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

by Paul Hoffman

  When the envelope was opened the tournament officials found themselves in a quandary. The rule in force then required the offender to replace his illegal move with a legal one—of his king. This meant Rubinstein had all night and much of the next day to analyze with a board and pieces which king move to make” [Andy Soltis, Chess Lists, Second Edition, 2002: McFarland & Company, pp. 49, 50].

  Postal chess games, of course, can drag on for years. In 1975, “Glaswegian Lawrence B. Grant and Dr. J. Munro MacLennan from Ottawa…had been playing a correspondence game for forty-nine years at the rate of about one move a year. As Mr. Grant said, ‘Ye cannae hurry these things’” [Mike Fox and Richard James, The Even More Complete Chess Addict, 1993: Faber and Faber, p. 258].

  10: When I attribute a number to a world champion, describing Kasparov as the thirteenth or Tal as the eighth, I am talking about the century-old classical lineage beginning with the first champion, Wilhelm Steinitz, in 1886.

  11: In the June 1857 issue of The Chess Monthly, “a Pennsylvanian…vouches for the truth of the following: You and I have both read, in fanciful chess stories, incredible accounts of men who have won wives, or of women who have caught husbands, by means of our glorious game. But I believe that I am the first person who can narrate an authentic incident of this kind. In a little village situated in the shadow of our iron-bearing Alleghenies my friend R——has lived and labored for half-a-dozen years. He is a bold Chess Player but as bashful a man as you can find in our whole State. At length he fell, as men will fall, into the entangling meshes of love; but for nearly a twelve-month his unfortunate diffidence kept his tongue hopelessly tied. The lady saw, with the rare perception of her sex, the real state of the case and determined to bring matters to a crisis. Having heard that R——was accustomed jestingly to remark that whoever decided to wed him must first be able to conquer him at chess, she sent for a Staunton from Philadelphia and devoted her womanly wit to mastering the arcane of the game. After two months unwearied study she dispatched a note to R——stating that she had been learning chess and requesting him to come and play with her. My unsuspecting friend went at the appointed time and after a regular Sebastopol struggle found himself obliged to capitulate at the fifty-second move. When he read an invitation in her eyes or heard it softly whispered from her lips I know not, but at the end of the game the bashful R——summoned up his courage and put the fatal question to his victorious mistress. They were married in March” [The Chess Monthly, June 1857, pp. 191, 192].

  12: And patients leave their sickbeds. Mikhail Tal (1936–1992), the eighth world champion, suffered from a kidney disorder, and during convalescence from surgery in 1969, “he would sneak out of the hospital to play at the local chess club.” During the operation itself, he “reportedly talked chess until the anesthesia-mask was strapped on!” [Lev Alburt and A1 Lawrence, Three Days with Bobby Fischer & Other Chess Essays, 2003: Chess Information and Research Center, pp. 26, 27]. The media had mistakenly reported that Tal had died during surgery. “A month later…he made a beautiful queen sacrifice and was highly amused at the comment of one of the spectators, who said: ‘Not bad at all for a dead man’” [The Human Comedy of Chess, p. 114].

  13: The subject of the inherent incompatibility of chess and marriage was raised in 1862 by The Chess Player’s Chronicle, which quoted an item from the Belfast Northern Whig: “Let it be understood that I call marriage an evil only as regards chess; for your new-made wife is a sad drag on your ardent chess player, and we have even known ladies, married for years, who still cry out loudly, as their lord’s weekly club-night comes around; for that night they make every possible kind of engagement—that night is the only one of the week on which they can entertain their friends, and for that night, of all others, they must gladly accept an invitation. Then the great female failing is antagonistic to the silent game, and the players are obliged to dispense with ladies’ society at their meetings. This leads to bachelor parties, another great cause of conjugal offence. I entertain all possible love and reverence for the sex; but still, with this my experience, I cannot refrain from advising the bachelor chess player, contemplating matrimony, to pause before he takes the fatal leap. He must choose for himself; but let him do it deliberately between his board and his wife—between his chess-box and her band-box. Except through many a matrimonial row, there is no middle way” [as quoted in A Chess Omnibus, p. 406].

  I have heard more than one chess player joke that the demands of marriage have cost him one hundred rating points.

  In Shakhmatnaya Goryachka (“Chess Fever”), a silent film made by Vsevolod Pudovkin during the Moscow International Tournament of 1925, a player’s fiancée wants him to quit chess and focus more attention on her. She complains to world champion José Capablanca, who makes a cameo appearance in the film, that she cannot even stand the thought of chess. Capablanca, in keeping with his reputation as a Don Juan, responds: “I understand how you feel. I cannot stand the thought of chess when I am with a lovely lady.”

  Contrast this with the views of Luzhin’s fiancée: “An artist, a great artist, she frequently thought, contemplating his heavy profile, his corpulent hunched body, the dark lock of hair clinging to his always moist forehead. And perhaps it was precisely because she knew nothing at all about chess that chess for her was not simply a parlor game or a pleasant pastime, but a mysterious art equal to all the recognized arts” [The Defense, p. 88].

  The artist Marcel Duchamp was a tournament competitor. He was married in 1927, and according to his friend Man Ray, for most of the first week that the newlyweds lived together, Duchamp studied “chess problems, and his bride, in desperate retaliation, got up one night when he was asleep and glued the chess pieces to the board. They were divorced three months later” [David Hooper and Kenneth Whyld, The Oxford Companion to Chess, 1991: Oxford University Press, p. 116].

  And Fischer’s views on marriage? “I would not marry an American girl,” he said in 1961. “With a foreigner would be much better. First you get her without customs, second, if you don’t like her you can send her back” [Michael Fox and Richard James, The Complete Chess Addict, 1987: Faber and Faber, p. 188].

  By the 1992 rematch with Spassky, Fischer had ruled out marriage altogether. “Fischer says that he will never marry,” said the girlfriend of one of his bodyguards. “He needs all of his time for chess” [Tim Hanke, “Finding Bobby Fischer,” American Chess Journal, 1992, No. 1, p. 63].

  CHAPTER 3: The Pandolfini Variation

  1: There are tournaments in which all the players, despite beginning the game with more than two hours for forty moves, end up in time trouble. In AVRO 1938, the world’s top eight players came together in the Netherlands for a double round-robin. “The outstanding feature of [the first] round, one which was to prove characteristic of the entire tournament, was the time pressure felt by all the players,” Chess Life reported. “As usual, Reshevsky is in time trouble. He has to make 20 moves in 8 minutes…16 moves in 6 minutes. His opponent, Alekhine, becomes very nervous, gets up and paces restlessly back and forth. Reshevsky, on the contrary, is quiet. He even takes one minute of precious time to tell Alekhine to calm himself! 12 moves to make in 2 minutes! Everyone, players as well as spectators, is jittery, except Reshevsky, who, with lightning rapidity, completes his fortieth move on the last second of the allotted time.

  Time pressure seems contagious: Keres, 11 moves in 9 minutes; Capablanca, 16 moves in ten minutes; Botvinnik, 12 moves in 9 minutes; Euwe, ditto, overlooking a win because of it and having to be satisfied with a draw” [Chess Life, December 1938].

  2: There are four ways to draw, or tie, a game. First, the players can agree to a draw, presumably because they judge the position to be equal. Second, a player can claim a draw if the position on the board repeats three times. Third, a draw can be claimed if fifty moves pass without a pawn moving or a piece or pawn being captured. When there is a draw by perpetual check, the players are agreeing to draw because they both realize that one of them
could keep checking the other’s king forever without mating it. If they played out the position, after enough checks the threefold-repetition rule or the fifty-move rule would take effect. Finally, it is a draw if the player who is supposed to move is not in check but has no legal move. It is against the rules to move into check, and the player who cannot move is said to be stalemated.

  3: I can’t say that I had any real friends at the tournaments I entered in New York as a teenager. But there was a boy named Peter Winston, two years my junior, with whom I sometimes got a bite to eat between games. Or we relaxed between rounds by playing “giveaway chess,” a topsy-turvy variant of the game in which the object is to give away all of your pieces. (As in checkers, if you can capture a piece, you have to take it.) Once, after a spirited session of giveaway, Peter blew an important regular tournament game by giving away one of his pieces on the fourth or fifth move. He was much better than me at normal chess—he was co-winner of the U.S. Junior Championship in 1974. He was smart and kind. I lost track of him after I cut back on tournaments and went off to college in the fall of 1974. While working on this book, I learned what became of him. In 1977, he played in an internationally rated tournament at Hunter College High School in New York. After losing an unprecedented nine games in a row, he left the tournament hall and never made it home. He hasn’t been seen since. Nor has his body ever been recovered. He is presumed to have committed suicide.

  4: In an interview on French television, Nabokov agreed that Fischer was “a strange person.” He explained that “there is nothing abnormal about a chess player being abnormal, this is normal. Take the case of [Akiba] Rubinstein, a well-known [Russian] player of the early part of the century, who each day was taken by ambulance from the lunatic asylum, where he stayed constantly, to a café where he played, and then was taken back to his gloomy little room. He did not like to look at his opponent, but an empty chair at the chess board irritated him even more. Therefore in front of him they placed a mirror, where he saw his reflection, and perhaps, also the real Rubinstein” [Genna Sosonko, “The Jump,” New in Chess, 2000, No. 3, p. 63].

  5: Garry Kasparov, who was the reigning world champion at the time of Fischer’s 1992 match, dismissed the American’s comeback: “Here sits this poor fellow with whom one cannot talk normally, and what’s more he plays bad chess.” Fischer had taken a twenty-year-long hiatus from chess. His understanding of the game, Kasparov told New in Chess, was antiquated, “like Borg playing tennis with a wooden racket…. Nowhe’s someone from the past. He doesn’t belong to our world. He’s an alien.”

  Botvinnik, too, saw little of the 1972 Fischer in the 1992 match: “This is not the Fischer we used to know, the Fischer who used to fascinate us with his play. He was a virtuoso of calculation. That Fischer is no more, nor can he be.”

  Although Fischer won the 1992 match, he was unable to shine despite the fact that Spassky was oddly complicit in his victory, behaving more like a friendly sparring partner than a real opponent. “I’m ready to fight and I want to fight,” Spassky said at a press conference during the match, “but on the other hand I would like Bobby to win because I believe that Bobby must come back to chess and show his best. So I’m trying to give him excellent training.” After Fischer uncorked an opening innovation in the eleventh game, Spassky said: “I was a little surprised, and at the same time I became very happy. I realized that Bobby was playing like a young man, and it was my principal goal to make him stronger and stronger in every game” [all quotations in this endnote from “Finding Bobby Fischer,” pp. 74 and 66].

  6: Fischer’s hate speech can be found on his Web site, http://home.att.ne.jp/moon/fischer/. His fellow grandmasters have trouble explaining his descent into anti-Semitism. “I do not want to speak as a psychiatrist,” the Dutch grandmaster Hans Ree told a filmmaker. “But one is inclined to do so. It is in my opinion an ailment, a paranoid mental derangement that expresses itself in this manner. I do not wish to say that all anti-Semites are insane, but he is that to a certain extent. He said, for instance, that the Jews want to eradicate the African elephant because their trunks make them think of uncircumcised penises. That is so bizarre that the average anti-Semite would not easily think of that” [Bobby Fischer: The Wandering King, p. 45].

  7: Dutch filmmakers who made a 2003 television documentary on Fischer tried hard, through intermediaries, to track him down and arrange an interview. The only response they had was an e-mail he dispatched just before the United States invaded Iraq. It said nothing about their interview request: “The cat is out of the bag! U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is a f**king Jew. Thanks and have a good day” [Bobby Fischer: The Wandering King, p. 20].

  Through a Japanese intermediary I, too, engaged in months of fruitless negotiations for an interview with Fischer in 2004 and 2005, and one of the first questions his handler asked me was whether I was Jewish. Fischer requested copies of my biographies, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers and Wings of Madness, and he studied videos of me that were posted on the Web. Gentlemen’s Quarterly had asked me to profile him, and he was afraid that I might clean up his remarks so that they were less offensive and vituperative. The magazine and I tried to accommodate him by proposing that the GQ Web site include an unedited transcript of our interview and any response Fischer cared to make to my published article. Still, no go.

  8: Illness is not the only excuse that adults make for losing. In 1908, Siegbert Tarrasch 1862–1934) could not wrest the world title from Emanuel Lasker in a match in Düsseldorf and Munich. Tarrasch blamed his inadequate play on his sensitivity to the sea. This excuse, The British Chess Magazine opined at the time, “does not leave altogether a pleasant taste in the mouth. Düsseldorf is some 170 miles from the coast. A gift so sensitive to sea influence is not robust enough to carry the world’s championship” [Harold Schonberg, Grandmasters of Chess, 1973: J. B. Lippincott, p. 124].

  Alibis or not, Tarrasch deserves his due as a great player not least for his sage practical advice: “When you don’t know what to do, wait for your opponent to get an idea—it’s sure to be wrong!” [Bobby Fischer, My 60 Most Memorable Games, 1969: Simon & Schuster, p. 368].

  When Fischer thrashed Larsen 6–0 in their 1971 semifinals Candidates Match, the Danish grandmaster blamed high blood pressure as well as the inhospitable Denver climate.

  William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, had one of the most novel excuses ever for losing. While pondering the seventeenth move of a postal game in 1983, he received the news from Stockholm that he had received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Delirious with joy, he mailed off a howler of a move [The Even More Complete Chess Addict, pp. 38, 39].

  9: In this respect, I was like Luzhin: “The nights were somehow bumpy. He just could not manage to force himself not to think of chess, and although he felt drowsy, sleep could find no way into his brain; it searched for a loophole, but every entrance was guarded by a chess sentry and he had the agonizing feeling that sleep was just there, close by, but on the outside of his brain: the Luzhin who was wearily scattered around the room slumbered, but the Luzhin who visualized a chessboard stayed awake and was unable to merge with his happy double” [The Defense, p, 126].

  Many top players have difficulty sleeping. “The main problem during important tournaments was how to fall asleep,” wrote the Estonian grandmaster Jaan Ehlvest (1962–). “It was a real pain if you could not do it quickly” [Jaan Ehlvest, The Story of a Chess Player, 2004: Arbiter Publishing, p. 116].

  Marshall managed to do useful chess work in his sleep. According to the December 1944 Chess Life, “he even took a pocket set to bed with him at night so that he might record the inspirations of his dreams.”

  Vladimir Bagirov (1936–), the leading proponent of Alekhine’s Defense, a dodgy response to the king-pawn opening in which Black encourages White to advance his pawns and kick around Black’s king knight, took up the defense after Alexander Alekhine appeared in a dream and urged Bagirov to rehabilitate his eponymous defense.r />
  Timman has learned from his dreams to persevere at the board. In one dream, he and Kasparov were in a castle surrounded by water. “We are talking about a position in which I am two pawns down but I have the two bishops,” Timman recalled. “We argue, and in the end Kasparov agrees with me that I have sufficient compensation for the material” [The Reliable Past, p. 153].

  10: Pandolfini was echoing the words of Russian-born Saviely Tartakower, who became a French citizen in the 1920s and was said to be more interested in playing a beautiful move than a winning one. Tartakower was known to make wry observations about the game. Harold Schonberg compiled many “Tartakowerisms”:

  The blunders are all there, waiting to be made.

  Sacrifices only prove that somebody has blundered.

  It is always better to sacrifice your opponent’s men.

  Moral victories do not count.

  An isolated Pawn spreads gloom all over the chessboard.

  Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do; strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do. [Grandmasters of Chess, p. 160]

  CHAPTER 4: Russian Domination

  1: Pravda’s description was double-speak. If Marx believed that chess was a good way to build character, it was apparently not effective in his own case. “When Marx got into a difficult position he would get angry,” a contemporary recalled, “and losing a game would cause him to fly into a rage!” [D. J. Richards, Soviet Chess, 1965: Clarendon Press, p. 39]. It is difficult to believe that Lenin didn’t care if he lost. He was reportedly a Class A tournament player like me. If he was genuinely apathetic about losing, he would not have been that good.