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

by Paul Hoffman

  “You’re sweating, Paul,” he said.

  “I’m hot,” I said. “I’ll change into a T-shirt after your game starts.” I walked with him to the board. I put my hand on his shoulder. “Play well,” I said, “and try to have fun.”

  The reality of course was that I was worried. I took a lot of pictures during the next ten minutes but screwed up the camera settings. The information officers were hovering in the doorway, and they watched me as I walked around the expansive playing hall. I was pleased to see that Bacrot had not resorted to the Petroff or the Philidor, but had allowed Pascal to play the Scotch. I wanted to watch Pascal win and I hoped the officers would not detain me for much of the game.

  When the photo session was over, the officers escorted me to a couch in a quiet corner of the hotel lobby. The chief officer got right to the point: “Mr. Paul, are you CIA?”

  I laughed and said, “If I were CIA, I’d be making a lot more money.”

  “Clever, Mr. Paul, but your behavior is suspicious.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You look around a lot, you notice small things, and you write them in your notebook.”

  “I’m writing a book about chess. It will include Pascal Charbonneau, the champion of Canada. I want to describe this hotel where he is playing. That’s why I write everything down.” I opened the notebook randomly to a page with a lot of chess notation. “Look,” I said. “It’s all about chess. These are the moves of the game Pascal played yesterday.” I started to wonder whether the Libyans might think the chess moves were some kind of code. I flipped to another page and showed them that I had recorded the slogans that appeared on signs around the tournament hall: “The House Belongs To Its Dweller,” “Committees Are Everywhere,” and “In Need Freedom Is Latent.”

  “Very, very interesting,” the man said. “Writers and intelligence agents are so similar. We observe the smallest things that other people miss. Watch yourself, Mr. Paul. I still don’t know why you’re here.”

  “Can I go?” I asked.

  “You’re always free to go, Mr. Paul,” he said, smiling. “Ours is a peace-loving country that respects the rights of individuals. I’m sure, Mr. Paul, you will get tired of the chess. Then we’d like to give you a private tour of the old city.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “But I’m sure I won’t get bored. I’m here to support my friend Pascal.”

  “Of course, Mr. Paul, that’s why you’re here,” he said. “How could I forget?”

  Did the Libyans really think I was there to find the missing nuclear equipment or pin down the Saudi assassination plot? Did they suspect that I meant Mohammed Gadhafi harm? That I might fire a poison dart at him from my pen? I had seen enough bad movies to know that espionage was a serious charge. The Libyan chess officials and Olympic committee members had always been kind to me, but they often gave me the same strange speech: “You know, Mr. Paul, that Libya and America are now friends. You believe that, Mr. Paul? You do share our view, Mr. Paul, that we are friends?” Whenever I reached into my money belt to pay for something, they’d ask me why I was wearing it. “Don’t you trust us, Mr. Paul?” they’d say. “We are a friendly, peaceful country.”

  After the latest round of questioning, I returned to the hotel room to change my shirt. I turned on CNN. President Bush was reacting to the beheading of the American engineer in Saudi Arabia, and I was spooked to hear him say my name: “The murder of Paul shows the evil nature of the enemy we face. These are barbaric people. There’s no justification whatsoever for his murder. And yet, they killed him in cold blood.”

  I was lonely and scared and missed Ann and Alex. At the same time I felt special being singled out by the Libyans and euphoric whenever I survived a round of questioning. I oscillated between fright, resigned acceptance of my fate, and total exhilaration. I had been sleeping less than I ever had. When Bush finished speaking, I retreated again into Seuss:

  Then he’ll land in a fish bowl.

  He’ll manage just fine.

  Don’t ask how he’ll manage.

  That’s his job. Not mine.

  I shut off the television and scanned The Tripoli Post, an English-language newspaper. The lead story said that Muammar Gadhafi regretted that Reagan had died before he could be brought to trial for crimes against Libyan children. Even as Gadhafi wanted the West to embrace him, he couldn’t suppress his kooky contrariness. Nor could his daughter Aicha, a lawyer in her late twenties, who announced she was joining Saddam Hussein’s legal defense team.

  I thought about the Bulgarian health-care workers. They had come to Libya to cure disease but were framed and put on death row. I did not want to end up a casualty of the Libyan justice system. Why had I worked so hard to visit a country that clearly didn’t want me? They had sealed their borders to American journalists, and I must have aroused suspicion when I switched the status of my visa from journalist to companion. I reminded myself that I had come to Tripoli for the chess, so I went downstairs to the press room to see how Pascal was faring.

  He had just played his eleventh move, a bold knight foray, and I thought he must be pleased to have reached a complex position. On his twelfth move he tried to trade dark-squared bishops and naturally expected Bacrot to take back with the queen-bishop pawn, resulting in awkward doubled pawns. But instead Bacrot ignored the fact that he could recapture Pascal’s dark-squared bishop and, short a piece, sent his own light-squared bishop on a kamikaze mission into Pascal’s territory. The light-squared cleric offered itself for capture by its own kind. But it was a pseudo-sacrifice, a Greek gift, a deflection strategy. Pascal’s light-squared bishop was busy defending a knight, and if the bishop moved to capture its counterpart, Bacrot’s all-powerful queen would swoop down on the now-undefended cavalry and at the same time deliver a discomfiting check to Pascal’s king and attack his rook.

  The offer of the bishop was an exquisitely beautiful move, the geometry of which Pascal would fully appreciate. The only problem was that it was made by the wrong player. The Canadian champion found a way to avoid immediate disaster, but ten moves later, faced with the certain loss of a piece, he resigned on Bacrot’s twenty-second move.

  PASCAL WAS PUNCHY WHEN I GREETED HIM. HE JACKET WAS ASKEW, AND his hair was messed up because, out of nervousness, he had repeatedly scratched his head during the game. We went back to our room for a postmortem.

  “I was happy that he played the Scotch,” Pascal said, pacing. “He surprised me when he took my e-pawn. He played it fast, after thirty seconds or a minute. The move didn’t worry me. I wasn’t sure whether he had prepared it or found it over the board.” Pascal adjusted his hair in the mirror. “I don’t have so much experience playing guys like him,” he added with characteristic understatement. Indeed, in North America, where Pascal played the majority of his tournaments, there was not a single player as good as Bacrot.

  “It’s hard to know the extent of his preparation,” Pascal continued. “I guess as I play more games against super GMs I’ll probably figure it out. He didn’t move instantly because he wanted to keep me guessing about whether his moves were part of his preparation. But when he’s spending no more than a minute per move and playing all this complicated stuff, you have to think they were prepared.” Pascal set up the position on my board after his eleventh move. “When I played Nb5,” he said, “I was happy but not completely happy. I thought it was my only real chance to do something interesting. But I also knew that my position was risky and might turn out badly because my kingside was a little weak.” Live by the sword, die by the sword—Pascal had mixed things up to give himself winning chances.

  “Then came the shocker,” he continued. “Bacrot banged out…Bh3 and I froze. I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m lost immediately.’ I sat there in a state of denial. The bishop move was so unusual, and he played it so quickly, that I suspected he had not found it at the board. I felt so dumb that I had fallen for some preparation trick. I couldn’t think straight or calculate, so for a moment I jus
t looked at him.8 He was expressionless, but I sensed he was smugly satisfied because he knew he had me. After a minute or so I calmed down and saw a way to avoid immediate defeat. I gave up a knight with check. But the problem was his position was still very active. He had winning chances because it was easy for me to go wrong. His moves were kind of obvious—…Rd8,…Ne5, the other knight to c6, push the pawn to b5. His attack played itself, but I had to struggle on each move to find the right defense. So it was not ideal. The end was a complete disaster, which is typical when you know that a draw is unacceptable. There were these two forcing lines that I calculated earlier to be draws, and I’m looking desperately for a way to avoid them. So without calculating I played another move, and I expected him to try to repeat the position and then I’d have time to think again and look for something better. But unfortunately my move lost immediately to a very simple response.”

  He shook his head sadly. “When the game is published in databases and people play through it without knowing that I had to win, they’re going to think my play was really dumb.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “That’s OK. It’s good the pain is over. We can go back to a better continent in two days. Not that I have anything against Africa—just this godforsaken place.”

  I told him about my latest run-in with the Libyan agents, and I said I felt badly that my troubles in Tripoli must have interfered with his concentration. “You played for the fucking World Championship,” I said. “You shouldn’t have to worry about agents kidnapping your roommate.”

  “I had a tough opponent,” he said. “I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. But I was ready. Although it looked like I was goofing off, I prepared for him more than for anybody ever. Our safety was more important to me than the championship. I would gladly have drunk scotch rather than have played the Scotch.” He hesitated a moment and looked away. “I’m actually ashamed, Paul. In the airport I chose my bags over my friend. That was mean.”

  WE UNWOUND BY WATCHING DUMB AND DUMBER on TELEVISION, WHICH Pascal renamed Dumb and Dumber and Me because of his loss to Bacrot. At 1:30 A.M. we went downstairs to the press room so that he could destroy grandmasters at blitz on ICC. He wasn’t the only one trying to recover his chess rhythm. Simutowe had also been knocked out of the World Championship and was also playing on ICC in the press room. The Zambian international master was not having an easy time online. “They don’t call them grand monsters for nothing,” he said, as he went down to defeat for the third time in a row. “They know how to make life bad for you. I played terribly in the championship.”

  “Me too,” Pascal said.

  “If you play stupid in one game, it’s difficult to bounce back,” Simutowe said, after his fourth loss on ICC.

  Even at this early hour, an information officer was still minding the press room. I had not noticed this particular agent before, and he apologized to me that yet another day had passed without my interviewing Mohammed Gadhafi. So there was a connection, I was now certain, between my interrogations and the canceled interviews. The agent promised that the interview would take place before I left Tripoli, but suggested I submit my questions in writing. I typed a list of softball questions, printed it out, and handed it to the agent.9

  I looked at Pascal’s computer screen to see how his games were going. I saw that he was doing much better than Simutowe. He had defeated a grandmaster four times at one-minute bullet chess. Pascal began the last game by shoving his rook pawn, a pointless first move favored by unschooled beginners like my son. “I get better positions,” he said, “by playing this shit instead of my normal openings.”

  “That’s because you’re a creative genius,” I said.

  “That’s because my openings suck.”

  Pascal stopped playing and looked in ChessBase to see where his Scotch game had departed from known theory. “Fuck it!” he said. “The ‘brilliant’ bishop move was not original!” Pascal discovered that it had already been played in Moscow in May 1989 by Yuri Balashov against Evgeny Sveshnikov, the leading Russian opening theoretician whose eponymous variation of the Sicilian was played by Pascal in his first game with Bacrot.

  For a moment Pascal was literally pulling out his hair, and he instant-messaged Irina on ICC: “I walked into a trap. Bacrot was prepared to something like move 40! But he disguised it by taking a minute and a half on a move here or there. So he made it look like he’s thinking on the spot and is a freaking genius.”

  As he finished his online conversation with Irina, he started chatting in French with a guest on ICC who said he was Bacrot. Top players who want to preserve their anonymity from the masses of chess fans, or practice openings without their fellow competitors observing, often sign on to ICC as guests rather than under their names or well-known pseudonyms.

  GUEST: Hi, it’s Etienne.

  Pascal looked around the room to see if Bacrot was using one of the other computers.

  CHARLATAN: Hi. Where are you?

  GUEST: I’m nearby. Some of us are playing chess.

  CHARLATAN: I don’t see you.

  GUEST: The players who are still up at this hour are either too serious or too reckless.

  CHARLATAN: You can’t get on the Internet from your hotel room so you must be downstairs in one of the offices.

  GUEST: Good guess. So do you give blow jobs?

  CHARLATAN: I will come downstairs and break you into 32 pieces.

  It was 2:30 A.M. and everything in the hotel—the dining room, the coffee shop, the business center, the pool, the gift shop—was closed and the hall lights were dimmed. Pascal was intent on peering into every office that wasn’t locked to ferret out Bacrot or his impersonator. All we found were empty desks, powered-down computers, and a few information officers dozing in the shadowy corners of hallways.

  PASCAL WAS STILL RESTLESS WHEN WE GOT BACK TO OUR ROOM. HE TOLD me he was bothered by the arrogance of many chess players. They all think they’re the brightest people on the planet, he said, just because they have command of “a little world of sixty-four squares.” He and Irina, he said, often disagreed about this. “She worships strong GMs—she thinks they’re super smart—and wants to spend time with them at tournaments,” he said. “I find them shallow and annoying. I want to play chess with them and get the hell out of there.”

  “What about Simutowe?” I said. “You seemed like you were buddies with him.”

  “No way,” Pascal snorted. “I was just being polite back there. He’s a jerk. He’s not fun to play against because he’ll do things like sit there and make this big production of eating a banana or peeling grapes and get the pieces all sticky. And once he cheated me, when UMBC played Texas.”10 Pascal had Black and reached a position in which he was only a tiny bit worse. Soon he was able to equalize and start outplaying Simutowe when the Zambian got into time pressure. They were playing with a digital clock with a fancy setting that displayed not only the time remaining but the number of moves played. The time control was two hours for the first forty moves and an extra hour for the rest of the game.

  “I was almost winning,” Pascal said, “when I noticed around move thirty-four that the counter on the digital clock was off and said move thirty-five.” He summoned the arbiter and explained the situation. He told the arbiter that his opponent was in time pressure and expressed concern that Simutowe was going to be awarded the extra hour one move too early. The arbiter told Pascal and Simutowe to go by the move count on the score sheet, not on the clock. “We resumed play and his position gets worse,” Pascal recalled. “He plays move thirty-nine and has about ten seconds for move forty. He ends up running out of time and I call his flag, but he refuses to acknowledge that his flag fell. There were a couple of cameras filming us for a PBS documentary. My teammates and their opponents were all watching our game. So were the two coaches as well as a USCF official. Even with all these witnesses, he won’t concede. I said, Let’s call the arbiter, and he objected. ‘I didn’t flag,’ he said. ‘I’m just going to co
ntinue to play.’ His behavior was very improper. If a guy wants to call the arbiter, you can’t stop him. As I turn around to call him, Simutowe quietly makes a move and presses the clock. People on his own team were like, oh my God, what is he trying to pull off here? The camera saw it, and the USCF guy saw it. Simutowe’s own coach saw it and told him, Amon, come on, stop this. He didn’t really listen. We had to replay the entire game for the arbiter and he confirmed that Simutowe had flagged. Still Simutowe didn’t want to accept the loss, and he started telling my team that I was behaving badly, that I didn’t have good sportsmanship. He thought I was too aggressive. I definitely was angry.”

  Of course it is against the rules to make an extra move on the board after your flag has fallen. That way it appears, when the arbiter arrives, that you made forty moves and did not in fact lose on time. But I’m struck by the very public and flagrant way in which Simutowe continued playing after he had already lost. His rational side could not expect to get away with this behavior, any more than my father, if he had been thinking clearly, could have expected me to believe that Baskin-Robbins didn’t make milkshakes. Simutowe apparently found the loss to Pascal so painful that he could not accept that it had actually happened.

  IT WAS 3:30 A.M. IN TRIPOLI AND PASCAL STILL WAS NOT READY TO GO TO bed. He reiterated his general disgust for chess players and told me about the time he and Irina were hanging around at a European tournament with a grandmaster friend of hers. For a couple of hours the GM was posing trivia questions—When did Bismarck do such and such?—and Irina was trying to answer them. “I thought the discussion was stupid and couldn’t stand it,” he said. “But she thought he was just brilliant. Later I told her I was sure he had memorized the questions and answers. She was offended and insisted he knew all this stuff because he was cultured. The next time we ran into him, I noticed a CD-ROM of trivia questions sticking out of his briefcase.”