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

by Paul Hoffman

  He had faced a parade of Bacrots, members of the elite 2700-plus club. “These guys showed me respect,” Pascal said. “It was nice.” On Board One at the Olympiad in Calvia, Pascal managed to equalize as Black against world number two, Vishy Anand, who hadn’t lost a game with White in a year and a half. He got a good position, too, against world number eighteen, Teimour Radjabov, the Azerbaijani prodigy who had survived Kasparov’s tantrum in Linares. And Pascal achieved a decent game against Irina’s friend, the world number five, Ivanchuk.

  But in all three games Pascal had self-destructed by the end. He overlooked a combination and lost a piece to Anand. He let Radjabov escape with a draw when he should have murdered him. He collapsed in time pressure against Ivanchuk. For the past two years he’d needed only one strong result to achieve his grandmaster title, but that result continued to elude him. “As soon as one gets close to that wretched title,” British GM Tony Miles once said, “nerves begin to creep in and strange things happen.” Pascal played in tournaments in Italy, Spain, Iceland, Montreal, Philadelphia, and Edmonton and always came up disappointingly short.

  “Somehow I lose interest and my mind wanders,” he said.

  “Did you put in so much work equalizing against these monsters that you ran out of steam?”

  “No, it’s not a question of energy.”

  “OK. Were you so happy when you got good positions that you let down your guard?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t know why.”

  “There has to be an explanation. It’s now happened five or six times. It can’t just be coincidence.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t know.”

  “Did you get cocky? Overconfident once your position was good?”

  “No, I think I was bored. These tournaments are long. It’s hard for me to maintain my interest in chess for a couple of weeks.”

  “I know they’re long. And it’s good you’re not a chess automaton and value others things in life. But, Pascal, I don’t believe that in these particular games you were bored. How can you be bored playing super GMs? It’s not like you do it that often. What did you do today? ‘It was just an ordinary day, Paul. I got up, went to class, called Irina, played the world number two.’ You love winning. I’ve watched you smash GMs on the Internet. These guys decide you’re cheating and using a computer because their egos can’t handle how many times you’ve beaten them. You’re a great competitor. So why can’t you put these guys away? It would be boring to beat Radjabov?—No!”

  “I don’t know, Paul.”

  “I’m running out of possibilities. Maybe it’s because you’re afraid.”

  “You think that,” he said, softly.

  “I wonder. Maybe you’re holding back because you’re afraid that if you put yourself on the line, you could fail. And you don’t know how you’d deal with that.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “I don’t think you’ll fail. In fact, I’m sure you won’t. But worst of all would be for you to get to my age, look back, and wonder why you never tried. I don’t mean to sound harsh. But think about whether I’m onto something.”

  I WAS NOW FIVE YEARS INTO MY ADULT IMMERSION IN CHESS AND HAD curtailed my own playing—and my exploration of the latest wrinkles in the Dragon and the Slav—in order to write this book in earnest. I had just separated from Ann and was splitting my time between Woodstock and Brooklyn. In many ways, it was a melancholy and discouraging time, and the parallels between my own childhood and my son’s were impossible to ignore: Alex was visiting me on alternative weekends, just as I had split my time between my own father and mother—and I had taught Alex to play chess, at the same age that my dad had introduced me to the game. My book had prompted a great deal of reflection on my own difficult childhood, and I hated to see anything that resembled it in my son’s.

  In brighter moments, though, I could see that Ann and I had done many things differently from my parents—both before and after the end of our marriage. We were not in overt competition with our child, and we took care not to use him as a weapon against each other, as my parents had. In addition, we had welcomed my mother into our lives, so that even as the nuclear family fell apart, all three of us gained a loving parent.

  When Alex was one, and we moved full-time to Woodstock, in 2000, Ann and I made the decision to encourage my mother to join us there. I was nervous about how we’d get along—and so was she—given all the bad chemistry between us. But I wanted to give it a try because it still bothered me that my dad had died when things between us were at their worst. I didn’t want to lose my remaining parent under similar circumstances, even though I wasn’t sure how we were going to mend forty-five years of hard feelings.

  Before I was born, my parents had rented a summer cottage in Woodstock, where I was apparently conceived. I knew my mother had liked the physical beauty of the Catskills—she was a bird-watcher and a gardener—and the artistic temperament of the town’s inhabitants. And yet when I first invited her to visit my own place in Woodstock, she demurred. What if I run out of gas? she said. Fill the tank before you set out, I suggested. What if the car breaks down? she persisted. You have triple A, I said, and there’s only fifteen thousand miles on your car. Will there be a place to park when I get there? she wondered. No, Mom, I sarcastically replied, there’ll be no place to park—you’ll have to hike in, through the dense, bear-ridden woods, from ten miles away. I ordered my mom to come visit, and when she arrived, after a thoroughly uneventful ride, she had a thoroughly great time. In 2002, she bought a house of her own in the town next to Woodstock. And the next four years, before she died suddenly of a massive stroke, proved to be a tremendous gift.

  Once my mother and I started seeing each other more frequently, I came to realize that the negativity that had so bothered me as a child reflected not her disapproval of me but instead an incapacitating anxiety about engaging the world. In the three and a half decades since my parents had separated, I knew her to have gone on only one date, with a geriatric man who hobbled up to her Westport home on a walker. Even sadder and more bewildering was the fact that she had never had a single friend with whom she shared meals or went to the movies. She was smart and engaging, even if she didn’t have a high school diploma—a fact that had always made her self-conscious about her intelligence around my speed-reader father. She and Ann genuinely liked each other, and thanks to Ann’s gentle prodding, I’d join the two of them for tea, farm-stand outings, and country fairs.

  Alexander, of course, was the great connecting force in the lives of my mom, Ann, and me. He often stayed at her home overnight, and she would spend hours drawing pictures with him, playing hide-and-seek, and mending his teddy bears. My mother adored Alex, and she was able to be loving toward him in a way that she been unable to be with me.

  My mother and I were simultaneously developing our own satisfying closeness as I realized that, at this point in our lives, our roles were reversed: my job was to go out in the world and bring her along with me. When I suggested that she try anything new, like a Mexican restaurant, she would have her typical knee-jerk response: “No way! I might hate the food.” Instead of taking her reaction as a rejection of me, however, as I would have done in my youth, I would reply, “Yes, you might hate it!” and drag her there anyway. Soon she was cooking regularly with cilantro and making her own tacos from scratch.

  My writing of this book also drew us closer because it engendered many thoughtful conversations about our family history. As I struggled to come to terms with what couldn’t be undone in my past with my father, my relationship with my mother continued to grow and change. Her crippling worries, she said, had started early: when she was four and emigrated by ship from Poland to Ellis Island, she had dropped her favorite doll into the ocean. It had been a devastating experience; ever since, she had been afraid of water and she never really learned how to swim. She also revealed that during her childhood her own mother had been periodically institutionalized for paranoid schizophrenia.
r />   My friends couldn’t believe that my mother had ever been a recluse, because she was always so warm and animated when they saw her: it was as if she could relax and be herself because they had, in effect, been prescreened for her. When Pascal and I returned from Libya, my mother embraced him and called him “an angel” for getting me safely home. At moments like this, I realized how far my mom and I had come.

  CERTAINLY ALEX’S INTRODUCTION TO GAMES WAS RADICALLY DIFFERENT from mine. For one thing, he had world-class chess opponents from the start. For another, these adversaries had no investment in beating him. Pascal and Alex played their first chess game when Alex was five, and Pascal had come to visit us in Woodstock. Pascal opened by pushing his king pawn two squares, and Alex said, “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Why not?” Pascal said.

  “Someone could get him,” Alex replied, as he picked up Pascal’s king pawn and put it back on its original square.

  “I’ll think I’ll play it,” he said, and repeated the move.

  “I really wouldn’t. I don’t want anything to happen to him.”

  “It’s OK,” Pascal said, laughing. “I’ve done fine with this move before.”

  As it happened, Pascal had to work hard to “lose” the game. Alex kept all of his pieces close to himself, out of fear that Pascal would capture them if they ventured too far from their home squares. Even when Pascal purposely left his queen en prise, Alex failed to take it for a few moves: at first my son didn’t see that he could capture the queen, and then he still hesitated because he thought Pascal was trying to trick him.

  When Alex finally won, though, he was beside himself. The next day, when the two of us went into the hamlet of Woodstock to get hot chocolate, he corralled strangers on the street and proudly told them that he had beaten the Canadian champion. Alex decided then that he and I were great players. “You can beat Garry Kasparov,” he said. “Right, Dad?” His chess games as a five-year-old also included fumbling efforts against two U.S. women’s champions, Jennifer and Irina, with the French champion, Joel Lautier, looking on and kibitzing. But Alex was not starstruck by his celebrated opponents—chess held much less interest for him than soccer, drawing, and Jedi Knights. For him, the game’s chief appeal was that I liked it. For my birthday he drew me a picture of a dragon and a cow playing chess.

  Pascal’s caution about competing with those close to him is certainly borne out by my son’s behavior, though. Alex may be casual about chess, but he doesn’t like it when he loses at it—or at any other game. Whenever Pascal or I was about to win, he would change the rules on us. One afternoon, he and Pascal were kicking around a soccer ball on the deck of my Woodstock house, using commandeered Adirondack chairs as makeshift goalposts. When Pascal scored a goal, Alex discounted it, saying that the object of the game was to get the ball around the outside of the goalposts, not through them.

  Alex liked to race from the door of the house to our car. “First one to touch the car wins,” he’d say. If I didn’t try, he wasn’t happy. But if I ran ahead and reached the car first, he’d be upset and say, “Actually, Dad, the second person to touch it wins.” Nor did I find the pablum “It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game…” particularly effective. Finally, my solution was to tell him that the two of us were a team racing against imaginary heffalump-like creatures called the Oodles and that he and I were both winners if we arrived at the car before the Oodles did. Now he was calmer no matter which of us got there first, but he still always had to know if we had indeed defeated the Oodles.

  It makes me uncomfortable to compete with Alex, or any child, because it reminds me of my tense relationship with my own father. Once, improbably, I agreed to fill in for one of the assistant coaches at Alex’s soccer scrimmage. Roberto, the chief coach and an Italian Air Force pilot, divided the five-year-olds into two groups, so that they could shoot practice goals past us. Our styles of play drastically differed: Roberto blocked every shot his group took, as if he were playing for the World Cup, whereas I dove theatrically at every shot, pretending that I was trying to block it, but letting each ball slip through for a goal. Alex, who was in Roberto’s group, was visibly frustrated after repeatedly failing to score on Roberto. He also kept looking over his shoulder to see how I was faring. After the drill, he came over and whispered, so as not to embarrass me in front of the other five-year-olds, “Dad, you’re not very good at soccer.”

  Some months later it occurred to him that perhaps I had let the kids score, and he started wondering whether I was letting him win at chess, too—like the time he checkmated me in just two moves (in the very way that had impressed the owner of Britannica in my job interview). Alex didn’t like that I was being easy on him at chess and asked me to go all out. But he also wasn’t happy when I beat him quickly.

  “Why do I always have to lose to you?” he asked.

  “Because I’ve spent way too much time playing chess to get as good as I am.”

  “Can you beat Pascal?”

  “No.”

  “I think you can.”

  “Not a chance. But I’m glad you believe in me, Alex.”

  “When will I beat you?”

  “It takes a while to master the game.”

  “I don’t want to wait a while. You’re beating me too much. But I don’t want you to lose to me on purpose.”

  Our solution, arrived at after much discussion, was to play chess games that we aborted long before I came close to mating him. The games were more of a lesson than a competition because we discussed the positions we reached and he was free to retract his moves. “This is fun,” Alex said. “Teach me more tricks! I want to fork all of my friends.”

  Alex is a quick learner, and his curiosity and mastery provide a nice counterbalance to the frustrations of game playing. I remember when Alex returned from a medical appointment at the age of three, and I asked him how it went.

  “She used the otoscope,” he said.

  “The what-a-scope?”

  “The otoscope.” Later Ann explained to me that the doctor had looked in his ears through an instrument and Alex had asked what it was called.

  I was delighted that he had used a word I didn’t know. I proudly told everyone—just as Alex had done when he had “defeated” Pascal at chess. Later it sadly occurred to me that if I had employed a word at the age of three—or thirteen or twenty-three—with which my father was unfamiliar, he would have felt upstaged and told no one.

  Thankfully, my relationship with Alex is different: I find that I love it when he does well. I’m happy that he has talent in areas, like soccer, where I don’t. And I’m pleased that he has his mother’s gift for chatting up strangers and feeling comfortable in any social situation; certainly it is preferable to my loner behavior at parties of hovering awkwardly near the chips and salsa.

  CHESS HAS BEEN MORE REWARDING THE SECOND TIME AROUND. I FINALLY made real friends in the chess world in a way that I never had in my youth. Pascal and Jennifer are kind. They’re honest. And they’re a lot of fun. However bizarre and untrustworthy other inhabitants of this world may be, I know I can count on them. And yet, not coincidentally, their commitment to this world is conditional: they have important things besides chess going on in their lives. Sometimes, however, our common love of the game brings the three of us together at chess events.

  One summer day in 2005, we all got to work together, providing live commentary in the ABC Studios in Times Square for a sixty-minute game between the twenty-six-year-old FIDE world champion Rustam Kasimdzhanov from Uzbekistan and the Accoona chess-playing computer program. Kasimdzhanov had never been to New York before, and Pascal and I went to meet him at his midtown hotel the night before the game. “Where’s Jennifer?” he asked. “Isn’t she coming to dinner, too?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but remember, I was going to interview you first.” Joel Lautier had told me that Kasimdzhanov’s nickname was Fucking Genius, because of the range of his knowledge of literature, poetry, and
other non-chess subjects. I asked Kasimdzhanov various questions about his chess playing, and, although he answered me, he seemed more interested in talking about women. Maybe this was his idea of what American men spoke about whenever they got together. He wanted to know what the age of consent was in the United States and whether his hotel was in the right neighborhood for meeting women.

  We took F.G. to a fancy Korean restaurant in SoHo, where Jennifer joined us. Her presence did not stop him from continuing to talk incessantly about women. If I had been alone with him, I would have felt a bit alienated, but since Kasimdzhanov was effectively outnumbered, the situation was instead quite humorous. The three of us listened, exchanged pointed glances, and started on a bottle of wine.

  “I don’t need to drink,” Kasimdzhanov said. “My friends say that I normally act the way other people do when they’re drunk.”

  One of our appetizers was a pancake stuffed with seafood that came with a bowl of wickedly hot sauce. Kasimdzhanov dabbed cautiously at the sauce. “Do you think it’s really spicy?” he asked.

  “It is,” I replied. “But it’s good.”

  “I’m not so sure I should try it. What if I don’t like it?”

  Jennifer, who was put off by Kasimdzhanov’s preoccupation with sex, saw an opening to rib him. “Who do you think makes a better lover?” she asked. “Someone who likes spicy food or someone who prefers bland?” Kasimdzhanov looked confused, while I proceeded to smother my portion of pancake with hot sauce.