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

by Paul Hoffman

  2: The field at Nottingham 1936 included the reigning world champion (Max Euwe), three former world champions (Emanuel Lasker, José Capablanca, Alexander Alekhine), and three renowned rising stars (Reuben Fine, Salomon Flohr, Samuel Reshevsky).

  3: If the Russians are allowed to include Alexander Alekhine as one of their own—he was born in Moscow but lived abroad after the Bolshevik Revolution and during his reign as world champion—the Russian hegemony goes back to 1927 and was broken only briefly by Fischer and the Dutchman Max Euwe. The classical champions since 1927 are Alekhine (1927–1935, 1937–1946), Euwe (1935–1937), Mikhail Botvinnik (1948–1957, 1958–1960, 1961–1963), Vasily Smyslov (1957–1958), Mikhail Tal (1960–1961), Tigran Petrosian (1963–1969), Boris Spassky (1969–1972), Robert James Fischer (1972–1975), Anatoly Karpov (1975–1985), Garry Kasparov (1985–2000), and Vladimir Kramnik (2000–).

  4: The Kremlin could also be ruthless in punishing players who let Russia down. After Mark Taimanov, the pianist and grandmaster, was shut out by Fischer 6–0 in the quarter finals of the World Championship Candidates Matches in 1971, his wife and musical partner denounced him and left him, and Moscow cut his salary, banished him from the national team, and prohibited him from playing chess abroad.

  5: When asked why increasing numbers of Russians were learning chess in his mother country, Alekhine had an explanation as simple as Karpov’s: “What else is there for them to do?” [The Reliable Past, p. 140].

  6: Adjourned games often featured masterfully played endgames. Russian GM Lev Polugaevsky (1934–1995) sometimes spent fifteen hours “to get to the bottom of an adjourned position,” wrote Hans Ree. “By banning the adjournment of games, we have lightened our burden as chess players, but we have also lost a glorious piece of our chess culture.” Ree described the time he was one of Korchnoi’s seconds and helped him analyze an adjourned game until 3:00 A.M. “At that point, being simply too tired to think of anything meaningful, I went to bed. Korchnoi didn’t, although his day had been much more tiring than mine, since, in addition to all the analyzing, he had played the actual game. He simply continued his analysis. The next morning he showed me something important he had discovered at about six…something we had completely missed the day before. Korchnoi was never too tired to look at a chess position” [The Human Comedy of Chess, pp. 300, 301].

  In the early 1990s, the practice of adjournment was eliminated, because of the availability of chess software that could aid in the analysis of adjourned positions; now all tournament games are completed in a single session without interruption. Adjournments were always unfair in a sense because they were popularity tests. Each player would employ the strongest seconds he could cajole into helping him analyze the game—or to let him sleep while they did the all-night analysis.

  7: Botvinnik did not have an easy time in the match. He fell behind and had to win the twenty-third and penultimate game in order to survive. His second, Salo Flohr, 1908–1983), was pleased when the game “was adjourned in a position where Botvinnik’s two bishops were clearly stronger than Bronstein’s knights. After lengthy thought Botvinnik sealed a move and together with Flohr left the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall. The move sealed by Botvinnik was fairly obvious, and a contented Flohr, analyzing in his mind the variations that promised victory, accompanied Botvinnik to his place. After supper they once more looked at the position, and Salo set off home for a final polishing of the variations. The following day Flohr was again at Botvinnik’s place. ‘Salo, could you show the variations to [my wife], I should like to have one more look at the position,’ said the world champion. Flohr was somewhat dumbfounded, but nevertheless, after setting up the position on the board, he began demonstrating something to Botvinnik’s wife, although she barely knew the moves of the pieces.

  “Some time later the champion himself came back, the friends had lunch, and set off to the playing venue. Before climbing up onto the stage, Botvinnik quietly, so that no one could hear, admitted to his helper: ‘You know, Salo. I sealed a different move.’” Tears welled up in Flohr’s eyes, and for a long time he was unable to forgive the resentment that he felt towards his suspicious and mistrustful old friend Misha” [The Reliable Past, pp. 166, 167].

  8 M ikhail Tal, the eighth world champion, was known as the Wizard of Riga (or, in Smyslov’s words, the Gangster of the Chessboard). In the late 1950s he revived the flashy sacrificial play that had receded in the late nineteenth century when defensive skills improved. Many of Tal’s fellow grandmasters could not accept that they were losing to him because they were bamboozled by his chessboard fireworks. Instead they blamed their defeat on his hypnotic stare. At Curaçao 1962, the Hungarian-born grandmaster Pal Benko wore dark glasses to avoid being mesmerized, but still expired in only thirty moves. Tal had a sense of humor, and he donned a pair of oversized novelty spectacles when he faced Benko later.

  Three-time U.S. champion Lev Alburt, who defected to the West from Ukraine, disagrees with Kasparov’s assessment that Tal was purposely trying to intimidate his opponents. In Three Days with Bobby Fischer & Other Chess Essays, Alburt and coauthor Al Lawrence wrote about Alburt’s own encounters with Tal: “Alburt had a run-in with the Dreaded Stare. At the start of their first game together, Lev couldn’t help but glance up at Misha, whose wide-open brown eyes, topped by their prominent dark brows, were riveted on Alburt. Lev, from a younger, less superstitious generation that had already incorporated Tal’s imaginative approach into their own games, reacted as if the stare were some kind of joke, smiling. Tal immediately roused himself from his trance. Never one to distract his opponent on purpose, he remembered Lev’s reaction. Alburt was never again the recipient of the Stare. Our conclusion: the much-touted stare was probably only an absent-minded habit” [p. 36].

  In all fairness, it should be noted that some of the game’s first theoreticians, aside from offering their views on advantageous ways of developing the bishops and knights, proposed ingenious schemes for distracting the opposing player. In the 1400s, Luis Ramirez de Lucena recommended placing the board so that light shined in the opponent’s eyes. “Also,” Lucena advised, “try to play your adversary when he has just eaten and drunk freely.” To rattle their opponents, chess players have done everything from banging the pieces and glaring menacingly to chewing with their mouths open and rocking maniacally in their chairs. Lisa Lane (1938–), who won her first U.S. Women’s Championship in 1959 and is one of the few chess players to grace the cover of Sports Illustrated (August 7, 1961), remembered how “one Russian woman performed noisy breathing exercises whenever it was her opponent’s turn to move” [James Hoffman, “Chess: Once the Game of Kings, Now the King of Games,” Lithopinion, Winter 1970, p. 77].

  Benjamin Franklin objected to such tactics. “If your adversary is long in playing you ought not to hurry him or express any uneasiness at his delay,” he wrote in a widely published essay on the morality of chess. “You should not sing, nor whistle, nor look at your watch, nor take up a book to read, nor make a tapping with your feet on the floor, or with your fingers on the table, nor do anything else that may disturb his attention.” Chess players are happy to claim such an illustrious personage as Franklin as one of their own, but they have universally ignored his plea for gentlemanly behavior [Benjamin Franklin, The Morals of Chess, 1779, as quoted in Jerome Saltzmann, The Chess Reader, 1949: Greenberg, p. 115]. At an international tournament in New York in 1927, Nimzowitsch complained to the referee that his opponent, the Yugoslavian master Milan Vidmar (1885–1962), was destroying his concentration by puffing on a smelly cigar. The official asked Vidmar to stop smoking, and he readily obliged. A few minutes later, though, Nimzowitsch protested again. This time the referee was puzzled. “Your opponent isn’t smoking,” he said. “Yes, yes, I know,” Nimzowitsch replied, “but he looks as if he wants to.” (This story is probably apocryphal, because another, more colorful version has Nimzowitsch responding, by borrowing an aphorism apparently coined by Tartakower: “Yes, but you know that in che
ss the threat is always mightier than the execution.” And in some versions Nimzowitsch’s opponent is Emanuel Lasker [1868–1941] not Milan Vidmar.)

  In 1972, the Argentine star Henrique Mecking (1952–) faced former world champion Tigran Petrosian at a tournament in San Antonio. Mecking complained that the Russian player “was only quiet when it was his own turn to move. All the time I was thinking he was kicking the table and elbowing the board to make it shake. If this was not enough to upset me, Petrosian kept making noises, stirring his cup of coffee, all the time varying the rhythm. And rolling a coin across the table.” Mecking retaliated by making some noise of his own, but Petrosian calmly turned off his hearing aid and proceeded to crush him [Grandmasters of Chess, pp. 21, 22].

  The fourteenth world champion, Vladimir Kramnik, even succumbed to the very distraction—bright light—that Lucena proposed half a millennium ago. On the day before the first game of his 2002 match against the computer Deep Fritz, Kramnik examined the pieces. To the surprise of the match organizers, he pronounced the chessmen unacceptable because they were apparently too shiny and reflected the stage lights. “First we got some sandpaper,” recalled match director Malcolm Pein, “but this ruined the pieces.” Then they bought some dark varnish and hastily painted the pieces to try to reduce the glare. But on the morning of the first game, the chessmen were too sticky to handle. “We faced the prospect of Kramnik picking up his king’s pawn and being unable to let go,” said Pein. “Frankly I was panicking and I was not alone.” Just before the game, someone had the clever idea of hastening the drying by placing the pieces in the refrigerator in Kramnik’s dressing room. (His private stash of chocolate bars had to be removed to make room for the chessmen.) To everyone’s relief, the Russian champion approved of the freshly dried pieces. Deep Fritz, of course, was oblivious to the fuss [Paul Hoffman, “Report from the ‘Brains in Bahrain,’” time.com/time/sampler/article/0,8599,3643100,00.html].

  9: This magnanimous gesture says a lot about Pascal’s character. Commentators on chess have long believed that a person’s behavior at the board mirrors his true character. To wit, Henry Chadwick wrote, in 1895: “If ever there was a game calculated to bring into prominent view the idiosyncrasies of individuals, it is chess. It shows up a man’s prevailing characteristics at times so plainly that he who runs may read. The faults of human nature, as shown in conceit, selfishness, obstinacy, ill-temper and meanness, are brought out into prominence in playing the game, as strikingly as are the virtues of humility, generosity, good temper, and a charitable consideration of your adversary’s weak points. The amenities of social life, of course, have their influence in suppressing, to a certain extent, any conspicuous exhibition of one’s faults; but they do not altogether repress the tendency to show a man up in his true colors. In fact, in the eager desire for victory in a contest in which one’s mental power is brought into play, and in a game in which the element of chance is entirely eliminated, a man is apt to exhibit his prominent traits of character very plainly at times” [Henry Chadwick, The Game of Chess, 1895, as quoted in A Chess Omnibus, p. 386].

  10: Kasparov’s claim was an echo of an allegation that Napoleon had made two centuries before. In 1809, Napoleon played chess at Schonbrunn Castle, in Vienna, against the Turk, a turbaned mannequin that was heralded as the world’s first chess-playing automaton. Napoleon suspected that a human chess master was somehow hidden inside, and he reportedly tried to interfere with the master’s view of the board by wrapping a shawl around the Turk’s head and torso. But the blindfolded Turk still moved the chessmen quickly, in a jerky, mechanical fashion. Napoleon lost the game and angrily knocked the pieces to the floor. He was apparently so rattled that it took him several months to regain his concentration at the chessboard. He continued to insist that the automaton was a fraud, and indeed it turned out to conceal a human being.

  CHAPTER 5: An American in Moscow

  1: In rapid chess, however, Kasparov walloped Lautier 3–0.

  2: Murey was Victor Korchnoi’s second in 1978 when he challenged Karpov for the World Championship.

  3: Lautier didn’t need to witness Kasparov’s cursing to know that he was beating the Russian. But body language can tip off an opponent to a threat on the board that he might not have noticed otherwise. Fischer wrote about his victory on the White side of a Ruy Lopez over the Yugoslavian grandmaster Petar Trifunovich (1910–1980) at Bled 1961. A dubious opening experiment of Trifunovich’s backfired, and after the sixteenth move, Fischer was happy with his position: “White has a strategically won game,” he wrote, “but the technical problems are considerable. Moreover a tempting trap now stared me in the face…. I was considering the blunder 17 B-N5?…but Trifunovich seemed too quiet all of a sudden, and I suspected he had tuned in on my brain waves.” At the last minute Fischer saw that Trifunovich could win his queen at the end of a four-move sequence [My Sixty Most Memorable Games, p. 203].

  The opponents of Max Euwe (1901–1981), the world champion from 1935 to 1937, always knew when he thought he was in a tight spot: his ears were red.

  4: Some players have the annoying, unethical habit of trying to retract a move in progress by saying J’adoube after they’ve already touched a piece and suddenly realized that moving it would be costly. “GM Milan Matuloví c has more than once been caught trying to get away with stuff that would get him thrown off any primary school chess team. Against Bilek at Sousse in 1967 he, not liking his position, took a move back, saying as he did so, ‘J’adoube.’ Bilek’s jaw dropped, but the arbiter hadn’t seen the outrage and Matulovíc went on to win…which is why, for a while, Matulovíc was known on the tournament circuit as J’adoubovich. A more eminent practitioner of this tactic may have been a former world champion. Alekhine was accused of having touched a rook before saying ‘J’adoube,’ against Schmidt in 1941”[The Even More Complete Chess Addict, pp. 225, 226].

  5: “Look at me, I’m laughing, I’m making pleasantries, and I’m not going to be able to sleep tonight,” proclaimed Argentinean grandmaster Miguel Najdorf (1910–1997) after losing a game [Anthony Saidy and Norman Lessing, The World of Chess, 1974: Random House, p. 216].

  6: “Mikhail Tal…on being told that the Soviet state was launching a campaign against alcoholism, commented, ‘The state against vodka. I’ll be on the side of vodka’” [The Even More Complete Chess Addict, p. 268]. Alekhine had a lifelong problem with alcoholism, and some commentators believed that he lost the 1935 World Championship to Max Euwe because he was inebriated during the games. Euwe knew that Alekhine had been drinking, but doubted that he was drunk. “I think it helps to drink a little, but not in the long run,” Euwe said years later. “I regretted not having drunk at all during the second match with Alekhine [which Euwe lost]. Actually Alekhine’s walk was not steady because he did not see well but did not like to wear glasses. So many people thought he was drunk because of the way he walked” [Chess Life & Review, August 1978].

  At Gijón 1945, Alekhine consulted a doctor who found that his “liver was so swollen that it was almost touching his right nipple.” The doctor insisted he stop drinking. “‘You are not the first one telling me that,’ said Alekhine. ‘If you don’t stop, you will die in a short time,’ said the doctor. ‘And if I do stop?’ ‘You’ll live maybe a couple of years.’ Alekhine said that in that case it made no sense to stop drinking, and thanked the doctor for his straightforwardness.” He died the next year, at fifty-three. “According to some it was a heart attack, while other sources reported he had suffocated after choking on a piece of meat. A plate of food and a chessboard were found on the table in front of him” [The Human Comedy of Chess, pp. 186, 187].

  7: It may have been the Web sites themselves, rather than anything Vaganian said, that were responsible for the notion that he had calculated everything in advance. Chess commentators often downplay the role of intuition and promote the erroneous image of top players as superhuman, all-seeing calculating machines. In his autobiography, Tal described a complicated
game in which he sacrificed a knight against Evgeny Vasiukov (1933–) in the 1965 Soviet Championship: “The sacrifice was not altogether obvious, and there was a large number of possible variations, but when I conscientiously began to work through them, I found, to my horror, that nothing would come of it. Ideas piled up one after another. I would transport a subtle reply, which worked in one case, to another situation where it would prove to be quite useless. As a result my head became filled with a completely chaotic pile of all sorts of moves, and the famous ‘tree of the variations,’ from which the trainers recommend that you cut off the small branches, in this case spread with unbelievable rapidity.

  “And then suddenly, for some reason, I remembered the classic couplet by Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky: Oh, what a difficult job it was/ To drag out of the marsh the hippopotamus.

  “I don’t know from what associations the hippopotamus got onto the chessboard, but although the spectators were convinced that I was continuing to study the position, I, despite my humanitarian education, was trying at this time to work out: just how would you drag a hippopotamus out of the marsh? I remember how jacks figured in my thoughts, as well as levers, helicopters, and even a rope ladder. After a lengthy conversation I admitted defeat as an engineer, and thought spitefully: ‘Well, let it drown!’ And suddenly the hippopotamus disappeared, going off the chessboard just as he had come on—of his own accord! And straightaway the position did not appear to be so complicated.

  “Now I somehow realized that it was not possible to calculate all the variations, and that the knight sacrifice was, by its very nature, purely intuitive. And since it promised an interesting game, I could not refrain from making it.