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

by Paul Hoffman

  In another life, I want to be a grandmaster. Not for the financial rewards, because they are few unless you’re a Karpov or a Kasparov. But for the unadulterated pleasure of peering further into the abyss of chess and glimpsing the game’s deeper beauty. I want to work magic with the chess pieces the way Morphy and Fischer did. I want to launch daring, unexpected attacks the way Jennifer and Pascal do. I want to achieve a small degree of immortality by the ingenious manner in which I coordinate my knights.

  ANNOTATIONS

  CHAPTER 1:The Insanity Defense

  1: I now prefer the definition in The Great Soviet Encyclopedia: “a sport masquerading as an art.”

  2: Perhaps the young retiree had been influenced by the familiar story of how world champion Alexander Alekhine (1892–1946) allegedly destroyed his hotel room furniture after a devastating loss. Allegedly is the operative word because chess players thrive on gossipy lore about the giants of the game, and this particular anecdote cannot be substantiated.

  In the main text of King’s Gambit, I tell my share of droll, irreverent, even prurient stories. With few exceptions, which are duly telegraphed by adjectives like fictional, apocryphal, and reported, the stories were witnessed by me or by those whom I interviewed. The historical anecdotes that I repeat in the main text were gleaned mostly from contemporary chess periodicals and newspaper columns, not secondary sources. In these footnotes, however, I allow myself the guilty liberty of sharing legendary yarns—flagging them as such, of course.

  3: In another mounting-the-table story, which is too amusing to ignore even if its truth is questionable, the great Aron Nimzowitsch (1886–1935) climbed on the chessboard, dropped to his knees, and shouted to the heavens, “Oh Lord, why did I have to lose to this idiot?”

  4: The illness alibi is old. In 1842, The Chess Player’s Chronicle advised, “Do not be alarmed about the state of your adversary’s health, when, after losing two or three games, he complains of having a bad headache, or of feeling very unwell. If he should win the next game, you will probably hear no more of this” [as quoted in Edward Winter, A Chess Omnibus, 2003: Russell Enterprises, p. 412].

  In 1848, a sponsor offered to fund a twenty-five-game match on the condition that “whatever may be the result, we hear nothing of indigestion, headache, indisposition, want of preparation, rest, or any other excuse, however ingenious, as palliative of defeat” [Morning Post, Thomas Beeby’s letter to Captain Kennedy, September 30, 1848, as reprinted in T. Beeby, An Account of the Late Chess Match Between Mr. Howard Staunton and Mr. Lowe, 1848, and quoted in A Chess Omnibus, p. 383].

  5: Religious leaders have had other reasons, too, for censoring chess. They feared it was associated with gambling. Islamic authorities banned figurine chess pieces because of Mohammed’s prohibition on humanlike images.

  6: The artistic element of chess, as opposed to the sporting aspect, is emphasized in the composition of chess problems (constructed positions in which, say, White is asked to force a mate in two moves), a pursuit that attracts only a small subset of chess players. Vladimir Nabokov’s most obscure chess book, Poems and Problems, was published in 1970. The book begins with fifty-three poems and concludes with eighteen chess problems, such as a mate-in-two—“a self-interference freak not for the conservative solver”—composed in Montreux in 1968. After discussing the poems in the introduction, Nabokov wrote, “Finally, there is the chess. I refuse to apologize for its inclusion. Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity. The composing of these ivory-and-ebony riddles is a comparatively rare gift and an extravagantly sterile occupation; but then all art is inutile, and divinely so, if compared to a number of more popular human endeavors. Problems are the poetry of chess, and its poetry, as all poetry, is subject to changing trends with various conflicts between old and new schools” [Vladimir Nabokov, Poems and Problems, 1970: McGraw-Hill, p. 15].

  7: Until recently there were questions about the identity of Fischer’s father. Because Fischer’s mother had studied medicine in Russia and was a political radical, the FBI had her under observation. Through the Freedom of Information Act, The Philadelphia Inquirer reviewed the government’s file on Fischer’s mother and discovered that his biological father was Jewish, too. Fischer’s mother, Regina Wender, was born in Switzerland in 1913 and raised in the United States. In the 1930s, she lived in Germany and then Moscow. She was married to Hans Gerhardt Fischer, a German biophysicist, and they had a daughter, Joan. When they tried to move to the United States in 1939, immigration officials would not let Hans Gerhardt into the country because he was an alleged Communist sympathizer. He went instead to Chile. In 1942, Regina had an affair with Paul Nemenyi, a Hungarian mathematician who worked on the Manhattan Project. Bobby Fischer was their child. Fischer never met Nemenyi, who died in 1952, when Fischer was nine.

  “In 1959 when Tal won the [World Championship] Candidates Tournament and treated the other participants, among them the 16-year-old Bobby Fischer, to a celebration dinner, his trainer Koblenz pronounced a toast. Thinking of how happy Tal’s deceased father would have been, he shouted: ‘To our fathers!’ The remark was innocent enough, ‘but,’ writes Koblenz, ‘you should have seen Fischer’s reaction! His eyes filled with tears, and he left at once.’ ‘Children who miss a parent become wolves,’ Fischer said later” [Tim Krabbe’s March 2003 column for AD-magazine as quoted in Hans Böhm and Kees Jongkind, Bobby Fischer: The Wandering King, 2003: BT Batsford, p. 24].

  8: In February 1942, the Vienna-born Zweig and his wife committed suicide in Brazil, to which they had emigrated, by way of England. (They had left Austria in 1935, in anticipation of the Nazi takeover.) Zweig, an admirer and a correspondent of Freud’s, was influenced by the psychoanalytic thinking of his times. When he killed himself, he left behind an autobiography, an incomplete essay on Balzac, and a novella called Schachnovelle, which was subsequently published in English as The Royal Game or, in the more faithful translation, Chess Story. The novella, which has undergone at least fifty-two printings, told the story of a heated chess match, casually arranged on a cruise ship, between world champion Mirko Czentovic and Dr. B, an Austrian attorney with Royalist sympathies who had taught himself to play mental chess in order to alleviate the isolation of solitary confinement by the Nazis.

  9: “The Russian title of this novel is Zashchita Luzhina, which means ‘the Luzhin Defense’ and refers to a chess defense supposedly invented by my creature, Grandmaster Luzhin: the name rhymes with ‘illusion’ if pronounced thickly enough to deepen the ‘u’ into ‘oo,’” Nabokov wrote in the foreword to the English edition of his novel about a World Championship challenger who descends into madness when he comes to regard his whole life as one big chess game. “I began writing it in the spring of 1929, at Le Boulou—a small spa in the Pyrenees Orientales where I was hunting butterflies—and finished it the same year in Berlin. I remember with special limpidity a sloping slab of rock, in the ulex-and ilex-clad hills, where the main thematic idea of the book first came to me. Some curious additional information might be given if I took myself more seriously” [Vladimir Nabokov, The Defense, 1970: Capricorn Books, p. 7]. Under Nabokov’s pen name, V. Sirin, Zashchita Luzhina was first published in Paris by the émigré Russian quarterly Sovremennye Zapiski and then in Berlin in 1930 by the émigré publishing house Slovo. It did not appear in English until 1964, as The Defense.

  10: Luzhin’s death can be seen as the death of “classical” chess. In the 1920s, a fierce debate raged in chess circles between the classicists who insisted that the only way to control the middle of the board was the time-honored approach of occupying it with pawns bolstered by pieces and the hypermodernists led by the Hungarian theorist Richard Réti who believed the center could also be controlled from afar by training distant pieces on the central squares. Luzhin was a classicist, and his chief opponent, the Italian star Turati (whose very name incorpora
tes Réti’s), was “a representative of the latest fashions in chess, [who] opened the game by moving up on the flanks, leaving the middle of the board unoccupied by Pawns but exercising a most dangerous influence on the center from the sides. Scorning the cozy safety of castling he strove to create the most unexpected and whimsical interrelations between his men.” Although Réti himself died young, at the age of forty in 1929, hypermodernism triumphed [The Defense, p. 96].

  11: Bill Wall’s Web site, http://us.share.geocities.com/wallw_99/trivia5.htm, includes an alphabetical list of chess player deaths. Omitting the suicidal jumpers, as well as Paul Morphy, Vera Menchik, Efim Bogoljubow, and Nicholas Rossolimo, whose deaths I discuss in the main text, the list reads: “Georgy Agzamov (1954–1986) died after falling down between two rocks at a beach. Alexander Alekhine (1892–1946) choked to death on a piece of meat…. Paolo Boi (1528–1598) was poisoned. José Capablanca (1888–1942) died of a stroke after watching a skittles game at the Manhattan Chess Club. Edgar Colle (1897–1932) died after an operation for a gastric ulcer. Ed Edmondson (1920–1982) had a heart attack while playing chess on the beach. Janos Flesch died in a car wreck in 1983. Nikolai Grigoriev (1895–1938) died after an operation for appendicitis. Alexander Ilyin-Genevsky (1894–1941) got hit by an artillery shell on a barge in Leningrad. Klaus Jung died at the front line in Germany. Salo Landau (1903–1944) died in a German concentration camp. Paul Leonhardt had a heart attack while playing chess at a chess club in 1934. George Mackenzie (1837–1891) died after an overdose of morphine. Frank Marshall (1877–1944) died of a heart attack after leaving a friend’s house in Jersey City…. Johannes Minckwitz (1843–1901) committed suicide by throwing himself in front of a train…. Julius Perlis died in a mountain climb in the Alps in 1913. Vladimir Petrov died in a Russian prison camp in 1945. Harry Pillsbury (1872–1906) died of syphilis. David Przepiorka died in a mass execution outside Warsaw in 1940…. Pierre Saint-Amant (1800–1872) died after falling from a horse and carriage. Carl Schlechter (1874–1918) died from pneumonia and starvation. Gideon Stahlberg died during the 1967 Leningrad International tournament. Howard Staunton (1810–1874) died of a heart attack while writing a chess book. Vladimir Simagin (1919–1968) died of a heart attack while playing in a chess tournament. Herman Steiner (1905–1955) died of a heart attack after a game in the California State Championship. Alexei Troitzky (1866–1942) died of starvation during the siege of Leningrad. Abe Turner (1924–1962) was stabbed nine times in the back by a fellow employee. Frederick Yates (1884–1932) died in his sleep from a leak in a faulty gas pipe connection. Alexander Zaitsev died of thrombosis after a minor operation to remedy a limp by having one leg lengthened. Johann Zukertort (1842–1888) died of a stroke while playing chess at a London coffee house.”

  12: Dutch grandmaster Jan Timman (1951–), after losing in the semifinals of the World Championship in 1985, was immediately ready to return to the board: “Even if I had to negotiate a roaring waterfall in a wooden tub with natives armed to the teeth below me, I will continue fighting” [Genna Sosonko, The Reliable Past, 2003: New in Chess, p. 148].

  13: Here are the USCF rating classes and the percentage of tournament players someone at the top of each class is better than: Master (2200 plus—99.22 percent), Expert (2000–2200—96.99 percent), Class A (1800–2000—92 percent), Class B (1600–1800—83.55 percent), Class C (1400–1600—73.25 percent), Class D (1200–1400—63.34 percent), Class E (1000–1200—54.11 percent), Class F (800–1000—44.1 percent), Class G (600–800—31.61 percent), Class H (400–600—19.04 percent), Class I (200–400—8.9 percent), Class J (0–200—5.33 percent).

  14: In the Fool’s Mate, White first advances his king-bishop pawn two squares. Black nudges his king pawn forward one square. White moves his king-knight pawn forward two squares (as only a duffer or someone with a death wish would do). And Black delivers checkmate by triumphantly sliding his queen to the side of the board.

  CHAPTER 2: Fathers and Sons

  1: I guess my father was never too keen with numbers. This headline from a 1966 Pageant falls apart if we are so unsporting as to dissect it. The U.S. population then was 197 million. If we eliminate the percentage of the population that was under nineteen and over sixty-five (on the assumption that few in those age brackets were sexually active daily), we are left with 120 million adults. Are we really to believe that half of them were having oral sex every night? If this was true, we should be even more nostalgic about the sixties.

  2: It is characteristic of the knight that it alternates colors as it moves. So if it is on a dark square, its next move must be to a light square. And if it is on a light square, it can only move to a dark square.

  3: Castling is the only time a player is allowed to move two pieces at once. It is a way of giving the king some protection by shifting it toward the corner of the board and of activating a rook. A player can castle if there are no pieces between his king and rook and neither the king nor rook has moved. Castling consists of moving the king two squares toward the rook and then moving the rook to the other side of the king. Castling can only happen if the king is not in check and the square it moves to and the square it moves across are not under enemy fire. En passant is a curious move that happens when a pawn initially advances two squares. If that puts the pawn next to an opposing pawn, the other side has the option of immediately capturing the pawn by acting as if it had moved only one square, not two. In other words, the en passant rule prevents one pawn from slipping unmolested past another.

  4: Many other champions could be added to the list of players who absorbed chess without being formally taught the rules. To wit, Arnold Sheldon Denker (1914–2005), the 1944 U.S. champion, who “learned the moves of chess by remote control. At the age of eight he had observed his older brothers playing, day in and day out. Although shunted aside by his elders, Denker had seen enough to know the rudiments” [Chess Life, August–September 1944]. Denker became the U.S. champion in 1944 with a winning percentage of 91 percent (fourteen wins, three draws, and zero losses), a record that stood for twenty years, until Bobby Fischer scored 100 percent in eleven games in the 1963–1964 championship.

  The great Frank Marshall (1877–1944), U.S. champion for twenty-seven years, also learned by observation: “In our home in Montreal, my father played chess in the evenings with his friends. One night, he asked me if I would like to play him a game. I suppose he had noticed that I had been watching and decided to try me out” [Frank Marshall, My Fifty Years of Chess, 1942: Chess Review, p. 3].

  5: Chess pieces come in all shapes and sizes, and can be made of wood, stone, metal, glass, or plastic. Serious players prefer the classic Staunton set. In 1944, Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), the legendary surrealist who played on the French national chess team, organized a show in New York for which Max Ernst, Alexander Calder, and other leading artists designed chess sets. As works of art, many of these sets were spectacular, but even Duchamp himself favored playing actual games with the familiar Stauntons.

  6: Grandmasters need to brace themselves for revisionist thinking about their own most cherished games. Russian grandmaster Mark Taimanov (1926–) published a collection of his own games in which he included a favorite victory in 1969 over Anatoly Lutikov (1933–1989). “Over the years, Taimanov had often publicized this game. In his notes, he always took care to reveal that Lutikov could have chosen a better defense and forced him to draw the game by perpetual check [repeated checking of the king without mate]. This barely took away from the beauty of the game. Then, one day, Taimanov got a letter from his [English] translator…[who] wanted to know how the perpetual check in that game was actually supposed to work; he hadn’t been able to find it. It turned out there was no perpetual check. Lutikov could not only have obtained a draw, he could simply have won the game. That really did put a blemish on what was otherwise a beautiful game” [Hans Ree, The Human Comedy of Chess, 1999: Russell Enterprises, p. 307].

  7: Anyone can enter an open tournament. Chess tournaments c
an also be closed, meaning that they are by invitation only. Tournaments, whether open or closed, can be round-robin (everyone plays one game against everyone else), double round-robin (each entrant has both White and Black against every other player), knockout (one contestant plays a match of a predetermined number of games against another contestant, the winner moving on to the next round and the loser going home), or the Swiss system (a player is paired whenever possible in each round with someone who has the identical score). So in the Swiss system, if a player has two wins after two rounds, he will be paired in the third round with somebody else who is 2–0.

  8: Sometimes it is a child who gives the exhibition. Samuel Reshevsky (1911–1992), the Polish-born prodigy who emigrated to the United States and became one of the top three players in the world, learned chess at the age of four. Wearing a little sailor suit, he toured Poland at the age of six, giving simuls against twenty or more people, and then did the same elsewhere in Europe and the United States. As a boy, Reshevsky was somewhat of an idiot savant; he did not learn to read or write until after the age of eleven. As an adult, he supported his chess and his family by working as an accountant.

  9: “There is one story—perhaps apocryphal—of an extended bit of thinking that tops even Paulsen’s alleged 11 hours,” Andy Soltis wrote. It involves an adjournment (the suspension of the game until the next day) with one of the players not making his move on the board but rather sealing his move in an envelope until the resumption of play, at which time the move is unsealed and made. (The reason the move is sealed is so that neither player, during his long night of analysis, has the advantage of knowing what move he’ll next face when play resumes.) “At a European tournament before World War I Akiba Rubinstein was trying to decide which of two king moves he should seal in an adjournment envelope. The wrong one might throw away the win, perhaps even lose. Rubenstein could not make up his mind so he hit upon the ingenious solution. He sealed an illegal move.