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

by Paul Hoffman

  “Maybe we can tell by what he eats.”

  We watched him fill his plate with a pile of fruit and vegetables, in contrast to Pascal, who had been a real carnivore. “He’s clearly not ready to fight,” I said. “You chose the right food. Protein fuels the brain.”

  “There you go,” he said. “Knowing science is useful. That’s good. You boost my confidence.”

  Bacrot was hesitating at the soup pot. I reminded Pascal that the lamb and tomato stew was indigestibly spicy, and we joked about approaching Bacrot and recommending it. “My stomach is tough,” he said, “but he looks like the delicate sort.”

  “He’s a pushover,” I said. “Look at him in the silly white outfit. He looks like a freshman sailor lost at sea.”

  We asked the waiter to charge our meal to the room. He asked us for the room number.

  “510,” Pascal said.

  “610?” the waiter said.

  “No, 510.”

  “610?” the waiter repeated.

  “I said 510.”

  The waiter wrote down 610. As we left, Pascal said to me, “Well, I’m not going to be more Catholic than the pope. I don’t plan to be very Christian this afternoon at the chessboard.”

  We returned to our room. There was an hour and a half before the game, and Pascal confided that he got nervous not when he was actually playing but when he was waiting for the game to begin. He said that he routinely used to get nauseated just seconds before the game and often vomited. The problem started in late elementary school, when he was ten or eleven. “I was going through puberty,” he said. “My voice changed, I got tall overnight, and I became a bundle of nerves.” He particularly disliked waiting around in the tournament hall before his game, and he tried to orchestrate his arrival so that he reached the board precisely as the game started.

  When he was fifteen and played in the Canadian Junior Championship, the arbiter made them sit at the board for ten minutes before starting the clocks. “It was torture,” Pascal said. “How do you pass the time? You can’t warm up like in tennis. There’s only so much time you can kill doodling on the score sheet or writing your opponent’s name really slowly.” Whenever he had a long wait, he got sick—and felt better once he did. “I hated the anticipation of getting sick,” he said, “wondering when it was going to happen.” Once the game started, he usually felt fine. Most of the time no one else knew he was ill because he would escape to the bathroom or go outside, but occasionally he didn’t make it. He even managed to hide it from his parents. When his father eventually found out, he told Pascal that he, too, had gotten sick in his youth before exams and in other pressured situations.

  Pascal got ill before tennis matches, too. His coaches would freak out—they couldn’t believe he’d have the energy to play after he threw up—yet he didn’t know any other way, and he managed not only to play but to excel, earning the commendation of Most Valuable Player at his school.

  “Did you get sick on other occasions?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Around girls?”

  “Yeah, it could happen.”

  “That could happen to anyone,” I said. “I imagine you didn’t have much experience at an all-boys school.”

  “It’s fine to be clumsy or a little anxious around girls,” Pascal said. “But for me it was very bad because I’d vomit. The charm of meeting a girl quickly goes away when you throw up.” As the president of his high school, he once gave a group of girls a tour of the school. “I got sick in front of all of them,” he said. “The first moment was awful but then the girls were very worried that I was ill—of course I didn’t tell them it was because of nerves—and they fussed over me and were very solicitous. It turned out OK.”

  Pascal consulted two sports psychologists. “Maybe the techniques they suggested—about breathing and other things to get you in a good mood—work for less cerebral people,” he said. “I found it too basic.” He needed something more complicated than being told to inhale and exhale deeply and picture a quiet lake with a couple of whistling birds. There was one thing they said that he liked: if you’re intimidated by an opponent, imagine him sitting on a toilet bowl. Realize everyone has to go to the bathroom, even the most formidable adversary. “So if you’re playing Kasparov,” he said, “just think of him in the position.”

  “Are you feeling OK now?” I said. “Just picture Bacrot taking a dump.”

  “No, no,” he laughed. “I’m fine. I stopped getting sick a couple years ago, although I still don’t like to arrive early.”

  “What changed?”

  “Not sure.”

  “You just became more confident over time?”

  “No, it wasn’t confidence. I think I became super aware of getting ill, and somehow broke the cycle of anticipating getting sick and then actually getting sick. I also got involved with Irina. I think my priorities changed and I realized that it was not worth becoming ill over chess or tennis.”

  Even though his pregame anxiety was now under control, Pascal was not the kind of person who could sit down at the chessboard and put everything else that was going on in his life out of his head. “When Irina plays chess,” he said, “she totally loses herself in the game and can escape from the annoyances of everyday life. It’s not really an escape for me. I need to be in a good mood to play well. It doesn’t happen all that often because real life is always intruding.” When he won the Canadian Championship in Vancouver, it helped that he was with his friend Jack. “We were always having fun and cooking dinner together,” Pascal said, “so I was in a great mood.” When he played in the Montreal International last summer, where he made his first grandmaster norm, he was generally feeling good. Before each game he had this routine of speaking with Irina. “She’d wish me good luck,” he said, “and then I’d play and try to focus. I did well for the entire tournament except for the one time when something was off in my conversation with her. Afterward I couldn’t concentrate and I reached an endgame that should have been a draw but I started playing very quickly and very stupidly. I wanted to go home.”

  It was now forty-five minutes until his game with Bacrot, and he told me that it was time to put chess aside, stop our heavy conversation, and do “the most inane thing possible, something that requires no thinking whatsoever.” We didn’t have much to work with. The television in our room received only two English-language stations, and the first, CNN International, was hardly comforting. Paul Johnson Jr., an American engineer, had been kidnapped in Saudi Arabia, and CNN was replaying footage of his distraught wife pleading with his captors not to behead him.

  Luckily, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was on the other channel. We watched as Lieutenant Uhura told Kirk, “Captain, I’m getting something on the distress channel.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “she’s picking up Bacrot’s cries of anguish as you crush him.”

  Pascal laughed.

  A few minutes later Kirk was being philosophical: “Admiral, how we deal with death is just as important as how we deal with life.”

  “He’s speaking to you, Pascal,” I said. “He’s telling you that if you reach a bad position, you must not cave in.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, and he pantomimed a sizzling tennis serve.

  “Strike!” I shouted.

  Pascal looked deflated. “Shit! If you thought that was baseball, I’m in trouble.”

  “No, no. I meant to say, ‘Ace.’ I got the word wrong. Sports isn’t my thing.”

  He served again.

  “Ace!” I shouted.

  “Better!” he said. “Now I’m going to beat the punk.”

  With fifteen minutes to go, he changed into dark trousers and a striped shirt, put aside the tie (“It’s too constricting”), and made sure the long tails of the shirt were not tucked in.6Tails out was the fashion trend, and so there was little chance FIDE was going to fine him for dressing inappropriately. “Some chess players are superstitious about what they wear,” Pascal said. “I couldn�
�t care less. Irina always gives me this you’re too-rational speech. She’s superstitious about her shirt, her jacket, the pen she uses.” With ten minutes left, Pascal blasted Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on my computer, pretended to sink a basket, and aced another serve.

  “What’s Bacrot doing now?” I asked.

  “Listening to the ‘Marseillaise,’” he said, “and puffing on a Gauloise.”

  Pascal timed his exit from the hotel room so that he arrived at the chessboard just as the game was set to begin. He shook hands with Bacrot, who had swapped his all-white outfit for a dark jacket and blue dress shirt. The two men said nothing to each other. Pascal started the clock, and Bacrot quickly moved his king pawn forward two squares. Unlike our hotel room, the tournament hall was air-conditioned. For the first ten minutes, people were allowed to approach the players and take photographs. There were only three other journalists covering the first round, which I thought was not surprising, given my visa problems. There were no spectators at all. (Gadhafi, I learned later, is against spectating in many arenas, not just chess, and believes people should be participating in sports rather than watching them.) The other observers were FIDE officials, the players’ seconds and family members, and four information officers, who did not watch the players but seemed to follow every move of mine, instead. After the photo opportunity, the tournament arbiters instructed us to retreat to a roped-off area where it was not possible for me to see the entire position on Pascal’s board. Bacrot sat there impassively, while the Canadian champion’s knees wobbled under the table.

  I left the playing area and, shadowed by two information officers, went to the press room and connected my computer to the Internet, where I could follow Pascal’s game. When my screensaver came on—it was a picture of my five-year-old—one of the officers said, smiling, “That must be your boy. He looks very happy.” In any other situation I would have taken the comment as a friendly one, but here I couldn’t tell if it masked something sinister. The State Department had warned me that all my e-mail would be read, and with the two officers standing behind me, they didn’t have to resort to high-tech snooping. I wrote Ann an e-mail about how I missed her and added some platitudes for public consumption about how splendidly organized the tournament was.

  Pascal had put a copy of his opening preparation on my computer. It was there so that he’d have a backup in case his laptop malfunctioned. While the game was in progress, I looked at the lines he had studied. That way I’d know when the game diverged from his home preparation and he was on his own. Pascal had warned me to guard my computer carefully in the press room. Players had been known to steal each other’s analysis by slipping an external memory stick into a USB port.

  I looked at the World Championship Web site and saw the position that Pascal and Bacrot had reached after Black’s tenth move. It was the Sveshnikov sideline that he and Jack had prepared, and so far the position was one that they had investigated in depth. Now, Bacrot, on his eleventh move, could greedily grab Pascal’s queen pawn, but in return Pascal would be able to chase the White queen and develop quickly. Bacrot shunned the indigestible pawn and sank a knight on the sixth rank, in the heart of Pascal’s position, where it threatened a Black rook. All this Pascal had analyzed before, and he quietly shifted the rook one square so that it was safe. I did a search on the 2.2 million games in ChessBase and found that the position had previously been reached 136 times. Pascal now expected Bacrot, on his twelfth move, to stick a knight on the weak d5 square but instead he made a quiet bishop move, which Pascal and Jack had not considered. The move appeared toothless, though, and I saw in ChessBase that it had been played only once before, on December 14, 1978, in a forty-eight-move draw between Viktor Kupreichik and Evgeny Mochalov in the Sokolsky Memorial Tournament in Minsk. Pascal found an appropriate continuation and by the fourteenth move had achieved a dynamic position that was fully equal—a respectable accomplishment with the Black pieces against a player of Bacrot’s strength.

  I returned to the tournament hall. It was Bacrot’s move, and Pascal had left his seat to walk around and examine other games—a sure sign that he was satisfied with his position.

  I went back to the press room and looked again at his game on the Web. The position was equal, but eventually Pascal went astray, playing too passively before making an intemperate queen move. Bacrot, after pushing Pascal’s queen around, was able to build up a kingside attack. The Frenchman gobbled two pawns in the process, and the Canadian had to swap queens to deflect the mating attack. But the endgame with two pawns down was hopeless.

  I returned to the tournament hall for the finale. Pascal resigned on the fifty-first move, having played for a little more than three hours. He and Bacrot shook hands and placed the kings in a prescribed way in the center of the board to indicate that White had won the game. Pascal came over to me. He was fairly calm. “You know the king placement convention?” he said. “When the kings are placed on e4 and d5, White has won. And when they are placed on d4 and e5, Black has won.”

  I thought I knew the convention but was confused by his explanation. “You don’t have to refer to the squares’ algebraic coordinates,” I said. “If White wins, the kings are placed on the two centermost white squares and after a Black victory, they are placed on the two centermost black squares.”

  Pascal was dumbfounded. “Stupid! I can’t believe I never thought of that,” he said. “That’s why you went to Harvard and I go to UMBC.”

  I was surprised that Pascal, who approached chess in terms of geometric patterns, had overlooked the color coordination, but what was more telling was how he put himself down because he had just lost to Bacrot. It was mild self-deprecation, though, compared to his usual barrage of abuses. All things considered, he seemed OK, if a bit despondent. He told me he needed to exorcize the game from his mind, so we returned to our room and set up a board. He went on a cathartic monologue as he replayed the moves for me.

  “I didn’t know how I’d feel in the World Championship,” he said, “but I wasn’t anxious. That was good. I was actually pretty confident after the opening. I knew Etienne hadn’t played it quite right. He played solidly but got nothing special. I was happy that I was able to get this position as Black against someone like him. He started to play e4 again. I’m sure he knows a ton of theory in certain lines—because he has all these people helping him prepare and tons of files and everything. But chess players have to remember things and there’s no way to put everything so quickly into one’s mind. It takes a while to assimilate everything. He claimed after the game that he had never faced this particular sideline before. But I’m sure he’s played similar stuff or faced it in blitz. Of course I hadn’t really played it either, but I had thought about it a lot. It was a good decision. I mean, he didn’t get anything with White. I can’t complain. Maybe after the opening I showed him too much respect by playing somewhat passively. I got angry with myself because I knew I made some bad moves.

  “My twenty-seventh move, the queen move, was obviously dumb. I was getting a bit low on time, but I had to go to the bathroom. I had maybe twenty-five minutes to make thirteen moves. I was not in time pressure yet, but it was getting there. Unfortunately the bathroom was not convenient—it was far. I just had to go. When I returned, I could tell from the clock that he had moved quickly and my clock was running the whole time I was away. It threw me off psychologically because I thought he was going to take a while, but he moved as soon as I left the board. Maybe it was a coincidence, maybe it wasn’t, but it wasn’t unethical. I was upset, and I reacted by playing too fast and that was my main error in the whole game…Qf4. I played it in only thirty seconds, and the move was no good. After that it was very hard for me to hold on. My position kept crumbling. I didn’t feel like I was outclassed. But of course I was really disappointed that I had messed up a good position by making a couple of careless moves. So my advice is watch out for bathroom breaks.” Pascal pushed the pieces off the board. “Someday, Paul, I
want to get to Bacrot’s level. On the next rating list, he’ll probably be ranked twelfth in the world.”

  OUR ROOM WAS TOO HOT IN THE LATE AFTERNOON SUN, SO WE DECIDED TO seek relief in the hotel’s outdoor pool, which was so heavily chlorinated that I assumed we could ignore the warning about insects. Swimming happens to be the only sport I’m good at—I used to do the crawl three miles a day in my teens and I’m a certified lifeguard—and swimming is the only athletic activity at which Pascal is not competent. At one point, while he was treading water, I flicked a nasty-looking beetle off his cheek. If he was going to get sick, it had better be after getting revenge on Bacrot.

  That evening, after dinner, Pascal wanted to talk instead of preparing. “I thought about the scenario where I lost the first game,” he said. “I can bounce back tomorrow. This guy is not invincible.” I nodded encouragingly.7

  The next morning Pascal seemed relaxed and confident. He spent a couple of hours reviewing the lines of the Scotch opening he hoped to play. An hour before the game, he turned off his laptop and we watched an Oprah special, “The Sexiest Man Alive,” in which housewives indulged their fantasies of getting it on with hunky builders and repairmen. “This is about as inane as it gets,” Pascal said contentedly. His air serves were stronger, and he was sinking imaginary three-point baskets. Today’s pregame music was “Let’s Get It Started” by Black Eyed Peas. Pascal changed into a dark blazer, like the one Bacrot had worn, and we timed our exit from the room so that we wouldn’t arrive a nanosecond too early. When we exited the elevator, Pascal realized that he had left his identification badge in the room. I waited while he retrieved it. The moment the elevator door closed behind him, two information officers descended on me. “We need you to come with us, Mr. Paul,” one of them said.

  This time I protested. I told them the game was about to start, and that I was waiting for my friend, the Canadian champion, so that I could accompany him to his board, and that I planned to take pictures during the first ten minutes when photography was allowed. The officers were annoyed and insisted I follow them. I refused, and we had a testy exchange. Nijar happened to walk by and told the officers to wait ten minutes before interrogating me. They reluctantly retreated, like dogs being pulled back on a leash. Nijar promised that my interview with Mohammed Gadhafi would take place soon. The elevator door opened, and Pascal, wearing his picture ID, emerged.