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

by Paul Hoffman

  “I love the little geometries in chess,” he explained, as we charged through the rain. “Now, don’t laugh, Paul, but have you ever thought about the fact that if a rook is attacking a bishop, the bishop can’t be attacking the rook?”

  I couldn’t say I had.

  “OK,” he continued, “it’s obvious once I point it out. But a chess game is in some sense an accumulation of obvious ideas. Even the most complicated tactical sequences are built up from elementary things. I like thinking about the simplest things in chess. There are many of them. If a bishop is attacking a knight, the knight can’t be attacking the bishop.”

  “If a lowly pawn is attacking a rook,” I chimed in, “the rook can’t take the pawn.”

  “There you go.”

  “If a knight is threatening a rook,” I said, “the rook can’t be threatening the knight.” I was on a roll. “If a queen is attacking a knight, the knight can’t be attacking the queen.”

  “Many strong chess players never consciously think about this stuff,” Pascal said. “If I said to Irina, ‘I think it’s cool that if a pawn is attacking a knight, the knight is not attacking the pawn,’ she’d look at me blankly. It would never occur to her. But that’s how I look at chess.”

  So awash were we in the geometry of chessmen that we nearly passed the pub. After some hardy curry and a couple of beers, Pascal was finally ready to tackle the prospect of Bacrot. We brought Guinness back to the hotel room in order to make the preparation seem like fun. I knew then that another of my responsibilities as Pascal’s second was to locate beer. He fired up his laptop and connected it to The Week in Chess Web site. Pascal downloaded Bacrot’s most recent games as well as his own and then combined them with older games from MegaBase 2004. He now had a database of 874 of Bacrot’s games. He set up one file for the 441 games in which Bacrot had White and another for the 433 in which he was Black. He similarly split his own 486 games into a White file (231 games) and a Black file (255 games).

  To my surprise he began by playing through his own most recent games. It wasn’t vanity that led him to do this or an attempt to impress me. Rather, he was trying to look at his own games from Bacrot’s perspective. “Obviously he’s going to download my games,” he said, “and examine them one by one to assess my strengths and weaknesses and predict how I’m going to play against him. I’m trying to imagine what he’ll conclude.”

  Success in chess is dependent, of course, on anticipating the opponent’s responses. Every newcomer learns the hard way that he cannot judge his own moves in isolation but must also consider his adversary’s replies. A beginner often makes the psychological mistake of attributing weak moves to his opponent, effectively abetting his own plans. Even a premature attack will succeed if a player is allowed to make his opponent’s moves for him. A better player is able to turn the chessboard around figuratively, freshly evaluate the position from the adversary’s perspective, and poke holes in his own intended moves. Successful players can’t be so in love with their own ideas that they are blind to strong moves that refute them.

  The idea of approaching the game from the opponent’s point of view also extends to figuring out the opening sequences of moves he’s likely to play. That much I expected Pascal to do. But I didn’t realize that he would pull a kind of Victor-Victoria and try to get inside the head of Bacrot trying to get inside the head of Pascal. This exercise took almost an hour.

  When Pascal played over a few of his own games from the 2003 Continental Championship, he looked content. “Maybe Bacrot will think I’m dangerous,” Pascal said. “I hope so. He’s got to be worried. It’s not like I’m an ordinary 2500. My rating is going up and I’ve had 2700 performances. On a good day I can give almost anyone in the world a hard time. I want one of those days!”

  “Wouldn’t you rather he think you’re weak?” I asked. “Then he might let down his guard.”

  “I guess if he concentrated on the games where I fucked up, he might get overconfident, play sloppily, and screw up. Not likely, though! Besides, I don’t want anyone thinking I’m a wimp.”

  Pascal focused next on the games in which he had White. “My first move will not be a secret,” he said. The database showed that Pascal always began with the move e4, advancing his king pawn two squares. He told me that someday he’d like to open also with d4, advancing the queen pawn two squares. Then he’d be what Irina approvingly calls a two-headed monster. “That would be awesome,” he said, “because my opponents wouldn’t know what to expect.” But for him to master d4 would require hundreds of hours of work. “And I haven’t put in nearly enough effort on e4 yet.”

  Pascal turned to the file of games in which Bacrot had Black and ran through a dozen of them, move for move, at breakneck speed. “So, Paul,” he said, “how will he respond to e4?”

  I was glad that Pascal was involving me in his preparation, but was suspicious of his motives. Talking to me was yet another way to avoid studying.

  “Who has White first?” I asked.

  “I won’t know until the day before.”

  I rifled through some of Bacrot’s games and predicted he’d play one of the numerous lines in the Sicilian that promised an unbalanced, fightto-the-death struggle.

  “Why’s that?” he said.

  “Well it’s the sharpest response in his repertoire, and in a two-game match, unless he’s already ahead a game—and you’re not going to let him be ahead—he’ll want to play for a win and the Sicilian is perfect.”

  “Your logic is good,” Pascal said, “but you don’t take it far enough. You’re not considering what I’ll do. Have a look,” and he opened the file of his own games as White and made a subfile of all of his Sicilian games. The ChessBase software has a command that sorts a collection of games into a tree so that you can see where one game branches off from the next. Well, the tree of Pascal’s games as White in the Sicilian had very little trunk because the branching began as early as the second move. It was more of an unruly bush, a hedge that had never been trimmed, than a tree. A good number of the branches said 1–0, indicating that he had won. “I’ve played many different things against the Sicilian with good results,” he said, “so Bacrot has to prepare for a lot of possibilities. It’s not that all these things, the so-called Anti-Sicilians, are objectively great, but they have hidden poison if you don’t know them well. I don’t think he’s had much time to prepare. He has other things on his mind now.” Up until the championship, Bacrot was busy competing in an important team tournament, Russia v. the Rest of the World.

  “I think he’ll play…e5,” he said, meaning that Bacrot would advance his own king pawn two squares, mimicking Pascal’s first move, to bring about a double king-pawn opening. “I’m sure of it.” Of the 224 games in which Bacrot faced e4, he responded…e5 in just one third of them.

  I was impressed by Pascal’s confidence. If I were in his place, I’d be worried about all the defenses Bacrot had never played that he might debut for the first time. But you can’t prepare for the unknown—there are just too many damn chess openings—and given that Bacrot was favored to win, he’d probably save any opening surprises for tougher opponents in later rounds.

  Pascal’s plan, if they reached a double king-pawn opening, was to develop his king knight on the second move, immediately attacking Bacrot’s advanced pawn. This was the most forceful continuation, and the move commonly made in the position by players of all levels. The database showed that Pascal had faced…e5 eighty-five times. Besides developing the king knight, Pascal had assayed three rarer moves in this position, leading to the King’s Gambit, the Bishop’s Opening, and the Vienna. “I used to do anything to avoid mainline opening theory,” Pascal said, “but there’s a reason these old openings aren’t played too often. Black can equalize if he’s knows what he’s doing. They’re good on occasion for surprise value but they won’t surprise Bacrot.” He’d be ready for them after reviewing Pascal’s previous games.

  Pascal took comfort in knowing that B
acrot would have wasted some of his limited preparation time on the King’s Gambit, the Bishop’s Opening, and the Vienna, openings that he had no intention of repeating. But unfortunately Pascal would also do unnecessary preparation, starting in fact with Bacrot’s second move. After the expected double king-pawn opening and White’s development of his king knight, the database revealed that Bacrot responded in three different ways. Seventy-six percent of the time he defended the pawn with his queen knight—the commonest move in this position. Ten percent of the time he ignored the attack and instead used his king knight to attack Pascal’s own king pawn—resulting in a trendy symmetrical position known as the Petroff or Russian Defense. Fourteen percent of the time he defended the king pawn with his queen pawn—a very unusual option called the Philidor Defense.

  For the next hour Pascal concentrated on the Philidor, which he had rarely faced in tournament play. (He was not worried about the Petroff because he had studied the defense with Irina, who often played it.) At first glance, the Philidor looks suspect because it violates a basic tenet of opening theory: develop your pieces freely and quickly. Instead Black makes a quiet pawn move that hems in his own dark-squared bishop. But Bacrot’s games demonstrated that the bishop has potential energy—it can spring to life later on. “The Philidor is very strange,” said Pascal. “Nobody plays it these days except Bacrot. He’s done OK with it. I doubt he’ll play it against me, but I need to look at it in case.”

  IT WAS 10:30 P.M. AND PASCAL WAS READY TO GO TO SLEEP. ASIDE FROM OUR short dinner at the pub, we had spent the entire day in the hotel and yet he had managed to study chess for only two hours. The match with Bacrot was just three days away, and Pascal still hadn’t looked at the openings that were most likely to arise.

  At midnight he sprang up in his bed. He thought it was morning and was afraid we’d miss our flight. He was surprised when I told him that he had slept only an hour and a half. He asked why I was up.

  “I’ve been playing through Dragons.”

  “That’s not the way to get sleep,” he said.

  “I know,” I said, “but I can’t get them out of my mind. Why are you awake?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Are you nervous?”

  “No, I’m calm so far. I have a special motivation for trying to beat Bacrot.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Irina thinks he’s cute.”

  “Get out!”

  “It’s true. And that’s more motivating for me than hours of opening analysis,” he continued. “Bacrot is playing now in Russia—the chess has probably tired him out and he won’t get a break before Tripoli. Maybe he met a stunning Russian girl and is sad to leave. Maybe she kept him up late and distracted him from preparing for me.4 Perhaps he’s in love with her and won’t be able to focus when we play. Maybe his mind will keep wandering back to those special nights while I quietly improve the position of my knights. I know there is hope for me.” Chalk it up to sleep deprivation, or middle-of-the-night delirium, but the Canadian champion, normally a pillar of skepticism and reason, had revealed a sentimental side.

  As we lay awake and talked, Pascal told me how difficult it was to be with one of the few women in a chess world full of male vultures. “The tournaments we play in together are often stressful in ways besides the chess,” he said. Strong grandmasters, some with less than honorable intentions, offer to take Irina under their wing and turn her into the next women’s world champion. Some don’t even bother to conceal from Pascal their desire for her. At one tournament, a top GM pleaded with him to lend Irina out to him for the evening.

  There were only fifteen people in the world who, like Bacrot, were rated higher than 2700. Many of Irina’s closest male friends besides Pascal have come from this elite club. Her 2700-plus friends have included the Ukrainian world champion contender Vassily Ivanchuk, fourteen years her senior, and the American phenom Gata Kamsky.

  When she was a teenager, she defied her parents by moving to Moscow for four months to live with Alexander Morozevich, six years her senior, one of the top ten players in the world. He was known for the startling originality of his openings, not to mention the originality of his personality. (Moro has a mystical outlook on the world and avoids making dates, Irina said, because he believes that people who are meant to be together will just show up at the same place at the same time.) He and Irina met after chatting online for months and playing hundreds of games on the Internet, none of which she won. Moro was being touted then as a future world champion, but their relationship was apparently deleterious to his chess. They broke up after his rating plunged a shocking seventy points, and she said that he blamed the decline on the fact that she was draining his energy. “Maybe I’m the sanest guy she’s been with,” Pascal joked. “But it sure sucks to be the lowest-rated boyfriend.”5

  Pascal was worried about what Irina really thought of his chess. He described to me the time she was watching him play a warm-up game on the Internet just before a New York Masters Tournament at the Marshall. She criticized the way he handled the White side of a Sicilian and told him his position was horrible. “I knew theory considered the line to be great,” Pascal explained to me. “I told her the position would have been fine if I hadn’t made an error. She still insisted the whole line was shitty.” The discussion deteriorated into a colossal fight. “It was all about respect,” he said. “I felt she didn’t respect my chess, and she felt I discounted her opinions.” With his confidence undermined, he blew two games at the Marshall against much weaker opponents and abandoned the tournament in the middle.

  Pascal and Irina have been a conspicuous couple since the 2002 Olympiad in Bled. “Being a chess couple also has its pluses,” Pascal told me. Each one understands what the other is going through at the chessboard and is tolerant of the crazy schedules and all the traveling that tournaments entail. “But it is very hard when we both play at the same time,” Pascal said. “I don’t think we’ve ever had a tournament where we both did well. If I’m playing great chess and she’s not, I have to dampen my happiness and try to boost her spirits when I should be enjoying myself and concentrating on my own chess.”

  The two of them have completely different playing styles. He is a king-pawn player and wild attacker. She is a queen-pawn player and master of postional play. Their personalities are different too. He is sociable and extraordinarily polite and she is a recluse. When people meet her for the first time, they may judge her to be rude because she is prone to burying herself in a book or her favorite magazine, The New Yorker. “I hate initially talking to someone,” she once told me. “I hate the hello part. Because I’m a chess player I’m used to doing stuff alone. So I like solitary activities—schoolwork, reading, studying, online poker.”

  Chess, of course, binds them together. It is such a rarefied art and sport that only a fellow international master of Pascal’s strength can appreciate all the intricacies of his games, and the same is true for Irina. The two have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours analyzing each other’s games and helping each other prepare for important tournaments. He has drawn the line at actually playing her. “I avoid it,” he said, “because it bothers me that she can’t turn her very competitive nature off when the player she’s facing is me. I can’t bring myself to be so competitive with her.”

  He told me that Irina thinks they should be able to play hard-fought blitz games and not let the result intrude on their relationship. “I don’t think it’s possible,” Pascal said. “Our chess ratings are so close [only twenty-six points separated them] that if I started losing to her, I’d wonder what’s wrong with me. But I wouldn’t want to beat her, either, because I don’t want to make her feel bad.” Pascal was not looking forward to the possibility that someday they might have to play a crucial tournament game that neither of them could afford to lose or draw. “Maybe I have to win to get my GM title,” he said, “and she has to win to clinch first place and a big cash prize.” And he had a deeper worry: would their rela
tionship survive if their ratings diverged and one of them advanced to the firmament of chess?

  I WOULD LATER HAVE A CHANCE TO OBSERVE THEIR INTERACTION IN A seven-round blitz tournament at Susan Polgar’s Chess Center in Rego Park, Queens. In the first two rounds, Pascal and Irina won easily. In the third game they found themselves scheduled to play each other. Tournament directors normally avoid pairing husband and wife or boyfriend and girlfriend. Although directors are not expected to know the details of every player’s romantic life, this particular director, Paul Truong, the manager of the U.S. Women’s Olympiad team, knew Irina and Pascal well. Either Truong was being mischievous or he was a stickler for adhering to the pairings served up by his computer program.

  As the two of them waited for the round to start, Irina carefully adjusted her White pieces, looked down at the board so that she would avoid seeing him, and tried to focus and get herself into the zone. Her posture at the chessboard was very feline as she hunched over the pieces and curled a foot under herself on her chair. All and all, she was pretty relaxed. As for Pascal, he stared grimly into space with the look of someone who would rather be anywhere else. They limply shook hands, and then she predictably advanced her queen pawn two squares.

  Pascal copied her move and soon they were playing a line of the Slav Defense that he had prepared extensively for a recent international tournament. Within the first minute, he had totally forgotten all of his preparation and made an inferior move. Her pawns now commanded the center, and soon she advanced one of them deep into his position, disrupting the communication of his pieces and tying his king to the middle of the back rank. Then she went straight for his king, throwing her army at him. To stave off immediate defeat, he had to jettison a rook for a less valuable knight. He used a lot of time trying to find a way out of the mess. When his clock had twenty seconds left and hers had forty seconds, she didn’t try to finish him off or “flag” him—beat him on the clock—but slowly extended her hand to offer a draw. Of course, he accepted the act of mercy.