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

by Paul Hoffman

  KASPAROV’S ACQUAINTANCE WITH JUDIT POLGAR BEGAN INAUSPICIOUSLY. Born in 1976, she is the youngest and strongest of three chess-prodigy Hungarian sisters who were homeschooled by their psychologist father. Laszlo Polgar believed that genius was not innate but could be taught through rigorous conditioning in early childhood. Like B. F. Skinner before him, he tested his controversial theory on his daughters. He chose chess as the medium not because he loved the game but because his first daughter, Susan, liked chess and he knew his educational theory would command attention if he could create female stars in an activity that had long been dominated by men. He reportedly arranged for the girls to wake up to chess problems that he posted next to their beds. Each morning began with spirited bouts of Ping-Pong for physical exercise, followed by six to eight hours of chess. His wife, who also stayed at home to help with the instruction, taught the girls languages and occasionally shepherded them to museums.

  Hungarian officials objected to Laszlo’s experiment; they threatened to commit him to a mental institution and they dispatched armed policemen to his home in Budapest to try to force the girls to attend school. The Hungarian government retreated when Laszlo promised to send his daughters to school once a year for standardized testing. “We learnt what we needed very quickly and forgot it as soon as the exams were over,” Judit Polgar told London’s Daily Telegraph.

  The training regimen also dismayed prominent members of the chess world whose own self-images were invested in the idea that chess genius was more than rote learning. Kasparov, for one, famously dismissed Judit Polgar as a trained dog, and Nigel Short christened her “Lassie.” Kasparov claimed later that the epithet was not intended to denigrate her as a person but to disparage the mechanistic way in which her father had instructed her.

  However Judit and her sisters were taught, the chess world could not ignore her amazing accomplishments. At ten, she made headlines in the United States by winning the unrated section of the New York Open. At twelve, she became the world’s youngest international master. And at the age of fifteen, she bested Bobby Fischer’s record by a month as the youngest grandmaster ever.1

  JUDIT POLGAR WAS SEVENTEEN WHEN SHE AND KASPAROV FIRST FACED EACH other at the chessboard. The year was 1994, and the occasion was the annual Super Tournament at the Hotel Anibal in the Spanish town of Linares. On Kasparov’s thirty-sixth move, in a position in which he was winning, he confidently picked up a knight, advanced it to the c5 square, released it completely for a microsecond, and then swept it back up with three fingers—after presumably noticing that the move was a blunder that would allow Polgar to fork his queen and rook. He showed little emotion as he thought for a few minutes and then moved the knight to a different square, one that ruled out the fork and maintained his advantage. Polgar was stunned. She struggled to process both the fact that, in a split second, she had gone from losing to winning to losing again and her suspicion that the world champion, a veteran twice her age, had cheated her.2 He appeared to have violated one of the most sacred and irrevocable rules in tournament chess: touch move.

  This rule has two parts: first, if you touch a piece you have to move it, and, second, if you release it, you cannot pick it up again. Touch move is drilled into all chess students, and every player can remember losing games because he intemperately touched a piece or put it on the wrong square. (Or winning games because he improperly retracted a move, as I did in the Harvard Open.) The honor code knows no exceptions—not for world champions, not for enfant terribles.

  Polgar was unsure how to respond. Standing nearby were both the arbiter and the owner of the hotel, who was the sole and generous sponsor of the tournament. She looked at them, as if appealing to them for confirmation, but they didn’t react. (It is the arbiter’s job to enforce the touch-move rule if he sees a violation.) Polgar resigned after another ten moves and then quietly asked Kasparov whether he had in fact released the knight. He gave her a patronizing smile and responded: “Come on, what do you think, with a few hundred spectators as witnesses?”

  Polgar still suspected that Kasparov had cheated her. Her middle sister, Sofia, urged her later to ask him again, but she rejected the suggestion, imagining the possible consequences.

  He’s only got to say that it’s not true and who’ll believe my story then? I can see it. How very unsporting of such a young girl. You can tell she is very young. She is in time trouble, she is lost and tries such a cheap trick. And against Kasparov too, who would be the last to permit himself such a thing. In plain view of the arbiter, of the whole crowd, and, as if that were not enough, of a camera crew as well.

  A Spanish television crew was filming Linares, but they returned to their Barcelona studio before Judit Polgar—or anyone else at the tournament—could see if the questionable knight maneuver was on videotape. A few days later, however, rumors swept the Hotel Anibal that the television producers had reviewed their reels of tape and found incriminating footage of Kasparov taking his hand off the knight. The tournament organizer released a statement saying that any such suggestion was a scurrilous besmirching of both the champion and the tournament’s good name, and he ordered that the tape not be shown anywhere in his hotel. Of course his order just stoked the controversy, and when a copy of the tape surfaced at the playing site, it was passed around and viewed repeatedly like a bootlegged video of Paris Hilton or Pamela Anderson. There was no mistaking that Kasparov, who had retreated to his hotel suite, had indeed released the knight.

  The chess press took the champion to task. “You bring down shame on yourself if you break this code of honour,” wrote New in Chess journalist Dirk Jan ten Geuzendam:

  Young Bobby Fischer, for instance, concentrating deeply in a game against German grandmaster Unzicker, happened to be fiddling with his h-pawn [the kingside rook pawn] in the assumption that it had been captured and taken off the board. When he realized to his dismay what he was doing, he didn’t have to think twice before accepting the consequences of his mistake. He moved the h-pawn, causing irreparable damage to his position, and lost quickly.

  The groundswell of support for Judit gave her courage. When she spied her former opponent leaving the hotel, the teenager caught up with him and asked point-blank, “How could you do this to me?” The consequence of her boldness, she told Geuzendam, was that Kasparov didn’t speak to her for three years.

  Although the world champion eventually apologized, he continued to insist that he did not realize at the time that he had released the knight—a view that his critics do not believe. “I shared a ride with Judit right after the game,” Karpov told me, “and she was so distraught not just by what he had done but by the fact that his body language at the board—his sitting there still and quietly, as if trying to disguise his crime—gave away that he knew he had wronged her.” Karpov, of course, was hardly a disinterested observer and always offered the worst possible interpretation of his rival’s behavior.

  I was not at Linares, but I would not read too much into reports of Kasparov’s unusual stoicism at the board. Whether or not he thought he’d released the knight, he certainly knew that he had almost committed a colossal blunder, and this knowledge would have distracted him. Maybe he was sitting there impassively mulling over his near-death experience and clearing his head so that he could continue the fight. My own belief is that Kasparov is guilty, but not beyond a reasonable doubt: it is conceivable he released the knight without really knowing it. I’ve witnessed many games in which the atmosphere was so charged that the players were not aware of the obvious. I was guilty of this myself in my game with Noah Siegel. If I was capable of winning a chess game and not knowing it at the time, I imagine it is entirely possible that a world champion could momentarily release a knight from his grip in the middle of a tense battle and not realize it. But there was also no denying that Kasparov would have found it especially humiliating to be beaten by a seventeen-year-old girl.

  Forty years ago Bobby Fischer, who described all women as “weakies,” boasted that he co
uld beat any female player in the world at knight odds (handicapping himself by starting the game without one of his steeds). In an interview with The New York Times in 2002, Kasparov conceded that women’s chess had improved to the point where it would be rash for him to repeat Fischer’s boast. “Now I wonder if I could be so prudent to give a pawn,” he cockily told the Times. Ironically, his own question had already been answered in the negative by the time the interview was published on September 22, and if the Times editors had followed chess news, they would certainly have scotched his comment. On September 9, the “trained dog” Judit Polgar, after losing ten games to Kasparov over a period of eight years, had finally defeated him in Moscow in the Russia versus the World rapid match.

  In our conversation at the restaurant, Kasparov was focused on the absence of women at the very top. From my own perspective as an amateur, I was more interested in the fact that there were more women now playing in tournaments in New York than there had been when I was a child. OK, the raw numbers were still relatively small, but in the 1970s many of the tournaments I’d entered were all male. The girl whom my father described my playing in Lithopinion was one of only three, I think, in a competition involving a few hundred kids. I would have enjoyed the game more as a teenager if girls had played it in greater numbers. Not just because I was developing an interest in girls then, but because their very presence might have served as a brake on the arrogant frat-boy antics of the male players.

  ON THE THIRD THURSDAY IN MARCH 2003, WHEN MANY ART GALLERIES across Manhattan were holding their monthly openings, seventy-five art connoisseurs and chess fanatics milled about the Viewing Gallery on Seventeenth Street, sipping wine, eating cookies, and occasionally glancing at the confetti-like landscapes on the walls. A little after 7:00 P.M., two elegantly dressed young women, one wearing only black, from her gloves and sleeveless dress to a black flapper wig, and the other all in white, emerged from the unisex restroom and took their places on opposite sides of a chessboard at the front of the gallery. They planned to play two games, at the fast pace of twenty-five minutes a side per game. They shook hands, and the woman in the white wig began by confidently advancing her queen pawn two squares and depressing the dual chess timer next to the board. The crowd nodded approvingly. “I would not have given up chess,” a disheveled man in his sixties announced, “if my opponents had looked like this.” I had to admit that the all-male flea-infested chess parlors I frequented with my father in Times Square were a world away from a chic art gallery in which two smart and beautiful women were playing the ultimate intellectual game.

  The woman in black was Jennifer Shahade, twenty-two, the strongest female chess player in history to be born and raised in the United States. She grew up in Philadelphia, where she learned chess at the age of five or six from her father, Michael, four-time champion of Pennsylvania. She was also inspired by her brother, Greg, two years her senior, who became a master when he was fourteen and at twenty earned the prestigious Samford Fellowship for the country’s most promising college-aged player. Jennifer’s big break came in 1996 at the so-called Insanity Tournament at the Marshall Chess Club. “It’s a crazy event,” she said. “You play, I think, nine games. You play all night with the rounds starting at odd times like 2:11 A.M. and 4:23 A.M. I was about to turn sixteen and I managed to get it together and do well with no sleep.” She came in first and joined her father and brother as a certified chess master.

  Jennifer’s opponent at the Viewing Gallery, nineteen-year-old Irina Krush, a petite brunette and Pascal Charbonneau’s girlfriend, was certainly no chess slouch, either. Irina had emigrated from Ukraine in 1988 before she turned five, the age at which her father taught her the game. At fourteen she became the youngest U.S. women’s champion ever, a record that still stands. In 2000, she continued to break records by becoming the first American woman to earn the title of international master.

  Of the 80,000 members of the United States Chess Federation in 2003, some one thousand had earned the coveted rank of national master, but only fifteen American women, Jennifer and Irina among them, had that distinction. Although the two women were friends—they were teammates at the 2002 Chess Olympiad in Bled, Slovenia, and classmates at New York University—they were also fierce competitors, and at the art gallery they went all out.

  Jennifer responded to Irina’s queen-pawn opening with a provocative defense known as the Grünfeld, favored by both Fischer and Kasparov. Black goads White into placing pawns in the center of the board, normally an important goal, but figures that she can undermine the center with well-placed blows from the flanks. Here the plan failed because Jennifer overlooked the fact that Irina could win a key center pawn. Later Irina infiltrated with her knights and launched a decisive mating attack. You could sense Jennifer’s desperation as she struggled to shelter her king. As she pondered the position, she leaned over the board and their heads almost touched. She cradled her face in her hands—a characteristic posture she shares with Kasparov—and squeezed so hard that her fingers left red marks on her cheeks. She squirmed in her seat and twisted her feet in her black boots. There was no defense, and she resigned on the forty-second move.

  “This really sucks,” she said to me after she got up from the board. “All your close friends show up to drink wine and enjoy themselves while you lose in front of them.” Twenty minutes later, however, she had composed herself and sat down for the second game. This time she had the advantage of moving first. She advanced her king pawn two squares, a more aggressive opening than Irina had employed in the first game. Jennifer needed to win to even the score, and she planned to press Irina from the onset. Irina did not shy away from the battle, and steered the game into an obscure line of the Richter-Rauzer Variation of the Sicilian Defense. The two players positioned their kings in opposite corners of the board and launched all-out assaults on the opposing monarch.

  Irina’s attack netted her two pawns, and she could have won immediately by sacrificing a rook, but Jennifer set a trap on the thirtieth move. If Irina misjudged the position and made the seemingly natural response of offering the exchange of queens, Jennifer could win a knight—a decisive material advantage—through a simple four-move combination. At classical tournament chess, where each player can take three to five hours for a game, Irina would presumably have never fallen for such a swindle, but here, faced with her time running out, it was possible that she would go wrong. The people next to me in the audience, even with wine in them, recognized the trap. “It’s Jennifer’s only chance,” whispered her brother Greg. He turned nervously away from the board, as if staring at it might jinx his sister’s subterfuge. Pascal, who of course was rooting for his girlfriend, started pacing. Irina fell for the trick and, unlike her emotional opponent, sat motionless as she lost the knight and subsequently the game.

  It was almost 10:00 P.M., and the spectators chanted, “Tiebreak! Tiebreak!” hoping that the two women would play a sudden-death game (five minutes a side) to determine the winner. But Irina had a late-night engagement, and Jennifer, who was drained, seemed content to call it a tie.

  “People sometimes ask me if chess is fun,” Jennifer told me afterward, as we sipped white wine in the gallery. “Fun is not the word I’d use. Of course, I enjoy it, or I wouldn’t play. But chess is not relaxing. It’s stressful, even if you win. The game demands total concentration.” She surveyed the young, natty crowd that had just watched her play. “It’s now cool to play chess,” she said. “The game is finally shedding its image as a magnet for geeks.”

  Female celebrities now proudly associate themselves with the game. Madonna reportedly took chess lessons from the Scottish national champion (her husband, filmmaker Guy Ritchie, is Scottish). Carmen Kass, a Vogue model of the year and the face of L’Oreal, is president of the Estonian Chess Federation. Kass told Vogue that she doesn’t know anyone else in her profession who plays the royal game. Although Kass has entered tournaments, she is not so committed to chess, she joked, as to have “a regular Tuesda
y-morning game with Kasparov or an IBM computer.”

  Jennifer herself was a model of coolness. Her brown curls, when they weren’t stuffed under a black pageboy wig, were streaked blond and pink. She lived in a loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where Internet cafés and Thai restaurants have displaced mustard and girdle factories. She played basketball, air hockey, and Ms. Pac-Man. She stayed out all night at clubs and bars.

  WHEN I PLUNGED BACK INTO THE CHESS WORLD, I KNEW JENNIFER ONLY from afar. She played in the top section of many of the tournaments I attended, and I was intrigued by the contrast between how nervous and anxious she appeared at the board and how relaxed she looked between games. She has a boisterous, infectious laugh that can fill a large playing hall and a gentle conversational manner that puts even the most socially awkward male master at ease. I liked her evident passion on and off the board.

  Jennifer has a mischievous side, too. When she tires of telling people she has just met that she is a chess champion—because that inevitably derails the conversation into a long Q and A about chess, and she has answered the questions time and again—she says she’s a circus performer. “I’m not a good liar,” she told me, “but I’m thrilled when people believe me.”

  After the match with Irina, I interviewed Jennifer in her Williamsburg apartment for an article I was writing for Smithsonian magazine. I noticed that her interest in wigs extended beyond the black hairpiece she’d worn at the Viewing Gallery. On the wall were photos of her solidly built father (he competes in Iron Man triathlons) and her brother wearing pink shoulder-length wigs. “I love the color,” she told me, as she showed me a campy self-portrait in which she explored the idea that a woman can be both a sex goddess and an intellectual. She was wearing a pink wig, pink gloves, and a slinky pink dress. She had made herself up to look like a vampish Marilyn Monroe. She was dressed to party, but was reading a book with a pink cover called Secrets of Chess Tactics, a classic Russian text that is serious even by the erudite standards of chess literature.