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

by Paul Hoffman

  “The person who prefers spicy, of course,” she said.

  “Do you eat bishops?” he asked, a sly reference to the title of a wacky newspaper interview with Maria Manakova, a thirty-year-old Russian master and self-proclaimed “sex specialist” who poses nude for the media and believes that the way to make chess as popular as poker is for women to exhibit their sexuality at the board.

  “It depends on the position, of course,” Jennifer cleverly responded. Her rejoinder played on the fact that on the chessboard bishops are preferable in open positions and knights in closed, bottled-up pawn structures.

  When the meal was over, we showed Kasimdzhanov around the East Village. Around 11 P.M., Pascal and I got into a cab. “Where are you going?” Kasimdzhanov asked.

  “To our hotel,” I said.

  “And where are you going, Jennifer?” he asked.

  “I’m going home.”

  “Then I should come with you and make the situation symmetric.” I was amused by this pickup line, uttered by one world-class player to another. Symmetry—when to follow it and when to break it—is a fundamental concept in chess. For someone who taught himself English from audiotapes, F.G. was pretty witty. But of course I was also pleased that Jennifer gently rebuffed him. She knew how to handle herself after years of experience in a sport overrun by sexually immature men.

  IF KASIMDZHANOV HAD READ THE SPRING 2004 ISSUE OF BUST MAGAZINE, whose tagline was “For Women with Something to Get Off Their Chest,” he would have known that he didn’t have a chance with Jennifer. “For the last couple of years,” the magazine stated, “Jennifer has only dated men who have nothing to do with chess.” It also quoted Jennifer as saying—in a bizarre stroke of coincidence, given Kasimdzhanov’s country of origin: “Chess guys are likely to be really competitive and obsessive. Plus, so much chess is played overseas. Do I really want to have a long-distance relationship with someone from Uzbekistan?”

  The piece then went on to use Jennifer’s description of the game to slyly suggest that perhaps chess made sex less necessary:

  “Sometimes when you reach the end of a variation, there’s a certain je ne sais quoi that feels so good,” she croons. “It’s hard to describe. It’s like trying to describe an orgasm—how do you do that?”

  This explanation of chess’s appeal has been made by many other writers, as well. George Steiner, in the pages of The New Yorker, compared sex unfavorably to the royal game: “The poets lie about orgasm. It is a small, chancy business, its particularities immediately effaced even from the most roseate memories, compared to the crescendo of triumph in chess, to the tide of light and release that races over mind and knotted body as the opponent’s king, inert in the fatal web one has spun, falls on the board.”

  Other writers have compared the pace of blitz chess to the rhythm of sexual excitement. “There is in, say, five-minute games, a pattern of moves progressing, faster and faster, building up toward a climax, marked by a time-scramble or a checkmate, signaling a sudden release of tension,” wrote David Spanier, a chess enthusiast and foreign correspondent for the London Times:

  The king is mated, the flag falls, the pieces are set up again and the process repeated. This is not sexual excitement per se; but the activity does have an edge of excitement to it which is emotionally very satisfying (if you win); and I suppose even if you lose, there is always the next game coming up, to get back into it, so to speak. Yes…it’s not sex, but more of a substitute for sex, in that having experienced the intensity of excitement again and again, a player’s emotions are spent, he or she) must feel to an extent exhausted, and certainly far less motivated to pursue what one might call normal social relations. I mean, after such a chess session who needs a routine evening of talk or drinks or TV?

  For me the most powerful similarity between sex and chess is that I can totally immerse myself in both of them, to the exclusion of the world around me. Time stops. For the few hours at the chessboard, the mundane and profound concerns of life thankfully fade away—they’ll be there when I’m done. I forget the misunderstanding I had with a friend. I forget how disturbed I am by the situation in Iraq. I forget that it has rained for five days straight.

  For some players chess also offers a break from disturbing events in their personal lives.3 For better or for worse, it’s not that extreme for me. When I had a scary result from a medical test before the National Open in Las Vegas in 2003, I could not concentrate on the chessboard and dropped out after losing three games. The only other time I withdrew in the middle of a tournament was the National Chess Congress in Philadelphia on the three days after Thanksgiving in 2004. My wife was dismayed that I was spending the long post-holiday weekend playing chess, and I was preoccupied during the games with wondering why she and I were growing apart.

  Yet I am amazed by the power that chess has to divert me from less serious matters. Few other activities offer me this degree of respite from everyday life.4 When my writing is going well, I can do it for eight-or ten-hour stretches without getting up to eat or visit the bathroom, and I have no idea how long I’ve been at the keyboard. The same is true of a good chess game. Of course, I’ve also had bad chess games, in which I was too self-conscious, too focused on the end result, on whether my rating would go up or down, and never relaxed enough to get completely into the game. Alas, there is bad sex, too. But when this intense focus is accompanied by inspired play and a win, it’s an extraordinary, addictive feeling.

  “When I’m absorbed in a chess game,” Jennifer told me, “I’m living completely in the present. I lose my sense of the past and the future, and I love that. Chess was the first thing I was really passionate about.” Playing a great game, sacrificing a piece for a wild attack, living on the edge between victory and defeat, setting a neat trap, seeing a beautiful combination—these send shivers through her, she said. “It’s very physical and primal,” she said. “After I found passion in chess, it was easier to find passion elsewhere, in relationships, in art, in good writing, in simply being alive.”

  ON THE SAME DAY I ACTED AS PASCAL’S CHESS THERAPIST, I SPENT THE AFTERNOON watching my friend Matt doing personalized performance art at a children’s street fair and block party in Chelsea. He sat holding a pad of paper and a rubber stamp that said “THE ADVENTURES OF YOUR FINGER!” A kid would sit down next to him, and Matt would instruct the kid to stamp a sheet of paper, and then he’d ask the kid what he liked to do. Some of the children were shy and tongue-tied, while others answered immediately. “I like ballet,” an eight-year-old said. So Matt wrote “YOUR FINGER STARS IN SWAN LAKE” in big letters at the top of the sheet. Next he drew a studly prince for the girl and next to the prince, a tutu without a body. He poked a small hole where the body should be and asked the girl to put her finger through the hole from the back of the sheet. With a thin Magic Marker, he drew a face on the tip of her finger. “I see,” she said, beaming. “The finger is me! I’m dancing!” I watched Matt draw “YOUR FINGER SCORES THE WINNING GOAL AT THE WORLD CUP” for a boy who had on a soccer uniform. One kid wanted his finger to commit suicide but his embarrassed father quickly nixed the idea and shepherded the boy away.

  Finally it was my turn. “You don’t need to share your fantasies,” Matt said. “I already know them.” He had me stamp the sheet, and he proceeded to draw a hairy Russian with very thick eyebrows who was huddled over a chessboard, his head in his hands, the Black king in front of him lying prone in resignation. “Dratski!” Matt wrote in a comic-strip thought bubble next to the Russian’s head. He then drew a White bishop and wrote “Triumph!” in the accompanying bubble. He poked a hole in the paper so that my finger was making the winning move with the bishop. He titled the drawing “YOUR FINGER BEATS KASPAROV!”

  THE MOST EXCITING CHESS GAME I EVER PLAYED AFTER BECOMING PASCAL’S unofficial student took place at a rapid tournament at the Marshall. By then Pascal had dissected many of my previous games and helped me understand how I disassembled after emerging from the opening with an adv
antage. Either I was too aggressive, prematurely launching an attack before putting all of my artillery in place, or I was too passive, scrambling to suppress the seeds of real and imagined counterplay by my opponent and not proceeding with a constructive plan of my own. There is an old saying in chess, “A bad plan is better than no plan at all,” and I was often guilty of the latter.

  I had hoped to do well at the Marshall and demonstrate that my chess had improved because of what Pascal had shown me. Then I slept fitfully the night before the tournament because I was putting too much pressure on myself to justify my adulthood absorption in the game. I was worried that if I didn’t do well Pascal would lose interest in helping me. On the day of the tournament, I was so tired and nervous that I decided at the last minute not to play. I called to tell Pascal because he was planning to come to the Marshall and watch. He assured me that he wouldn’t abandon me even if I lost all four games, and he told me, in so many words, to get my butt over there and play even if I was exhausted. I needed the push.

  My first-round opponent was Asa Hoffmann, a fixture on the New York chess scene. Hoffmann, a gaunt man with the physique of Abraham Lincoln, made his living by playing chess for money on street corners throughout the city and peddling antiquarian books he purchased at flea markets. He doesn’t like to be called a hustler, because he says he doesn’t do anything shady or underhanded to win. He doesn’t try to conceal his playing strength and pretend that he just learned the rules—he simply gives his marks time odds that appear too favorable to turn down. Hoffmann was a contemporary of Fischer’s—they were both born in 1943—and he loves to tell the story of beating Bobby at blitz, although he is quick to concede that the future world champion usually got the better of him.

  Hoffmann was rated close to 2400, two full rating classes higher than mine, and he had the advantage of playing White. He was known for employing offbeat openings, and in our game he chose the Pseudo Trompowsky, the double-queen pawn opening in which White immediately develops his dark-squared bishop.

  The game was an emotional roller-coaster for me. Delight!—Pascal and I had looked at the Pseudo Trompowsky when we were preparing for my encounter with Antoaneta Stefanova in Tripoli. Confidence!—I play my first three moves quickly. I boot his bishop with my rook pawn, I bolster my queen pawn with a fellow foot soldier, and I slide my queen so that it attacks a wing pawn that he left undefended when he developed the bishop early.

  Pascal and I had considered two ways for White to respond to my attack on his pawn. White can advance the pawn or defend it with his own queen. Disappointment!—Asa chooses a third way we hadn’t examined: he blocks my attack by placing a defended knight between my queen and his pawn. So much for the preparation—it is only the fourth move and I am already entirely on my own. I am disoriented for a moment and tell myself to remain calm and try to look objectively at the merits of his move. Self-deception!—I psych myself up by convincing myself that it would be robotic and boring for me if Asa followed my preparation. Instead I can now exercise my full creativity by charging into the unknown. Insight!—the knight move looks artificial to me, the steed relegated to the sidelines. Foresight!—I envisage at some point resuming my attack on his flank pawn by using one of my own pawns to kick his knight away. Over the next few moves I follow through with this plan and land the first blow by fracturing his queenside pawns. Then I invade his weakened queenside with heavy weapons, my two rooks and my queen. Joy!—he gives up material to try to ease the pressure.

  Fear!—I notice I have less time than he does on the clock. Soon I will have only five minutes to complete the game. I’m a pathetic blitz player and in time trouble I’ve been known to drop pieces and discard winning positions. Resignation!—I’m going to collapse yet again in time pressure. He starts blitzing out moves and frenetically hopping his knight around, hoping that I’ll overlook a devastating fork. Composure!—I tell myself that I’m not fated to screw up, that I don’t have to repeat the past, that I can do better this time. I tell myself to focus and make sure he has no tricky forks or bothersome checks. I tell myself not to be intimidated by the speed of his play. I tell myself that I am a champion and will beat this hustler. I tell myself to pick up the pace and not lose on time.

  Mischievous!—I set a sly little trap of my own. My bishop has been defending my king pawn. I move the bishop away so that the pawn is undefended. He looks at the delicious, helpless pawn, hesitates a few seconds, and then gobbles it with his own bishop. Panic!—I have only forty seconds left for the rest of the game. My hand is trembling. My throat is parched. I feel queasy. Stay focused, Paul. Sip some water. Take in air. Second thoughts!—Does my combination really work or did I have a hallucination and recklessly jettison a key pawn? Collect yourself. Don’t let this slip. Courage!—I enact my plan. My play is muscular now, my mind and hand working in tandem. My fingers are no longer jittery; they dart deftly across the board and purposefully move the pieces. I check his king. It can only move to one particular square. Domination!—I pick up my knight. It feels good in my hand. I like the ragged mane and the asymmetry of the overall shape. I lower the knight to the board and it makes a wonderful thump as it forks his king and bishop. He flinches as if I had poked him with a needle. He wearily moves his monarch away and—Zap!—I chomp his bishop.

  Elation! He tips his king over in resignation and shakes my hand. I’ve won the game with only twenty seconds to spare. I did not fall apart. I more than held my own. He’s the highest rated player I’ve beaten over the board. I am a fucking genius. Asa defeated Fischer and I crunched Asa, so does that make me better than Fischer? For one manic moment I wonder if I should give up writing and play chess full-time. I feel young inside. My joints may creak, but my brain whirls. Maybe I can set a world record as the oldest person to become a grandmaster. I am so exhilarated and distracted that I aimlessly play my three remaining games. I’m inattentive to the outcome. It doesn’t matter anymore. I’ve succeeded in playing a great game.

  The tournament ends after midnight. I am staying near the Marshall, at David Blaine’s. Pascal and Irina accompany me there so that we can analyze my victory. David is entertaining a few leggy dancers and supermodels, and they all stop what they’re doing and crowd around us for an hour as we replay the moves of my game. How sublime is this? A group of gorgeous women are watching me reenact my greatest chess triumph. Pascal praises my play, and he and Irina have a lively argument about whether I conducted the early middle game correctly. He approves of my take-no-prisoners, tactical approach, and she thinks I should have played more quietly.

  Later I find an ice cream shop that’s still open at 2:30 A.M. and order a chocolate milkshake. I go on the Internet and buy half a dozen chess books, including The Survival Guide to Rook Endings, Mastering the Najdorf, and Grandmaster Preparation. I already have five hundred unread chess books on my shelves, but these, I’m convinced, will finally reveal the secrets I need to understand the game. Of course that’s what I thought when I purchased the previous six, and the six before that, and the six before that.

  I feel incredibly competent tonight. It is rare for me to feel this strong. Nothing beats the feeling, though—not even Dexedrine—and I’m staying up a couple more hours to enjoy it while it lasts. I wish that feeling for everyone I love. I wish it especially for my son, Alex.

  DURING THE JANUARY 2006 BREAK AT UMBC, PASCAL ENTERED A NINE-ROUND international tournament in Chicago. At the end of eight rounds, he had five points (two wins, six draws, and zero losses). If, in the last and ninth round, Pascal defeated Rusudan Goletiani, the 2005 U.S. women’s champion (and the person who almost displaced Jennifer on the Olympiad team), he would finally earn the grandmaster title. Alex had given him a good-luck charm, a little alien Buddha figurine, to keep in his pocket in Chicago.

  Pascal spent a late night preparing for the game, concentrating on an offbeat line of the Sicilian that Goletiani had played twice before in earlier rounds. In his midnight preparation he had not discovered a way t
o wipe her off the board, but he did come up with a peculiar-looking queen shift that would give him a solid position and leave her with weak squares on the queenside.

  The next morning she repeated the line against him and he unveiled the queen move. As he subsequently probed her queenside during the middle game, her weaknesses multiplied, and by the nineteenth move he had a dominating position. But then gremlins interfered with his concentration, and he squandered much of his advantage with aimless wood-shifting.

  Goletiani then broke out of his chokehold and started recklessly lashing out at his king. Pascal renewed his focus and rebuffed her attack. After her thirty-eighth move, he told himself to stay calm. He tried to forget that the GM title was at stake and pretended that the position in front of him was not his own game but was from a book with the instructions “White to play and win.” His geometrical skills helped him. With a simple bishop move, he started to weave a mating net. She tried to distract him by queening a pawn, but his concentration was not jolted. He saw that by shifting his rook just one square—sometimes the simplest move is the best—he could force a sequence that would lead to checkmate.

  Pascal hesitated for a minute before moving the rook. Not to recheck his calculations—he knew that they were right—but to savor the moment. After two frustrating years of near-misses, the grandmaster title was only one move away.

  Irina was also playing in the tournament. Although she was short of time in her own game, she abandoned her board and went to watch the end of Pascal’s game. She witnessed him pick up the rook and make the decisive, title-winning move. “I was very happy Irina came over,” Pascal told me. He now knew that the woman he loved respected his play.5

  IN MY RECENT YEARS EMBEDDED IN THE WORLD OF CHESS, I’VE HAD MANY disturbing nights after tournament games that didn’t go as smoothly as my encounter with Asa Hoffmann. I’ve seen players cheat, and I’ve seen them cry and hurl clocks across the room. I’ve watched Pascal beat himself up after losing. I’ve played chess with the crazy dictator who is the commissar of the game. I’ve visited the emergency room after the greatest player in chess history was too competitive with me at dinner. And yet, despite my misadventures in the chess world, I still sometimes fantasize—just as I did when I was a kid—about being a world-class player instead of a competent amateur.