by Paul Hoffman
Short thought that he had recovered his composure by the fifth game, in which he played the Black side of a Nimzo-Indian, but in the middle of the game he suddenly felt “this wave of complete exhaustion. It was obvious that this thing had stressed me beyond belief. The game continued. I was completely crushed and mated like an idiot. Rustam Kamsky succeeded. He won the game just as surely as if he had made the mating move himself. At the very minimum, after this death threat Gata should have forfeited a game. Other sports have rules about such things. In cricket, if the fans of one side go on a riot, it’s just declared lost for them. The fans can set fire to the stands. They can throw bottles. But tough: checkmate. In chess we don’t have a framework for dealing with this. So I lost the match badly. It was easy for Gata to be gentlemanly at the board when there was someone standing behind him with a baseball bat.”
Before the match, Kasparov had given Short some unsolicited advice. “If you ever doubted that Garry Kasparov is a genius,” Short told me, “listen to this. He offered to set me up with two bodyguards. He said that they should visit Rustam and tell him that if he ever stepped within ten meters of me, he was dead. I seriously considered the advice because of all of the nasty things I had heard about the Kamskys, but I turned him down because it seemed too extreme. I could have afforded the bodyguards. It was an investment I clearly should have made.”
(Gata Kamsky would not let me interview him. I approached him directly and through Pascal. “I have absolutely no desire to have anything to do in the book that even mentions the name of Nigel Short,” Kamsky e-mailed me. In 1996, Kamsky had pretty much mysteriously dropped out of chess for the next eight years and attended college and law school. In June 2004, he reentered the chess world by showing up at the Marshall to play in the New York Masters. His initial tournament results were mixed, but much of his old form returned and, in April 2007, he was ranked number nineteen in the world and had qualified to represent the United States in the 2007 World Championship cycle. In the first match of the cycle, he trounced Pascal’s nemesis, Etienne Bacrot. Kamsky’s father—who used to berate him in public when he lost—no longer accompanies him to tournaments. Kamsky’s behavior now, in this, his second chess life, is unimpeachable.)
SHORT HAD LOST TO KAMSKY BECAUSE HE FELT EMASCULATED BY KAMSKY’S behavior off the board. I wondered if Short had ever lost a game for the reverse reason: that he was too cocksure and discounted his opponent prematurely. (One of Bobby Fischer’s seconds, grandmaster Larry Evans, said that the American champion’s one flaw was overconfidence, which “sometimes causes him to forget his opponents are also capable of finding good moves.”) Short denied that he was ever guilty of this, but told me that one of his most important and hardest lessons was losing in the 1988 Candidates to Jonathan Speelman, his friend and neighbor.
Short was ranked third in the world then, and Speelman was fifth, and so West Hampstead, their neighborhood in London, had 40 percent of the world’s top five players. “What I learned from the match is that I had underestimated the psychological aspect of chess,” Short said. “I told you earlier that people tend to overestimate the psychological dimensions—and I still maintain that. But here we were of similar strength—I was better but the difference was not immense. I found his play very confusing. I was not ready for the rough and tumble.”
At the time Short was training with British GM John Nunn, who had been a triple gold medalist in the Thessaloníki Chess Olympiad in 1984. “He was a very good second for me in many respects,” Short said. “I had a high opinion of him as a player. He had an invincible record in the Olympiad, he was a killer on the White side of the Sicilian, he was very well prepared in the openings, and he was a great tactician. But he has an algorithmic personality, and algorithmic personalities aren’t good at psychology. His approach to chess was here is this opening system, and you look for a novelty within the system. It was sort of a technical approach. He was very, very good about analyzing positions on the board. Yet he was pretty useless when it came to thinking about who Speelman was, how the match might turn out, what to do if it should twist in a different way. I was too naive then in my approach to matches. We spent too much time patching holes in my opening repertoire as opposed to thinking about Speelman and figuring out how he would approach the match and how we should counter his approach.”
In the early 1980s, Speelman, a tall vegetarian whose nickname was the “Gentle Giant,” was not among the chess world’s elite. He suffered from an eye disease that was causing him to go blind.
Staring at the board for hours at a time gave him terrible headaches. His doctors forbade him from reading books or engaging in activities that would excessively strain his eyes. Jonathan languished in limbo, trapped in an ever-deepening darkness. Unable to study at length and handicapped by his eye disorders, his play was strictly hit or miss. Success in a given tournament depended on how well his eyes felt.
Once ophthalmologists were able to arrest his condition through surgery, the headaches disappeared, his rating shot up above 2600, and he decimated Yasser Seirawan 4–1 in a 1986 match.
Speelman was in peak form when he faced Short in 1988. “Jonathan had these two switches,” Short recalled. “There’s his vegetarian switch which was usually on—he played quiet moves, safe but a little bit dull. I remembered a magazine mocked him for not playing full-bloodied carnivore openings; it called one of his innocuous openings the Anemic Parsnip. Then he had a manic switch, where he created complete chaos. He had almost nothing in between dull and chaos. The intelligence on his part was deciding when to flip which switch. I didn’t cope with the changeups. I simply didn’t cope. I would expect a slow positional encounter and then he’d suddenly go manic on me.” Short lost, 31?2–11?2.
In the 1991 Candidates cycle, Short faced Speelman again for eight games en route to Karpov and Kasparov, and this time he had studied his opponent. “I exposed certain weaknesses in Jon’s preparation,” said Short. “I aimed at his weaknesses where in the first match I had worked on my systems. But Jon still gave me problems.” Short won the first game on the Black side of the Grünfeld, but after five games was a full point behind. He was in danger of being eliminated in the next game, and even if he won two games in a row, the best he could do was tie the match and send it into rapid playoff games.
“This was the same dismal situation I had faced in our first match,” Short recalled. “I was very, very depressed. There was a free day before the sixth game and I got up incredibly late. I didn’t want to get dressed. I thought, here we go again three years later—history is repeating itself. Rhea said, Come on let’s go out and watch a film, and I said I can’t be bothered. I was moping, just wallowing in self-pity. She told me to pull myself together and stop feeling sorry for myself. She had a Time Out and started reading the titles of the films in London and asked me to choose. And I said no, no, no to title after title. Then she came to one—Reversal of Fortune. Yes, that’s the one we’re going to see. It made a total difference to my mood. I’m not really a superstitious person, but sometimes you start to think: maybe there is a God.
“The next day I played a very good game. I employed the Four Knights. It was an interesting choice because people think of this old opening as very drawish. Grandmasters often used it as a means of agreeing to a quick draw, but of course I was looking for more. In the previous match in this situation, I played sharply—he chose the Pirc Defense and I responded with the Austrian Attack—and the crisis in the game came early. This time I wanted to delay the crisis because I thought slow tension would be difficult for Jon, and the Four Knights fit the bill.
“When you feel you’re under pressure—it could be real pressure on the board or self-imposed pressure, as Jon’s was, because he was eager to put me away and win the match—it’s very good when the crisis comes quickly. Either you solve the crisis or you don’t. The most unpleasant thing is a sort of steady building of the tension. You start off the game feeling tense and it just gets worse and worse
and worse. And when the crisis finally comes, you’ll often be in no condition to meet it. I think I played well, psychologically well. I didn’t try to force anything out of the opening. Just got a reasonable position and kept playing from there. I won the game—it was the comeback moment—and the momentum in the match changed dramatically.” The next game was a draw, and then Short won in overtime, at the rapid time control of forty-five minutes a game.
Six years later, in 1997, another movie helped Short at a defining moment. He was playing for the World Championship in Groningen. The format was a series of two-game knockout matches. After disposing of Korchnoi and Andrei Sokolov, he faced Alexander Beliavsky. “We played a wild, fascinating game with tremendous tension,” Short said. “First I sacrificed a piece and got a lot of play. But rather than trying to hold the material, he started attacking me and in the end I succumbed to the onslaught. I lost the game and was facing imminent elimination if I couldn’t win the next day. [Russian GM and fellow cricket fan] Peter Svidler said, ‘Come on Nige, let’s see a film.’ I wasn’t in a great mood, but I went with him anyway into town. We saw the Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies. And I thought, yes. Tomorrow never dies. This is it. I’m not going down tomorrow. Sure enough, I beat him in a great game and then I crushed him in overtime.
“So I might be right to be a little superstitious. The logical part of my brain says this is complete bollocks. But actually, so what? It doesn’t matter as long as it helps you at that time. Karpov was famous for not washing his hair when he was on a winning streak. Unfortunately, he had long tournaments where he never lost a game—the guy got greasy. The most opportunistic thing I ever did was to get religion. I’m basically an atheist—I like to tell Christians I’m a Satanist—but in the middle of important matches I go to church.”
And what exactly does he pray for? At the time of the Karpov match, Short told a journalist: “At first I said, ‘Please, God, let me win this game,’ but I realized this was asking too much. So instead I asked, ‘God, please give me the strength to beat this shithead!’” Since the conversation with the Almighty didn’t hurt his cause, Short told me that at his next match, in El Escorial, Spain, against Timman, he visited the beautiful Cathedral of the Monastery of Philip II every day and prayed for victory.
I’M NOT A SUPERSTITIOUS PERSON, BUT I DO FIND MYSELF SEIZING ON ANYTHING that could conceivably boost my confidence at chess. On an unseasonably cold spring day, David Blaine was standing on top of a ten-story pillar in Manhattan’s Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library. After thirty-five hours on the twenty-two-inch-diameter column, and no sleep or food, he planned to jump and land on a pile of cardboard boxes below. He had been training for this stunt for more than a year, starting from a ten-foot pillar and gradually working his way up to eighty feet. Twenty-eight hours into the feat, I joined a crowd of people in the park who were cheering him on. David was wired with an earpiece and microphone, and I spoke to him for a few minutes via his assistant’s phone. He sounded mellow and he asked me how my chess was going. I told him I was playing in a tournament in a few hours, and he said he wished he was doing that. He told me that the hardest part about his stunt was keeping his legs from cramping. He needed his legs to work so that when thirty-five hours was up, he could jump out from the pole and not hit it as he fell. He was confident, he said, that he could do it.
I wished him luck and drove an hour and a half to a chess club in Middletown, New York. That night I was scheduled to play Sergio, the toughest player in the club, against whom I did not have a good record. He usually moved pretty fast and I’d get nervous as I fell behind on the clock. This time, after a few moves, I could feel myself getting anxious again, and I told myself that my response was ridiculous given that my friend had been standing now for thirty-two hours atop a freaking pole and was calmer than I was. David was putting his life at risk, I reminded myself, and I’m just playing a game. I settled down and played one of my better efforts, in which I dominated Sergio from the opening all the way through to the endgame. I won the game just fifteen minutes before David successfully leaped off the pole and was taken away, dazed, to a hospital and pronounced in good health.
SHORT HAS A PENCHANT FOR POSTMORTEM ANALYSIS OF MORE THAN JUST the moves he makes at the board. As he looks back over his career, he is disturbed by the madness in chess. “Have you concluded, Paul,” he said, laughing, “that we are all megalomaniacal psychopaths?”
“My wife doesn’t like it when I use the word all,” I responded.
“OK, Dr. Hoffman. Are 90 percent of us psychopaths?”
“My pocket Fritz is crunching the data right now. But that sounds about right.”
Short showed me a review of The Defense that he wrote for The Spectator in 2000 in which he confessed that “the subject matter is, for one who has spent his life immersed in studying the intricacies of chess sometimes to the detriment of normal existence, deeply unsettling.” Short believed that Nabokov was “uncannily prescient” and told the story of dining with Lembit Oll, “an Estonian grandmaster of an age and a psychiatric history not dissimilar to Luzhin’s.” Oll claimed that the strong Ukrainian grandmaster Vassily Ivanchuk, known as Chucky, a man of nervous disposition who rarely looked people in the eye or held a linear conversation, would never become world champion because he knew little about life. “We burst out laughing,” Short wrote,
a little cruelly perhaps—not that we disagreed with the view, but at the irony of the remark coming from one so deeply disturbed himself. Lembit looked bewildered.
While we were discussing this anecdote, Short’s son burst into the room once more and asked, “When a bomb goes off, how do you die? Does it crush you or does your body burst from the inside?”
“Nicholas, where do you get this stuff?” Short said.
“On TV. Military stuff. I have no school tomorrow.”
“Why’s that?”
“It’s Greek Independence Day.”
“I didn’t know that.” Nigel Short has lived in Athens since 1994, but six-year-old Nicholas, who attends an English school, already speaks more Greek than he does. I returned to his piece on the oddity of chess players:
Within the year, Oll would fling himself to death from his fourth-floor apartment. Luzhin did it from the third. By 1929, when Nabokov began writing the book, there were already ample examples of mentally ill chess players from whom to draw inspiration. Today one could produce encyclopedias of case-histories. It is all too real for this particular reviewer and, in my advanced age, pleasure and not enlightenment is what I seek.
As I sat there reading the review, Short was being true to the words he had written. He was engrossed once again in the World Chess Beauty Contest, searching for any new photos that had been posted since the last time he looked—fifteen minutes before.
12
ENDGAME: YOUR FINGER BEATS KASPAROV!
“The King immediately fell flat on his back and lay perfectly still!”
—LEWIS CARROLL,
Through the Looking Glass
ONE SATURDAY MORNING DURING THE SUMMER OF 2005, i met Pascal in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for lunch. I was glad that we had been thrown together in the cauldron of Tripoli—the scary craziness had accelerated our friendship, and in the year since, he had become very important to my own chess playing. Whenever I didn’t understand a position, I could turn to him to get an answer. It was immensely satisfying to know, while I was enmeshed in bewildering complications at the chessboard, that there would be clarity and wisdom later that day. I could also talk to him unguardedly about my chess neuroses because he had shared his own mental demons. It was comforting to have a good friend in the lonely and often hostile world of chess: someone who understood firsthand that even at the amateur level the game was as stressful as it was singularly rewarding; someone who appreciated those occasions when I did something beautiful or crafty at the chessboard.
It was also fun having a friendship that crossed generations. Once I got a panicked call fro
m him at 3:00 A.M. when he needed help writing his first résumé, for a possible job on Wall Street. I liked that he had most of his life in front of him, but also found it comforting that he was so absentminded—leaving shirts, for instance, in his refrigerator—which made me more tolerant of my frequent misplacing of my keys and wallet.1
I was still sometimes tempted to challenge Pascal to a blitz game, but I knew he’d refuse. Some time ago I’d called him in a jitter just before an important tournament game. I was afraid my adversary was going to play a certain tedious variation of the French Defense, and I wanted to confirm that I knew how White could keep the position interesting. We both logged onto the Internet Chess Club—he signed on as Charlatan and I as Smothered-Mate—and we set up the starting French position on a board that we could both manipulate.2 We continued our conversation online, and I asked him to take Black so that I could test my understanding of White’s strategy. He made a move, then I made a move. He made another move and I responded. He said I was playing just fine. We each made another move, and then he instant-messaged me:
CHARLATAN: Are you trying to trick me? ©
SMOTHERED-MATE: What?
CHARLATAN: You want me to play a game!
SMOTHERED-MATE: Huh?
CHARLATAN: You’re trying to trick me into
playing you ©
“Everyone in the chess world thinks I’m their friend,” Pascal had told me in Tripoli, when I first broached the idea of playing him. “I have many superficial relationships with people in the chess world. But it’s hard to be friends because I compete with them. They want to kill me on the chessboard. I don’t have many close friends. I don’t want to risk what we have by introducing competition between us.”
On this particular day in New York, I was Pascal’s chess therapist, and we reviewed his tournament record since Libya. I had accompanied him and Irina to Toronto, where he successfully defended his title as Canadian champion in the face of the organizers’ unfairly giving him too many Blacks in a row. He had also weathered a petty political coup to oust him from the Canadian Olympiad team. As for the quality of his chess, he had purposely played more solidly, not striving for chaos in every game. He had forced himself to spend more time preparing openings and had seen the investment pay off.
