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

by Paul Hoffman

  We spoke for an hour about her interest in chess, and then I asked if we could play a game of blitz. There was a board already set up across the room, and she agreed. If I had been a player of her caliber, our first game would have been monumentally important as we each jockeyed to win and establish a trend that would prove who was better. Here, of course, there was no question that she was much stronger than I, but the game was psychologically loaded nonetheless. I expected her to win, but I still wanted her to respect me: I didn’t want to play like an idiot. I wanted to demonstrate that I had some command of the pieces. And if I was fortunate, I might make a move or two that she found interesting, if not inspired. My biggest fear was that I’d bore her.

  Jennifer was also clearly less relaxed than she’d been during the interview. She was playing with her hair, twisting its pink and blond streaks, and adjusting her pawns so that they were in the center of their starting squares. Despite my desire to impress her with a cunning combination, I also felt sympathetic; if I made the most horrible blunder in the history of chess, it would be our little secret. If she made a similar error, the five million readers of Smithsonian might be party to her humiliation.

  I looked across the table and wondered what was going through her mind. I knew she didn’t want to screw up, but what exactly was her strategy? Would she try to wipe me out from the start? Probably not, I thought. Her eyes were kind, and I imagined she was the type of woman who’d want to beat me but leave me feeling good about myself. There was also a double standard. If a man went straight for the jugular, he’d expect to be admired. Was she concerned that if she blew me away, I might be one of those unenlightened guys who would describe her in print as an aggressive bitch? Or could it be that she actually wanted to be described that way? I didn’t know her well enough to judge.

  She shook my hand, I started her clock, and she casually pushed her king pawn forward. I steered the game into a Najdorf Sicilian, and she responded with the fashionable English Attack, which leads to positions that are among the wildest in the rough-and-tumble world of the Sicilian. In many variations of the Sicilian, White soon advances her kingside pawns toward Black’s king; in the English Attack she launches the pawns particularly early.

  On the eighth move, I advanced the rook pawn on my kingside, in defiance of conventional thinking. I intended to shelter my king on that side of the board. Chess students are taught not to move pawns in front of their castled king because they can become targets or leave weak squares around the king. But I had seen some recent grandmaster games in which the rook pawn was advanced in this exact position, in the hope of slowing White’s anticipated pawn onslaught. She smiled and stiffened a bit in her chair. She knew from my move that I had at least a passing familiarity with modern opening theory. I hoped that I was lucky and she hadn’t faced this prophylactic pawn push before.

  She made natural moves on her next ten turns, continuing to maintain the advantage that the White pieces gave her. Then, on the eighteenth move, she pushed a pawn deep into my king’s front yard—so deep, in fact, that it was knocking on the palace door. She had dispatched the foot soldier on a kamikaze mission to pry open lines to my king. Whether the sacrifice was objectively warranted wasn’t clear, but it was pure Shahade, and no doubt intended in part to intimidate and confuse me. She liked to take risks on the chessboard and throw the game into chaos.

  For the next dozen or so moves, we had a thrilling, tit-for-tat slugfest. First we traded dark-squared bishops, although this improved her position by bringing her queen closer to her quarry, my king. I picked up my light-squared bishop and captured her knight, which was also poised to invade the king’s palace. She in turn captured my bishop. With one of my rooks I chopped off a juicy-looking pawn, with a motion of my hand that was unusually aggressive for me, and she replied by jauntily executing one of mine.

  I paused to evaluate who stood better. I had weathered her attack—hallelujah!—and, after all the exchanges, remained a pawn up. I thought I had the advantage, although maybe not enough to win against a player of her caliber. There was no reason I should lose, though. Then I checked the clock and saw to my delight that I had a luxurious twenty-five seconds remaining to her paltry fifteen seconds. She was notorious for getting into time pressure in her long tournament games, and now she had done that—perhaps fatally—here.3 If I could just move instantly and avoid blunders, she would surely run out of time before I did.

  I was pleased that I had more than acquitted myself on the board—she respected me now, I hoped—but I was conflicted about impending victory. I started to worry that it was self-serving if I beat her in an offhand game and wrote about it. She seemed to be playing hard, but what if she was just a fine actress and going easy on me out of some unusual sense of chivalry? I looked up at her face. She was pressing her temples and squeezing her cheeks. No, she certainly didn’t look as if she wanted to lose. I checked the clock again. All this introspection had cost me ten seconds; we were now even, at fifteen seconds apiece. I panicked and mindlessly repositioned my knight.

  I was ahead again in time after two more moves, seven seconds to four. But she did not collapse. Instead, she went out swinging by trying to sacrifice a rook for my knight. Her hand was shaking when she picked up my knight, and it slipped out of her grip and went careening into the wall. I hesitated to capture her rook with my pawn. She would then take the pawn with her queen, bringing that mighty piece very close to my king, whose protective pawn fortress was now completely denuded. And yet I didn’t see a killer follow-up for her. But I gave her the benefit of the doubt by assuming that I was missing something diabolical that she had seen. Why else would she want to part with her valuable rook? So I declined the rook and captured a knight of hers instead. It was not a bad move; it kept my advantage.

  Two moves later she reached out and stopped the clocks and announced with obvious relief that I had lost on time. My dreams of triumph were reduced to fantasy. I saw that she had just two seconds remaining on her clock. I asked her if I could have captured the rook and lived. I don’t see why not, she said softly. She had outwitted me not by the objective strength of her final moves but by the clever psychological ploy of making an unexpected, intimidating-looking capture that caused me to think when I could not afford to. A good player, I learned, never gives up until she has exhausted every conceivable weapon in her arsenal.

  I ASKED JENNIFER IF KASPAROV’S VIEWS ON WOMEN HAD DETERRED FEMALE players from pursuing the game. “You have to laugh,” she said. “Does he really think that women can’t play well because we all hear babies crying in the back of our minds?” She joked about staging a tournament above a nursery to see if men would handle the noise better than women. “I don’t really care what Kasparov thinks,” she continued. “He’s not a sociologist, and he’s not going to stop me from playing. I’ll listen to him when he analyzes chess positions.”

  I remembered Irina Krush telling me that she thought being a female player was an advantage. “You get more invitations to exclusive tournaments,” Irina explained, “because you’re considered to be something of a novelty. Male players sometimes claim that I have an advantage because they are distracted by how I look. I don’t buy that, though. When chess players lose, they always come up with an excuse.”

  Jennifer’s own views on this particular excuse mirrored my feelings when I played her. “If you find someone attractive,” Jennifer said, “you don’t play worse. You buckle down and try to play better because you want to dazzle them with your brilliance.”

  The chief impediment to more women playing tournament chess seems to be cultural. “If you’re going to become very good at chess,” Jennifer told me, “you have to pour yourself into it.” In our society, we approve if a boy plays chess. We see it as a sign of intelligence. But we consider it weird if a boy is obsessed with chess, if he spends the bulk of his waking hours playing and studying the game. “Now if a girl does that,” Jennifer said, “it’s not just weird, it’s downright unacceptable
to most parents. Women are usually discouraged from pursuing chess and other intellectual activities that require time-consuming devotion.”

  In her own case, she said, she was free to be obsessive. Jennifer had the blessing, and the example, of her mother, who was both a success in the traditional male field of chemistry (she is a professor at Drexel) and an avid games player—of blackjack, poker, and, to a lesser extent, chess. “There were periods in my life,” Jennifer told me, “when chess was the most important thing to me. It’s not that I did chess all day—I took time out to be with my friends or to exercise—but I justified the time with my friends and the exercise as being good for my chess. Today my life is more balanced.”

  UNLIKE JENNIFER’S LIFE, IRINA’S REVOLVES AROUND THE GAME. “I AM VERY chessy,” she told me. Irina is uncomfortable giving interviews—she’d rather be playing chess than talking about the game. But one morning at 3:00 A.M., when I was driving home from a tournament with her and Pascal, she was unusually philosophical. Of all the top players I know, she is the most idealistic about the power of chess to give meaning to life. “Chess is a gift that civilization handed us,” she told me. “I believe chess can bring me closer to the spiritual part of this world in a way that simple material stuff can’t.” She sees no intrinsic reason why women can’t play as well as men but doubts whether there will ever be many women in chess. “You have to be obsessive to play the game well, and women aren’t as obsessive as men,” she said. “I’m not fanatically crazy about chess. I like the game but I’m not going to study it ten hours a day like many male grandmasters did when they were teenagers.”

  “I think it’s a matter of choice,” Pascal interrupted. “Women haven’t chosen to devote themselves to the game.”

  “Biology can get in the way,” said Irina. “A lot of things change for girls when they’re thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen. Things change for boys, too, of course, but not as early so it’s easier for boys to concentrate on chess in their early teens when playing and studying the game has the biggest payoff. During those years, interactions with the opposite sex matter more to girls. Their first crushes, their first kisses, when they first fall in love….

  “I think girls are more emotional than guys. Lots of my mistakes happen because of how I emotionally respond to a position.” She told me about one of her games at the U.S. Championship against a player named Tatev Abrahamyan. “I had a shitty position,” Irina said, “and was being outplayed. I saw that she had a move that would give her a great position. I was very unhappy. But she didn’t think long and made a move that was one hundred times worse than the move I expected.” Irina was so shocked that she did not adjust to the new situation and immediately made a losing retreat with her queen. “It was horrible,” she recalled. “The position was certainly not beyond my understanding. Immediately afterward, I realized the retreat was bad. I had made a very emotional blunder because my shock blinded me for a moment.” Irina paused for a minute. “You never hear male players saying they’re shocked. Maybe it’s because men are not as honest.”

  “What?” Pascal interrupted.

  “Men never say the truth. If a male player panicked, he’d deny it.”

  “What?” he teased.

  “Be quiet, Pascal.” Irina turned back to me. “Is a woman more likely to panic than a man? I don’t know. Are the top men naturally calmer, or have they just trained themselves regardless of their personality not to panic because that’s what it takes to be a top GM? Regardless, I need to work on this.”

  FOR MOST OF THE GAME’S LONG HISTORY, WHEN WOMEN PLAYED CHESS IT was in the context of courtship. When Benjamin Franklin was an old man in Paris, he tried to seduce women over the chessboard by playing them in their boudoirs. A favorite partner was Madame Brillon de Jouy, an acclaimed harpsichordist and composer who lived with her older philandering husband on a fancy estate not far from where Franklin was staying. She met Franklin in 1777, when she was thirty-three and he was seventy-one. Although they never consummated their relationship, the two exchanged more than 130 steamy letters over an eight-year period, in which he suggested that his penis was a stallion ready to invade her stable. When they got together in person, she’d sit in his lap and they’d play chess.

  Apparently his seduction technique did not include letting her win. “She is still a little miffed about the six games of chess he won so inhumanly,” wrote Madame Brillon about herself in one of their letters, “and she warns him she will spare nothing to get her revenge.”

  Another time he kept her playing chess in her bathtub until late at night, for which he apologized the next day in a letter: “Never again will I consent to start a chess game with the neighbor in your bathing room. Can you forgive me this indiscretion?”

  She certainly did. “I get so much pleasure from seeing you,” she replied, “that it made up for the little fatigue of having come out of the bath a little too late.”

  In Franklin’s time, women were not welcome in the chess clubs of Europe or America. It was not until the mid-1880s that a club in Turin, Italy, allowed the wives and daughters of its members to join them at the chessboard, a practice that was applauded by world champion Wilhelm Steinitz. “This is as it should be,” Steinitz wrote, “and we hope that this example will be followed by other chess societies, it being evident that, if we engage the queens of our hearts for the queens of our boards and if we can enlist the interest of our connubial mates for our chessical mates our intellectual pastime will be immensely benefited and will pass into universal favor.” But change was slow. When the first women played in an international tournament, in London in 1897, a commentator cautioned that they “would come under great strain lifting the leaded, wooden chess sets.”

  WHEN KASPAROV HOLDS FORTH ON THE SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE FOR WHY FEW women play world-class chess, he is carrying on a long tradition. There is a rich psychoanalytic literature on the unconscious motives governing chess players and the lack of women in the game. Freudians say that an unresolved Oedipal complex is responsible for driving male chess masters to kill the king, the father figure. Because women do not have the same unconscious desire to murder their dads, the argument goes, the game does not have the same symbolic appeal. Psychoanalysts have also doubted women’s ability to muster the competitive impulses necessary to play topflight chess. But the papers in the psychoanalytical literature do not cite scientific research or case studies to support this view. They provide no more insight than Tal’s quip that women can’t play chess because they can’t keep their mouths shut for five hours.

  Typical is “The Psychology of Chess,” by Dr. Ben Karpman, from a 1937 Psychoanalytic Review. In describing women’s behavior at the chessboard, Dr. Karpman repeats dubious anecdotes from a 1931 book called Chess Potpourri:

  Miss Muller Hasting’s first play was with Miss Eschwege, with whom she played until fifty-four moves had been made, when she resigned for no more serious reason than that, first, because she was tired, and second, because she preferred to lose her first game and win the latter one!…At another board a king was moved into check and several minutes had elapsed before either side discovered the error!!!! In one case, a lady with a simple winning ending offered a draw, which was accepted. Upon being shown that she had an easy win, it was perhaps excusable that she was not sure whether she had really offered a draw!!!

  Dr. Karpman’s selective choice of evidence was particularly lame because he was writing at a time when Vera Menchik, a Moscow-born master living in England, was storming the bastions of male chess. In 1929, in Karlsbad, Czechoslovakia, she became the first woman to play against men in top international tournaments. Albert Becker, an undistinguished Viennese master, had objected to her participation and derisively said that anyone who lost to her should be forced to join what he called the Vera Menchik Club. He expected the club to have no members, but he became the first inductee when she defeated him at Karlsbad. He was joined by Max Euwe, future world champion, whom Menchik beat at Hastings in 1931, and by Samue
l Reshevsky, the American phenom, who, though up a pawn against her at Yarmouth in 1935, ran out of time. “I didn’t expect her to see so much,” an admiring Euwe said. All in all, though, she played timidly against men compared to the verve she showed in games against female adversaries. She became the first women’s world champion, in 1927 in London, and she defended her title six times, scoring an overwhelming eighty points in eighty-three games. She died in 1944 in an air raid on London.

  IN CONVERSATION, JENNIFER GETS IMPATIENT DISCUSSING THEORETICAL reasons why more women don’t play chess. “I’m more interested in doing something about it,” she told me, “than in debating hypotheticals.” She and Irina are working to increase the presence of women in chess, not just through their own play but also by helping young girls master the game. There are many good reasons to teach kids chess, Jennifer told me: it helps them learn to concentrate, to think ahead, to see that their actions have consequences, to cope with defeat, and to be gracious in winning.

  On a Sunday afternoon in early January 2003, I joined Jennifer and Irina in the midtown New York offices of a foundation called Chess-in-the-Schools for a program called Girls Academy. Once a month, a couple of dozen girls, many from disadvantaged neighborhoods, come together from across the city for six free hours of intensive instruction from Shahade and Krush. The two champions know that they are role models for girls who dream of reaching the higher echelons of chess.