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

by Paul Hoffman

  His opponents at the club soon learned how to avoid the pitfalls. “The novelty wore off,” Plenty said, “and they tore me to pieces. But the love affair was still there. I just needed fresh victims. There’s nothing better than when a Grob virgin takes the gambit pawn, and I think to myself, OK, buddy, now you’re in my world.”

  Plenty tried to track down everything that was known about the opening. Michael Basman, an international master in England, was the strongest player to employ the Grob in serious tournaments. Plenty examined Basman’s games but judged them tepid: “I didn’t think he was a real Grobster because he wouldn’t gambit the g-pawn, but quickly defended it with another pawn. He’s a wimp—no, I don’t want to say that because I’d be insulting wimps. Defense is for women. It’s the ladies’ variation. Real men sac the g-pawn.”

  Plenty came across an inspiring booklet called The Tactical Grob by Claude Bloodgood. “As I read it,” Plenty told me, “I thought, My God, this guy is exactly like me. He analyzes like me. He likes cheapos. He seemed to be my mental twin. For all I knew this guy could be my illegitimate father. I began stalking him.” First he tried to contact the publisher, but like so many chess publishers it had gone out of business. Then he posted messages on computer bulletin boards (this was in the Usenet days before the Internet) letting the chess world know he was looking for Bloodgood. He eventually received a tip that Bloodgood might have been incarcerated in Virginia in the early 1970s.

  Plenty called the Virginia penal system in 1990 and asked if they had a forwarding address for someone who might have been in prison twenty years ago. They told him Bloodgood was still there, at the Powhatan Correctional Center in State Farm. “I thought, That’s not a good sign,” Plenty said. “He obviously wasn’t there for jaywalking.” They started corresponding. “Soon I found myself playing postal chess,” Plenty said, “setting and evading sordid little traps, with this man who had committed an awful crime.” Bloodgood had beaten his mother to death with a baseball bat after she prosecuted him for forging her signature on a tax refund check.

  Plenty then located another Grobster, a gadfly chess journalist named Sam Sloan whose claim to fame was starting a sex cult in Berkeley in the 1960s (and who, in the summer of 2006, would be elected to the board of directors of the United States Chess Federation). “I learned of this incredible coincidence,” Plenty told me. “Sloan also served time at Powhatan, although he and Claude apparently never met. Something to do with a messy custody fight.” They had other things in common: Sloan had also been on unofficial death row—in an Afghan prison, where people were routinely executed. “I started to worry,” Plenty said. “Powhatan, death row—there seemed to be so many problems associated with this opening. Maybe it was like King Tut’s curse. If you touch the opening, bad things happen to you. But I thought maybe you have to play the Grob really well before shit happens, and I wasn’t at that stage.”

  Plenty first visited Bloodgood in prison in 1993 or 1994. “He was wheeled out attached to oxygen tanks,” Plenty recalled. “He had emphysema and lung cancer and looked older than the hills. It was easy to believe him when he said he was born in 1924,” although he was in fact born in 1937. Plenty described Bloodgood as bald and stocky, “an evil Uncle Fester,” but admitted that, despite his ailments, he was charismatic.

  Bloodgood’s illness did not stop him from playing decent speed chess. “He crushed me game after game in prison,” Plenty said. “I think he was maybe master level. He was always very scrupulous about the rules. He never cheated or took back a move. He always played touch move. To him, chess was the only thing in his life that he was honest about. It was probably the only thing he really excelled at as a result of his own hard work.”

  In prison Bloodgood wrote three books on the Grob and other hustler openings, but these did not bring him fame. They appealed largely to the subculture of street players who inhabited places like Washington Square Park. But in the rarefied world of correspondence chess, in which each contestant has three days to ponder a move before he dispatches it by mail to a faceless opponent, Bloodgood was a minor celebrity because of the sheer number of games he played. There was a time in 1970 or 1971 when he conducted an astonishing twelve hundred postal games at once, surely a world record. It was ironic that Bloodgood, who earlier had served time for robbing a post office, had unlimited free postage at Powhatan—a peculiar perquisite of being on death row for first-degree murder.

  Bloodgood was a member of the so-called Class of ’72, the group of death row inmates who received a reprieve when the Supreme Court outlawed capital punishment in 1972. Despite the fact that he had to start paying for stamps—he used money from his veteran disability checks—he continued to play hundreds of correspondence games. His name showed up occasionally in British and American chess periodicals along with the moves of over-the-board games he claimed to have played in the 1950s against Humphrey Bogart (who tried what Bloodgood dubbed the Maltese Falcon Gambit), Clark Gable, Marlene Dietrich, and Charlie Chaplin. In 1996, he finally became famous in the chess world at large when the USCF published the April ratings of tournament players. There on the Top 50 list was Claude Bloodgood with the astronomical, grandmasterly rating of 2655. Although he had no international title, he was listed as the number nine player in the country, his name in klieg lights between two famous grandmasters in the number eight and number ten spots.

  Bloodgood himself never claimed to be of grandmaster strength. In fact, he had written repeatedly to the USCF warning them of a problem in the rating system. In a closed pool of players, like a prison chess club, the rating of a player who is much better than the others can steadily climb because he will pick up a point or two for every victory, even for wins over rank beginners.2 And prisoners, because they are not pressed for time, can play more than one game daily, and the one-and two-point gains add up. Bloodgood played seventeen hundred rated games in 1995—that’s four to five games a day—and his rating soared 421 points in just two years.

  The USCF was in a quandary in 1996 because it had ignored Bloodgood’s warning. The organization had promoted prison chess as a way of intellectually stimulating inmates and fighting recidivism, but now its own rules seemed to require inviting a convicted murderer to the U.S. Championship. Of course, he wouldn’t be able to attend in person, but he was miffed at the USCF for not responding to his letters, so he cantankerously suggested that they accommodate his special circumstances by letting him play by phone or fax. Chess had enough of an image problem without the USCF being seen to coddle violent criminals.

  The USCF knew it had a public relations disaster for another reason: in 1974 Bloodgood had used chess as a means of escaping from jail. The 1970s were liberal times, when America believed in the idea of rehabilitating prisoners, even murderers. The governor of Virginia and the head of the prison system gave Bloodgood and a fellow inmate, who had stabbed a woman seventeen times, permission to stage a chess tournament outside the correctional facility. They vanished for a month, and the FBI issued an all-points bulletin describing Bloodgood as an “armed and dangerous homicidal psychopath with homosexual tendencies.”

  Of course, the USCF did not invite him to the U.S. Championship. Like the Soviet Chess Federation, which punished players who defected or fell from grace by bowdlerizing their names and games from chess books, the USCF simply omitted Bloodgood from future Top 50 lists, but incongruously continued including him on the alphabetical list of senior masters, players with ratings over 2400. On the June 1997 list, his rating reached a stratospheric 2722, which made him the second-highest-rated player in the country, behind World Championship hopeful Gata Kamsky.

  “I get mad,” Plenty told me, “when ignorant people say Bloodgood was fraudulent about chess. He gave me copies of more than a thousand games. He played four or five rated games a day because he had nothing to do but sit around and watch paint peel off the wall. Bloodgood saw his rating go through the ceiling. He knew he was overrated. I called the USCF many times on his be
half trying to warn them before it became a scandal.”

  As their friendship developed, Bloodgood told Plenty about his past life as a Nazi courier, shuttling across the Atlantic, delivering instructions to German agents on American soil. “The stories were really outrageous,” Plenty said. “They couldn’t be true, but I don’t think Claude lied to me. He concocted a very elaborate history which I think he truly believed. He told me he met Himmler in a German military school and played chess with him in their leisure time. He put so much detail into the story—how Himmler parted his hair—that for a moment you’d buy it.” Plenty suspected that Bloodgood had met a German spy in the United States after the war and basically appropriated his identity. Bloodgood taught himself German to add credibility. He showed Plenty the moves of the games he’d played against Himmler and Goering.

  Bloodgood also told Plenty about his Hollywood years, which began when Bogart came to cheer up the patients in a California VA hospital where Bloodgood was recuperating from a foot injury sustained on a military base. He said that he befriended Bogart and was briefly married to Kathryn Grayson, the MGM actress who starred in Show Boat and Kiss Me, Kate. She was, in fact, fifteen years older than Bloodgood (but only two years older than the age he claimed to be). He said they were wedded in Mexico and that Grayson subsequently had the marriage annulled.

  “I thought, No, you weren’t married to her,” Plenty told me. “Then I did a Freedom of Information search on Claude. It took a couple years and I get this large file from the FBI that says he may have married Grayson.” Plenty also found an article by a journalist who tracked Grayson down and said the actress did not confirm or deny if she knew Bloodgood.

  PLENTY ASKED ME FOR ONE LAST BLITZ GAME. HE TOOK WHITE AND ANNOUNCED, as he pushed the g-pawn, “This is going to be ugly.” This time he was right. On the fifth or sixth move he made a bishop lunge for which I was not prepared. I got the worst of the opening, but toward the end, when we were both low on time, he blundered away a winning position.

  “Damn!” he said. “You were on the ropes. See the attraction of the opening? It’s exciting. The people who gravitate toward the Grob actually have a different mind-set on life. We look for cheap instantaneous gratification. We don’t like to work.”

  He cited examples from his own background. In engineering school he had entered problem-solving contests that were run by the mathematics department. He always won the weekly contests by employing a mainfame computer to number-crunch all the possible solutions. “The math department hated engineers, and I really pissed them off,” Plenty recalled. “So they changed the rules so that you couldn’t use computers. Grob players are pathologically pragmatic.”

  He asked me to guess how he met his wife.

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  “I met her at a lesbian bar.”

  “Uh—OK?”

  “I was thinking like a Grob player. I want to pick up girls, and there’s no guys at a lesbian bar. I’ll have no competition. So the odds are already in my favor because mathematically there’s a probability that some are at least bisexual. I don’t look like Tom Cruise. I’m not this real macho guy. So if this girl likes other girls, she’s not looking for a macho guy. So this increases my chances. This is the Grob mentality—I’m either going to win real quick or be shot down real quick. I’m not going to have to sit there all night and talk to these girls and buy drinks and wonder if they’re playing me for a sucker. They’re either interested in me or they’re not.” He met a straight woman that night and they were married six months later.

  After this story I felt that it was time for me to leave before I, too, was afflicted by King Tut’s curse.

  BLOODGOOD DIED IN PRISON IN 2001. PLENTY ENCOURAGED ME TO MAKE A pilgrimage to the public library in Cleveland, Ohio, where his papers were housed. One floor of the library was devoted to the John G. White Chess and Checkers Collection—seventy thousand books and magazines, the largest chess collection in the world. The library had recently acquired twenty large moving cartons of Bloodgood’s papers and personal effects, such as a pocket magnetic chess set, an unfilled prescription for a steroid inhaler, a senior-master certificate from the USCF, and Christmas cards from Bill Clinton and George and Barbara Bush because his name had erroneously made it onto a list of model prisoners.

  Of course I was interested in Bloodgood not just because he had taken chess obsession to extreme levels but because he was a compulsive liar. He was also a pack rat like my dad. He kept thousands of postcards from his correspondence games. He had carbon copies of the hundreds of complaints he’d sent to prison officials about inadequate medical care. He filed dozens of lawsuits against people who he thought had wronged him, and the library had copies of all the legal briefs he had written. The Powhatan officials got tired of responding to his nuisance suits and tried to thwart his efforts by taking away his typewriter. He continued the legal actions by laboriously writing the briefs by hand.

  The boxes in the library were not yet catalogued, so I went through the thousands of papers one by one. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular but was hoping to gain insight into Bloodgood’s mind. After reading his correspondence and the hundreds of briefs he wrote, it became clear to me how suspicious he was: everywhere he looked, he saw people conspiring behind his back. The absence of a vegetable dish at a prison meal was evidence of the penal system deciding to weaken him by depriving him of important nutrients. A knight missing from his chess set meant that the warden himself must have sneaked into his cell and stolen the piece while he was sleeping.

  Among the hundreds of letters I examined were two that he received from someone I knew. I immediately recognized the name. I had played him in two rapid tournaments at the Marshall and he’d behaved abominably. I was White and Bloodgood’s correspondent, a nervous and twitchy man, adopted a kind of Grob in reverse with Black.3 He slammed the pieces, knocked them over at key moments, and incessantly banged the clock. Sometimes he stood up and played from a standing position, so that he had greater leverage in smashing the chessmen and the clock. How, I now wondered, did all these lowlifes come to play the same ridiculous opening?

  In one of Bloodgood’s boxes, I found an unpublished novel typed on more than a ream of paper. I skimmed the text. It was a potboiler about American spies in Nazi Germany just before the war. The prose was fairly coherent if overheated. Along with the novel were copies of letters in which Bloodgood expressed disappointment about not knowing how to get the book published.

  The similarity to my father was eerie. One of my dad’s biggest frustrations in life was not being able to write the Great American Novel. He had committed so many novels to memory, and had studied and taught literature for decades, that he was sure he could write a stellar one. He once took a year off from the New School, the magazine business, and poker in order to complete a novel. A millionaire friend of his named Mike even lent him a year’s pay so that he could continue to support all of us. Toward the end of the year, my dad told me that his apartment had been ransacked and the TV, stereo, and typewriter stolen. He said that the draft of the novel was missing. He kept it in the typewriter case, he said, along with the typewriter. The crooks had walked off with the case. My father was tearful, and I accompanied him to Greenwich Village pawnshops to see if the typewriter might be there. He had already looked in trash cans in the neighborhood and posted reward notices in the diner and Laundromat.

  I could tell that he was devastated, but much later I wondered whether he might have discarded the novel himself because it fell short of his expectations. My father was completely disorganized, so that it was hard to imagine him tidily keeping the manuscript in the typewriter case; all of his other writings were scattered around his office. Besides, I doubted whether there was room in the case for both the typewriter and a book-length manuscript. And he had made a carbon copy of everything else he wrote, so what happened to the copy? It still makes me sad that I cannot trust his woeful story.

  My father, I
hate to say, was a Grobster in life. He always wanted immediate results. He was brilliant and talented, but apparently didn’t have the patience or discipline to complete a project as demanding as a novel.

  WHEN I RETURNED HOME FROM CLEVELAND, I RESEARCHED BLOODGOOD’S family and located his sister, who was five years his junior. She told me on the phone that she had learned only recently of his death, months after it had happened. She had tried to separate herself from her brother out of psychological necessity and fear that she could be Bloodgood’s next victim. “I wish there had been an autopsy,” she told me, “to see if his brain was wired funny from birth. He started at such a young age with all the lying and stuff. Maybe he did it because he was so smart and bored to crap in school.”

  She recalled how their mother was mortified when one of Claude’s elementary school teachers called and said, “Mrs. Bloodgood, if you can’t afford to feed your child, we have special programs.” He had pocketed his lunch money and told people in school that his parents were poor. “He skipped school all the time,” his sister said, “and my parents always told me what a brilliant genius he was. It was only years later after he killed my mother and I was in therapy that I understood I wasn’t stupid.”

  Claude often physically tormented his sister. He was on the wrestling team and liked practicing his moves on her. “He had me down on the floor,” she recalled, “with his foot against my neck and his other foot under my arm. He was pulling my other arm out of the socket. I was screaming because I thought he was going to break my arm. The neighbors heard me and came over. My mother was mortified. His role in the family was to be the troublemaker and my role was to be the good girl and shut up. But now the neighbors knew.”

  When Bloodgood was fifteen, he robbed a convenience store. His father kept a German Luger as a war souvenir, and Bloodgood used it in the robbery. “There were no bullets in it,” his sister said, “but he was tried as an adult because of the gun.”