westport he stopped at an auction and bought my mother prints by Miró and Chagall.

  When I received a term bill from Harvard my freshman year, my father told me that he didn’t feel like writing a check. He went out and won seven grand that evening and handed me the wad of bills to take back to Cambridge. The Harvard bursar was aghast when I showed up with cash. But my father also lost big: when I was a high school sophomore, my brother and I accompanied him to Europe aboard the S.S. France. (My dad was afraid to fly and never took airplanes.) Dizzy Gillespie was the featured performer on the ship, and after my father made sure that we were asleep, he played poker with Gillespie and his band. My dad was the only stranger in the game, and I was not surprised when he returned with an empty billfold. Fortunately, our meals on the cruise had been paid for in advance.

  DURING THE SUMMER OF MY SOPHOMORE YEAR IN COLLEGE, WHEN I WAS living with my father for the first time in New York, he invited me to watch him shill in a three-card monte game on Fourteenth Street. The dealer was a thirty-year-old ex-con who had perfected, during his long days in prison, the sleight of hand required to host the game profitably. Unfortunately for his business, he looked like the ex-con he was. That’s why he employed my dad—white, obese, and pushing sixty—to make the game seem safe for Village tourists who wanted to impress their dates by gambling.

  Their three-card monte game was played on the sidewalk, atop an overturned cardboard box that functioned as a makeshift card table. The dealer would put three queens—the two black ones and the queen of hearts—faceup on the box for everyone to see. Then he would turn over each card, mix them up, and position them, still facedown, in a row. The object was to guess the position of the red queen. Any bystander could plop down $20 or more and be paid two to one if he guessed correctly. So in theory it was an even bet—maybe the odds were even in the player’s favor because he knew the initial location of the red queen. But of course a skilled dealer has all sorts of misdirection techniques to steer the bettor wrong. For instance, while shuffling the cards, he “accidentally” sends the red queen flying. The shill—in this case, my father—retrieves the card from the ground. Before returning the queen to the dealer, he gets a passerby’s attention and shows him, and not the dealer, that he has put a little crease in the corner of the card. Now when the dealer shuffles the cards, the mark thinks he can identify the queen of hearts by the unobtrusive crease and, in his excitement, shells out big bucks. He is devastated, of course, when the creased card is revealed to be a black queen. During the shuffle, the dealer had surreptitiously un-creased the red queen and made a similar fold in the corner of a black card. That summer I learned not only the secrets of three-card monte but also discovered, unfortunately, that my father’s deception was not confined to cards and Ping-Pon
g.

  I was working as an elevator operator that August in an exclusive residential high-rise on the Upper East Side. The job paid well; I’d obtained it by referral from an orthodontist friend of my father’s who felt guilty because the experimental New Age braces he’d imposed on me had failed to straighten my teeth. The atmosphere in the building was absurdly formal. Housekeepers and nannies who were not accompanied by children were barred from the main lobby and directed to a dilapidated service elevator. As the operator of a lobby elevator, I had to wear white gloves and was instructed not to speak to a tenant unless spoken to first. The building’s rules required that I wedge myself into a corner during the elevator ride and look discreetly at the wall. Regal old heiresses enforced the rules, but thankfully there were also liberal nouveaux riches who warmed up to me after word spread that I was attending Harvard.

  The building had a large staff of Yugoslavian doormen who cheerfully called out “Pitchka!” to any attractive woman who walked by. The woman would invariably smile, unaware that the word meant whore. On top of the lockers in the basement of the building, where we would change into our starchy uniforms, was a kind of museum display of dildos and other embarrassing objects that my coworkers had fished out of the residents’ garbage. Each object was labeled with the name of its former owner so that we would know where to direct our ridicule. I was amused, and a bit stunned, by how much my coworkers knew about the private lives of the residents who trusted them. I liked how the Yugoslavians banded together, but I was an outsider to their locker room high jinks: my summer job was clearly not going to relieve my sense of isolation in life.

  Once I worked an onerous double shift straight through the night. At least I received a hush-money tip from a woman who was cheating on her traveling husband—and a podiatrist’s wife who felt sorry for me summoned me to her apartment and handed me a glass of wine and a plate of shrimp scampi and lobster tail, prepared by her cook. After sixteen hours in the elevator, I returned to my dad’s apartment at ten in the morning. It was drizzling, and I told him that I wasn’t feeling well and wanted to get a milkshake. I asked him where the nearest Baskin-Robbins was. He said there wasn’t one nearby. But we went to one last week, I reminded him. Where was it? Oh yes, he said, but that Baskin-Robbins doesn’t have milkshakes. That’s strange, I told him, because I remember seeing people sipping shakes. And how could an ice cream store not make a milkshake? Maybe, he said, but that particular Baskin-Robbins only sold premade shakes that weren’t very tasty. Premade shakes? I’ve never heard of that. They’re bad, my father said, because the ice cream has freezer burn. The conversation continued in this surreal vein, with my father digging himself in deeper with increasingly convoluted rebuttals to my attempts to probe his explanations.