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

by Paul Hoffman

  I spoke to Greg afterward. “You did what?” he said, incredulously. “You felt sorry for him when you were beating him? You’re crazy, Paul. You’re completely crazy. You should crush these kids and make them really cry.” Indeed, I was a head case, the tormented duelist who draws his pistol first but can’t get off a shot. We humans are supposed to learn from our mistakes, yet here I was repeating the same self-destructive pattern I had followed when I played Greg’s sister. I was ahead on the clock and on the board but allowed myself to be flummoxed by my opponent’s eleventh-hour, desperado sacrifices and my reservations about winning.

  The boy who beat me did not gloat. He just looked relieved and a bit embarrassed by his unlikely victory. You can tell a lot about a person’s character by how he acts after a chess game. I admired the boy because, like Jennifer, he did not display his glee at the change of fortune in his favor. In a world full of Grobsters, this attitude was rare.

  Overall, I was playing better chess—my rating was two hundred points higher than when I had quit in college—and yet I still felt out of place in the chess world and might have given up the game entirely if I had not met Pascal Charbonneau. Although I did not know it at the time, he would change the way I thought about chess.

  EVER SINCE I HAD GONE TO AEROFLOT, AND WITNESSED FIRSTHAND HOW Joel Lautier had responded to victory and defeat, I wanted to get further inside the head of a top player to understand the full range of his emotional responses to the game. I wanted to know how he prepared for each opponent, how well he slept before a critical encounter or after a bruising loss or a triumphant win, and how he psyched himself up at game time. Of course, I had interviewed various players about their pre-and postgame rituals, but in the world of chess, with its endless posturing, I could never be sure of the answers. I asked Joel once if I could watch him prepare for an opponent. He said to ask him again after he had had a few vodkas. I did ask again and he politely declined. I assured him that I would not reveal anything about the openings he prepared or new ways he might concoct to bust the King’s Indian. I think he trusted me but was understandably concerned that my presence in his hotel room—even a quiet presence at three in the morning—might interfere with his routine. When I approached Kasparov about watching his preparation, he screwed up his face and looked at me in total disgust.

  My interest in observing one of the top players prepare behind closed doors was more than academic: I wanted to understand whether my responses to the game made me a freak or whether other players had the same experiences. I was curious to learn if my internal reactions to the game were typical of a chess amateur but not of a world-class player. I knew that my mood greatly affected my play: a slightly strained conversation with my wife, never mind a full-fledged argument, could throw off my game. I knew that I did not sleep well during tournaments because I was too plagued by all the chess variations that raced through my head—not to mention the strange dreams in which attractive women moved like knights and sinister men like bishops.

  In the spring of 2004, I had all but given up on finding a player who would let me shadow him at the upcoming FIDE World Championship in Tripoli, Libya. Then, in May, my wife and I attended a press conference in New York announcing a match in the city between Irina Krush and Almira Skripchenko, the French women’s champion (and Joel Lautier’s former wife). Ann usually passes up chess events, but this time she joined me because the venue was the legendary Russian Samovar, the Manhattan restaurant co-owned by Mikhail Baryshnikov and patronized by Russian artists and Soviet defectors. Ann is more sociable than me, and while I was standing around the buffet table nibbling pelmeni and caviar, she was across the room introducing herself to Pascal. When he told her that he was going to Tripoli in a month to play for the World Championship and was nervous about traveling by himself, she told him that I was considering attending but didn’t want to go alone, either.

  Pascal and I started talking. He explained that Irina couldn’t accompany him to Tripoli because she had a sudden chess commitment of her own: the 2004 U.S. Women’s Championship that had been hastily arranged to solve the Shahade-Goletiani rating controversy. Between bites of gravlax, Pascal asked me if I wanted to come along. I expressed interest, but warned him that I’d want to observe absolutely everything he did to prepare for his games and hoped my presence wouldn’t be a distraction. “That’s fine,” he said. “I don’t really have a preparation routine so there’ll be nothing for you to disturb. I’ve been to tournaments alone, with strangers, with my dad, and with Irina, and I haven’t noticed a correlation between how I do and who accompanies me.” This last remark, I’d learn, was vintage Charbonneau: he was the consummate rationalist. And so, in the course of a three-minute conversation, we had agreed to travel together to a country that did not have diplomatic relations with the United States.

  Both of us, however, harbored doubts about our trip. Although Pascal was glad he wouldn’t be traveling alone, he later confessed that he wondered whether an American journalist was the safest possible companion during the U.S. occupation of Iraq, when anti-American sentiment in the Arab world was at its zenith. “I was a little concerned,” he said, “but somehow I was happy. I thought we’d get along. You seemed interesting. I knew you were accomplished, and I hoped we’d become friends.”

  My concerns revolved around how little I knew about him. I had a sense that he was a nice guy because I had eavesdropped, fourteen months earlier, on a postmortem he’d done with Irina at the 2003 U.S. Championship in Seattle.2 He had gone to Seattle to support Irina, and I had gone there to watch Jennifer. Pascal was camped out in the press room for much of the tournament because it had a high-speed Internet connection and he was typing commentary on the games, which was being Webcast. He had another window open on his computer in which he was playing blitz chess online as he typed the commentary. He had a serious demeanor about him, but I could tell from the awful puns he wove into his commentary that he also had a silly side. Once, when Irina’s game ended early, the two of them went over it, move for move, in the press room. I noticed how gentle he was when he suggested improvements in her play and how he consoled her when she got mad at herself for blundering.

  Kindness is a wonderful attribute in a traveling companion or a friend, but it is not a sufficient, or even necessarily a desirable, quality in an interview subject. One of my writer buddies, Bernard, got me worrying about whether Pascal might be too bland: “Your passion is mad geniuses,” Bernard said. “What if he’s neither crazy nor a genius?” I started to wonder whether I’d have anything to write about if his preparation for his chess adversaries was uninteresting. Or if his games were dull. Or if he couldn’t articulate his feelings about chess. And what if he was not stirred by victory or defeat—what if chess playing was no more eventful for him than brushing his teeth? Then I worried about what this young man, half my age, might think of my play. What if he decided that I was a complete moron because my chess rating was comparatively low? Or a total loon because of all the emotional baggage I brought to the game? What if he concluded that I should renounce chess, get out the Preparation H, and watch On Golden Pond? It would cost me a couple of thousand bucks to go to Libya—it was not as if Southwest Airlines flew from White Plains to Tripoli—so the trip needed to be productive.

  AS IT HAPPENED, ONLY THE DOUBTS OF THE MORE RATIONAL ONE OF US proved to be warranted.

  In the week after the Russian Samovar, I started to play through the 456 games of Pascal’s on the 2004 ChessBase MegaBase CD, including youthful efforts of his going back to 1996, when he was all of thirteen. I noticed immediately that many of his games were high-wire acts. He habitually put himself at risk, courting dizzying complications that might conceivably backfire, but trusting his own ability to see through the thicket of possibilities more clearly than his opponents. I was particularly delighted that he occasionally employed the same crazy opening, the King’s Gambit, that I had intemperately made the core of my own repertoire as White.

  The King�
��s Gambit, a rarity in top-level and amateur chess today, was an adventurous reversion to the nineteenth century, when the prevailing playing style was to go straight for the other guy’s monarch almost from the first move, sacrificing pawns and pieces with abandon to open lines for the attack. Indeed, the King’s Gambit begins with the offer of a pawn, the king bishop’s pawn, at White’s earliest possible opportunity, on the second move. The pawn sacrifice helps White grab the center and develop quickly, but it also has the drawback of immediately weakening a key dark-squared diagonal leading to White’s own king. Moreover, a pawn is a pawn, and if Black survives the attack and everything is swapped off the board, the extra foot soldier will win the game for Black in the end.

  The art of defense was primitive in the nineteenth century, and so White’s early provocations often succeeded in bamboozling Black and mating his king. When Black eventually learned such defensive techniques as returning the pawn at the proper moment in order to advance his own development, White had less success and the opening was largely abandoned by the middle of the twentieth century. Only a few intrepid romantics, such as Boris Spassky, the tenth world champion, continued to play it.

  In the 1960 USSR Championship in Leningrad, Spassky trounced David Bronstein, a fellow practitioner of the King’s Gambit, in a twenty-three-move miniature after a brilliant knight sacrifice. The game was so beautiful—and so famous as chess encounters go—that the position after Black’s twenty-first move was reproduced in the James Bond film From Russia with Love as a game between “Kronsteen” and “McAdams.” In 1960, a dozen years before their legendary world title bout, Spassky defeated sixteen-year-old Bobby Fischer with a King’s Gambit at a tournament in Mar del Plata, Argentina, spurring the disbelieving youngster to search for a refutation of the opening, which he published to much acclaim the following year.3 Fischer’s analysis had the effect of further thinning the already depleted ranks of King’s Gambit partisans.

  I was a fan of Spassky’s aggressive style, and my interest in the gambit grew after I read that he had employed the opening some fifty times and never lost with it. I once asked Garry Kasparov whether Spassky’s record could be seen as an endorsement of the opening. “No,” Kasparov said, “it’s an endorsement of Spassky. The King’s Gambit is rubbish! Spassky was so strong that he could succeed even after handicapping himself with a dubious opening.”

  Joel Lautier, too, was not keen on the King’s Gambit. “You play that?” he said to me. “I prefer to start the game with as many pawns as the other guy.”4

  Any second thoughts I had about accompanying Pascal to Tripoli evaporated once I studied his games. I couldn’t imagine having a dull time with someone who played such a wild opening. And the fact that I was going with him to not just any tournament but the World Championship only added to my excitement.

  PASCAL WAS ONE OF 128 MEN FROM FIFTY-SIX COUNTRIES WHO’D CONTEST A series of knockout matches in Tripoli. The knockout format promised to be suspenseful, even if, as some chess commentators argued, it was an imperfect way of crowning a world champion. In seven rounds, a single winner would emerge. The early rounds would consist of only two games, and so if someone had an off day and lost the first game, he didn’t have any time to recover his confidence by playing a safe draw—he had to win the next game. In Fischer’s time, the matches between prospective World Championship contenders were at least six games, so that one slip or blunder wasn’t necessarily fatal.

  The pace of the games in Tripoli would be spellbinding for the spectators and harrowing for the players. The time control—forty moves in ninety minutes and then fifteen minutes for the conclusion of the game, with a thirty-second bonus after each move—was fast for a World Championship, and it was one with which Pascal and the other contestants had little experience. When the players finished the first time scramble and reached their fortieth move, they would not be able to take a long coffee or bathroom break without cutting into their precious last quarter hour. Normally the second time control was a full hour, giving players a chance to recover their bearings and leisurely complete their games. Fifteen minutes was not much time to figure out how to nurse an advantageous but difficult endgame to victory or how to hold a dubious position if you were on the defending side.

  Pascal, with a rating of 2474, was seeded number 114 among the 128 players bound for Tripoli. He was paired in the first round against a French player his own age, twenty-one-year-old wunderkind Etienne Bacrot, the number 15 seed, rated 2675. Bacrot learned chess at the age of four and became an international master when he was thirteen, five years before Pascal, by defeating, among others, two former world champions, Vassily Smyslov and Anatoly Karpov. “I thought I was playing a child,” a stunned Smyslov said, “but I am certain I played a grandmaster.” In March 1997, at the age of fourteen years, two months, Bacrot officially received his GM title, setting a record as the youngest grandmaster ever. The French representative was the on-paper favorite to beat Pascal, but the relatively fast time control and shortness of the match could work to the Canadian’s advantage. Still, to score a major upset, Pascal would have to pull everything together.

  PASCAL CHARBONNEAU EARNED THE RIGHT TO REPRESENT HIS COUNTRY in the World Championship when he won the 2002 Canadian Chess Championship at the age of eighteen, by scoring an upset victory in a two-game playoff match against forty-eight-year-old Kevin Spraggett, the highest-ranked grandmaster in Canada, who was once among the top eight players in the world. The Vancouver Sun reported that the normally reserved teenager jumped up from his chair, “lifted two clenched fists into the air in a victory signal and strode around the room as if emerging from a boxing ring instead of the sport of mind-flexing.”

  The same paper hailed Pascal’s win with a front-page headline: “I’M NOT THE WORLD’S BIGGEST GEEK.” To prove that he really was, the article showed a series of head shots of him taken in the heat of play. He was seen scowling, sucking his left hand, shoving a finger into his right ear, putting a thumb in his mouth, and rubbing his left eye after pushing up his glasses. The Sun must have worked hard, sorting through rolls of film, to find such unflattering photographs: in reality, Pascal was a handsome, sociable kid with a sturdy athletic build, stylish undersize screw-less glasses, and dark hair that he used to wear on the slightly shaggy side.

  It was only five months after winning the championship that Pascal was caught up in the particular ugliness of Canadian chess politics, with its divisions between Quebecois and native English-speaking players. By the time he played on the Canadian team in the 2002 Olympiad in Bled, in October, a non-Quebecois player had begun a campaign to diminish Pascal’s reputation in the chess world. He suggested that Pascal’s rating was inflated because his father had paid a Serbian grandmaster from Greece, the 1993 world junior champion, to throw a six-game match to him in Montreal. Accusing someone of buying games, even when there is no evidence, is like accusing someone of child abuse; damage is done when the allegation is made, and there is little an innocent person can do to quiet the rumor mill and emerge with his reputation unsullied. Pascal was fortunate that many players ignored the accusation. The effort to cast him as a monomaniacal schemer, like the Sun’s attempts to portray him as the quintessential geek, fell particularly wide of the mark: in fact Pascal was an unusually well-rounded player who had always been as devoted to sports as he was to chess.

  PASCAL WAS BORN ON MAY 6, 1983, IN MONTREAL. HE HAS TWO GORGEOUS sisters, Veronique, five years his junior, a volleyball enthusiast and late-night partier who won’t go near a chessboard; and Anne-Marie, two years his junior, an actuary who was the third best female chess player in Canada (and, according to Internet chatter, also the most beautiful). His Quebecois parents chose his name because it reflected their respective interests. His mother, Danielle, was a professor of computer science, and PASCAL was one of the first programming languages. His father, Yves, was a mathematician turned actuary, and Blaise Pascal was a seventeenth-century French mathematician and theologian who was known
for the elegance of his mathematics—particularly for a pyramid of numbers called “Pascal’s triangle.”5

  Pascal Charbonneau’s parents taught him to play chess when he was five, and at the age of seven he entered his first scholastic tournament, the Quebec Provincial Championship for First Graders, and placed third. “I was very happy,” he recalled. “I got a big trophy. Chess is full of trophies.” When he was eight, he won the Provincial Championship for the Second Grade, and he repeated that success year after year in higher grades. Before he left elementary school, he had achieved the rank of expert in the Quebec rating system, the equivalent of a master rating on the U.S. scale. And yet chess was just one of his many interests, which included judo, piano, basketball, and most of all tennis, a game he would play throughout his twelve years of education at French-speaking Catholic schools.

  In school, the nuns often scolded him for talking disruptively in class. “I was a big gabber,” he recalled, “but I grew into being the teachers’ pet. In high school, my classmates voted me the suck-up award.” Pascal had plenty of academic success, coming in second place in the National Latin Verse Competition and doing well in a national mathematics contest organized by the University of Waterloo.

  Pascal began playing tennis at the same age he learned chess, and soon did well in tournaments at the local and provincial levels. “I don’t know whether I could have been a grandmaster at tennis,” he said, “but I could have tried.” The tennis coach took his father aside and told him that Pascal should give up chess so that he could spend more time on tennis and turn pro. The chess coach lobbied just as hard for the reverse.

  Pascal attended an all-boys high school. “They’re great,” he said, “as long as you have social contact with girls. You feel so much freer to say and do what you want. As soon as girls are in the picture, the boys try to upstage each other and don’t make the same kind of jokes.” Most of Pascal’s socializing was through the chess world. He met his first girlfriend at a tournament when he was fourteen. Like him, she not only played chess but was an overachieving generalist. She was a straight-A student, a gymnast, a figure skater, and a pianist who had perfect pitch. But she lived five hundred kilometers away in Toronto, and so they saw each other only at chess events.