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

by Paul Hoffman

  The attendees at Girls Academy, who ranged in age from nine to thirteen, broke into two groups that afternoon, and Jennifer spent the first couple of hours showing her group the moves from well-known games in which strong women defeated male grandmasters—“Play like a girl!” was her charge to them. She wanted them to play like Judit Polgar. “I love her uncompromising approach,” Jennifer explained. “Just when you think the position is sterile and drawish, she stirs up complications by sacrificing a piece and launching a blistering attack. It’s awesome.”

  Jennifer herself also favors bold, tactical moves. She is a much more aggressive player than her father and brother—something you wouldn’t guess from her soft, compassionate voice and the almost balletic way that she carries herself when she is not huddled over a chessboard. “By comparison, I play like a real wuss,” her father told me later. He explained that his own style is more positional. He accumulates tiny advantages until he wins in the endgame. “She goes for the jugular immediately,” he said, “and reaches positions that are so complicated they give me a headache to look at. I don’t know how she does it. Even Greg, whose play is much sharper than mine, doesn’t take the kinds of risks Jen does.”

  Her father had been the one to accompany her to the Insanity Tournament, and on the train ride home to Philadelphia, he told her gleefully, “No one could ever say you play like a girl.” In her book Chess Bitch, published in 2005, Jennifer reflected on her dad’s comment:

  At the time, I considered it a compliment. I didn’t see any reason for my violent style except that I liked attacking chess. However, I was aware of the stereotype that women were more patient and passive while men were supposedly braver, and I wanted to be a hero too. In retrospect, I see my chess style was loaded with meaning—to be aggressive was to renounce any stereotype of my play based on my gender.

  She was purposely trying to copy the attacking style of the world’s number one female player, Judit Polgar.

  For a while, I played recklessly, and at first I lost many games because of my one-dimensional style. Many opponents altered their strategies when playing against me, choosing quiet systems—such as the English opening—in order to derail the tactical melees at which I excelled.

  Ironically, as Jennifer’s familiarity with the chess world grew, she saw her notion of gender stereotypes turned inside out:

  By the time I was nineteen, I started to mingle in the higher ranks of international chess, playing in world championships and the biennial chess Olympiads. I realized that to play like a girl did not have the same meaning at the top as it did in parks and scholastic tournaments. It turned out that to play like a girl meant to play aggressively! This was most vividly demonstrated to me when a Russian coach looked at some of my boldest games and said derisively, “I see women’s chess hasn’t changed. Women have no patience; they always want to attack immediately.”

  That afternoon at Girls Academy, Jennifer shared with her students one of her own disappointments at the chessboard, from the 2002 Olympiad in Bled, where teams from eighty-nine countries competed in the women’s division and the United States was in medal contention until the end. “You can always learn more from your losses than from your wins,” Jennifer told them. “If you lose, it’s because you missed something. You need to understand what that something is so you don’t make the same kind of mistake again.” She set up the key position from the final round against Ukraine and explained how she went wrong. “I had a choice of two ways to capture,” she said. “I could have taken with the pawn or the rook. If I took with the rook, it would lead to a draw. I took with the pawn and quickly lost. Taking with the pawn was a radical misjudgment. Why did I do it? There was probably a psychological reason. Earlier I thought I had stood better in the game, so I didn’t want to settle for a draw and admit that I hadn’t been able to press my advantage.” The girls were listening respectfully to Jennifer.

  “I also learned from Bled,” Jennifer continued, “that I didn’t have enough stamina.” This was a startling confession from a woman who made her mark in the Insanity Tournament. “I’m used to American weekend tournaments in which four or five rounds are crammed into two or three days.” The Olympiad lasted two weeks. She won five of her first six games but then sadly had a big slump so that she ended up with six wins and five losses. “I can play chess twelve hours a day for a weekend on sheer adrenaline and then crash,” she said, “but I can’t sit at the board with peak concentration for days at a time.” She told me later that she was running, lifting weights, and shooting baskets to build up her endurance.

  Toward the end of the afternoon, Jennifer and Irina’s students came together for joint instruction. Irina set up a position on an oversize demonstration board in front of the room. She asked the girls to study it and then pair off and play the position out, with chess clocks ticking as if this were a tournament. Later the girls would compare their moves with the continuation favored by the chess titans who had actually reached the position. Jennifer glanced at the demonstration board and exclaimed with mock horror, “That position was never reached by a woman!”

  “It’s OK,” Irina responded, with a straight face, “because one of the players was a homosexual.” The class cackled, and Jennifer flinched at her colleague’s lack of political correctness.

  The position Irina selected was reached after the sixteenth move of the famous 1895 game between world champion Steinitz and the gay German master named Curt von Bardeleben—the model for Nabokov’s Luzhin. On White’s seventeenth move—which the girls were asked to find—Steinitz boldly sacrificed his queen pawn so that a path would be cleared for his knight to join in the hunt for the Black king. When Irina eventually showed the class the sacrifice and the subsequent play, the girls marveled at the depth and beauty of Steinitz’s mating attack. What Irina didn’t tell the students was the fate of the two men. Steinitz eventually went mad, claiming that he could play chess with God over an invisible phone line and beat Him even after giving Him the handicap of an extra pawn. And von Bardeleben, of course, leaped to his death from a window. But the fact that chess has a long history of association with obsession and eccentricity is emphatically not part of the curriculum at Chess-in-the-Schools. Earlier that same day, when a student asked Jennifer what became of Bobby Fischer, she responded, “Never mind! Let’s just appreciate his games!”

  Between the two women, however, the crazy competitiveness of their world was a running joke. During a break at Girls Academy, Jennifer put aside the remains of a large tossed salad. She had eaten none of the sundried tomatoes, which were scattered across the bowl. Irina was eyeing the salad dregs, and Jennifer offered them to her.

  “Why didn’t you eat the tomatoes?” Irina asked. “Are you trying to poison me?”

  “You never know,” Jennifer playfully responded.

  “It would be a good trick,” said Irina. “I wonder if anyone has ever tried it—making their opponent sick just before an important match.”

  LATER THAT WEEK JENNIFER AND IRINA WERE COMPETING IN SEATTLE, ALONG with fifty-six other players, for the 2003 U.S. Chess Championship. Jennifer was the defending women’s champion, and Irina wanted a shot at the title, which she had won once before, in 1998. When Jennifer won the title in Seattle in 2002, it was the first time women and men had ever played together in the 157-year-old national championship. No female player had ever qualified for the championship, and in 1937 a separate women’s division was created in which female players competed among themselves for the title of U.S. women’s champion. In 2002, the women’s section was abolished, and players of both genders were thrown together. Jennifer, who never faced a single female in the tournament, nonetheless became U.S. women’s champion by virtue of achieving the highest score of all the women. At the players’ meeting before the 2002 tournament, some of the men complained that the participation of women would degrade the quality of the play, but Jennifer proved them wrong. In the very first round, she disposed of Gennady Sagalchik, the grandmaste
r who had been particularly vocal in objecting to the inclusion of women; she now had a Vera Menchik club of her own. Later, back in Brooklyn, Jennifer celebrated in a blue wig at an all-night warehouse party with a childhood friend who was wearing a T-shirt that was supposed to say, “Jennifer Shahade is a Man Eater,” but the friend’s Magic Marker had run dry after she wrote Jennifer’s name.

  “I was delighted to beat Sagalchik,” Jennifer told me, “because I had a pattern of reaching good positions against grandmasters, getting nervous, and making inaccurate moves that let them slip away.”

  And yet Jennifer is not entirely convinced that having a coed championship is in the best interest of women’s chess. While the top-ranked women are strong enough to give the men a good fight, or even beat them, the lower-ranked women who qualify for the championship are much weaker than the weakest men. “Is it good for a young woman’s confidence and chess career if she has a horrible result in the U.S. Championship?” she said. “Maybe it would be better for her to play in an allwomen’s event? But I can also argue the reverse—that it is motivating to play in a championship with the country’s best players, and that women will get better as a result.”

  JENNIFER GOT OFF TO A SLOWER START IN THE 2003 CHAMPIONSHIP, BUT AFTER a victory in the seventh round she was tied for first among the women and consequently was in a good position to retain her title. Her brother was also competing in the championship—the first time since 1969 that two siblings had played in it—and he, too, had an important win in the seventh round.

  The Shahades had radically different methods of preparation. Each evening at about 10:00 P.M., they’d learn whom they’d face the next afternoon and whether they were going to have White or Black. Before going to bed, Jennifer would turn on her notebook PC and search through her database of more than two million chess games for those that were played by her opponent. She’d scan the relevant games and make a quick decision as to what sequence of opening moves she thought would give her adversary the most trouble. But she would save the bulk of her study for the morning. “I can sleep better,” she told me, “after I select the particular opening. Otherwise I’ll toss and turn and mull over it during the night.”

  Greg’s approach was less disciplined. He routinely went to bed at four in the morning and rose only minutes before the 1:30 P.M. round. He, too, possessed a PC with two million chess games stored on it, but the database apparently received less use than his sister’s. Instead he pressed the computer into service to play online poker and kung-fu chess, at which he was the number one player in the world. (Kung-fu chess is an Internet action game in which multiple chessmen rush forward as fast as you can move them.) Greg also kept himself busy with a Sony PlayStation, a TV season’s worth of The Simpsons on DVD, and a Dance Dance Revolution Pad (an electronic dance mat), all of which he’d hauled out to the West Coast from New York.

  I visited Seattle for the last few rounds of the tournament. I happened to occupy the hotel room next to Greg’s, and on the night before the final round, when he could have been preparing for one of his toughest opponents—fifteen-year-old Hikaru Nakamura, who was about to break Bobby Fischer’s 1958 record as the youngest American grandmaster and go on, in 2005, to become the youngest U.S. champion since Fischer—I awoke at 4:00 A.M. to the sound of Bart Simpson’s voice and Greg laughing loudly.

  “How’s the Nakamura preparation going?” I shouted through the wall.

  “Not well,” said Greg. “I haven’t started yet.”

  The next day was not a good one for the Shahades. Greg lost to Nakamura, and his sister was ground down by Benjamin Finegold, whose rating has occasionally gone high enough to make him the top-rated American-born player. Greg and Jennifer both finished the nine-round tournament with an even score of 41?2–41?2. Jennifer had tied for first among the women with Irina and Anna Hahn, a Latvian émigré. The next day the three of them would play a round-robin match of speed chess (fifteen minutes per side per game) to decide who would become U.S. women’s champion.

  “I departed from my usual, more methodical style of preparation and tried to study every opening under the sun,” Jennifer said. “I knew it was a crazy, stupid thing to do—you can’t possibly master numerous opening lines in one evening—but I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to be prepared for anything they might play, and then all night I dreamed about the possibilities.” She arrived at the board exhausted, and lost her encounter with Irina. Hahn, twenty-six, whose national ranking made her the underdog, managed to beat both of them and walk off with $12,500 and the title. “It all ended much too quickly,” Jennifer said, “after ten grueling days of chess.” Although she was no longer the U.S. women’s champion, she had done well enough in Seattle to earn the second of three norms toward the title of international master.

  JENNIFER GRADUATED FROM NYU ONLY A MONTH BEFORE THE CHAMPIONSHIP, and in Seattle she was in a reflective mood about what she was going to do with the rest of her life. “I majored in comparative literature,” she told me. “It’s a toss-up,” she joked, “about whether comparative literature or chess will be more useful in paying the rent. I’m struggling right now with how much I want to make the game the focus of my life or whether I want to do something in the arts. I love chess, but it’s the height of decadence. The positions you reach in a well-played game are beautiful, but the beauty is inaccessible to those who haven’t mastered the game.”

  In addition, Jennifer worried that the game itself doesn’t have a lot of social purpose. “You can understand if someone is spending sixteen hours a day trying to cure a disease or to write a novel,” she said, “but to play better chess?” As a feminist, she also hadn’t completely made her peace with the brutality of the game. “Chess is patriarchal—I sound like a college student—it’s a war game that rewards ruthlessness, not cooperation.” Yet she is drawn to the intensity of the game and obviously excels at it.

  Jennifer’s views on chess and gender evolved over the next two years as she worked on her book, Chess Bitch, about women who play the game. “I would no longer describe chess as patriarchal,” she told me recently. “It’s chess culture, not the game itself, that needs to change. The culture is extremely competitive and may turn off people who are interested in playing for fun. If the media focused more on unusual personalities and the beauty and art in chess, less competitive types—in particular women, who are generally not encouraged to be competitive—might play the game.”

  IN 1994, SUSAN POLGAR, TWENTY-FIVE, THE OLDEST OF THE THREE HUNGARIAN sisters, moved to New York. Judit, seven years her junior, was already eclipsing Susan in international tournaments, but it was Susan who had first broken gender barriers in chess and confronted institutionalized discrimination at tournaments, paving the way for younger female players like Judit. Their father had decided that the reason women didn’t make it to the top in chess was that they didn’t have much practice against strong men. And so he encouraged Susan not to restrict her play to women’s tournaments. At the age of seventeen, she became the highest-rated player in the world her age or younger, but the Hungarian Chess Federation was not ready to let a woman represent her country in the World Junior Championship and sent a lower-rated boy instead. In 1986, she qualified for the overall World Championship, but FIDE banned her participation, claiming that it was an all-male affair. FIDE, under pressure from the Soviets, whose domination of world chess was threatened by the Hungarian star, did her further injustice by blatantly awarding all of her female adversaries in the world an extra 100 rating points.4

  In 1991, Susan was able to thumb her nose at FIDE by becoming the first woman ever to meet the requirements for the “male” grandmaster title.5 (Later that year Judit, not to be outdone, achieved the spectacular distinction of becoming the youngest grandmaster ever. Judit would take their father’s prescription about playing chess with men to an extreme: she’d play exclusively with men, forgoing women’s-only tournaments that she could have easily won. The middle sister, Sofia, after meteoric success o
n the tournament circuit, moved to Israel and gave up the game.) In 1996, Susan—while living in America but still playing for Hungary—won the Women’s World Championship and retired from competitive chess to raise her two children.

  In a tremendous coup for American chess, Susan Polgar decided to come out of semiretirement seven years later, in 2003, and play for the women’s team that would represent the United States in the 2004 Olympiad in Calvia, Spain. The U.S. women had never won a medal in thirty-six previous Olympiads, and Polgar was determined to change that. She and Paul Truong, her manager (who was also the chess player with the disturbing boat-person tale), organized a rigorous training program for the prospective team members and obtained funding from the USCF and the Kasparov Chess Foundation. In another break for America’s chances, Kasparov himself decided to coach the team. His views on the inherent inferiority of women at chess obviously did not stop him from helping individual female players succeed. His personal involvement in the U.S. effort upped the ante because he expected the team to win a medal.

  Jennifer Shahade was one of the candidates for the team, and I accompanied her to a training session with Kasparov over the Memorial Day weekend in 2004. Besides Jennifer and Polgar, the prospective “Dream Team” included Irina and two strong immigrants from countries where chess was taken seriously: Anna Zatonskih, twenty-five, from Ukraine, and Rusudan Goletiani, twenty-three, from Georgia. Only Goletiani, who was visiting family back in Georgia, missed the session with Kasparov.

  Kasparov had worked with these same women once before, a year earlier, and Jennifer was apprehensive then because of the things he had said about women. But he quickly charmed her, she told me, by claiming the press had distorted his views and saying that he saw no reason there couldn’t be ten Judit Polgars. This time Jennifer was nervous because of the assignment Kasparov had given them. He had asked each woman to select two of her recent games and show them to him in front of the others. The idea was not to show their best efforts but to present games in which they had gone astray and were still unsure now about the correct strategy and needed the world champion’s guidance. Jennifer planned to discuss two games from the recent Women’s World Championship in Elista, Kalmykia, where she had been eliminated in the first round by a Georgian. The first game ended in checkmate on the thirty-sixth move, a rarity at Jennifer’s level because a master player usually resigns before her king is decisively cornered. She was embarrassed to show him the game, not because of the mate (she doubted he’d want her to play it out that far) but because she’d missed a simple tactic earlier. “I’m afraid of boring him,” she told me, “but I do have questions about it. I’d much rather show him one of my better games in which I crushed someone with a clever attack.”