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

by Paul Hoffman

  6: The word heffalump was coined by A. A. Milne in Winnie the Pooh (1926). Pooh never actually saw the creatures, but imagined them when he tried to fall asleep. Milne did not describe what heffalumps looked like but his illustrator, E. H. Shepard, depicted them as elephants.

  7: There is no universal nomenclature convention for chess openings. They can be named for a piece or the side of the board that figures prominently in them: Bishop’s Opening, Two Knights Defense, King’s Gambit. They can be named for the masters who pioneered, promoted, or rehabilitated them—Bird’s Opening, Richter-Rauzer Attack, Nimzowitsch-Larsen Attack, Falkbeer Counter Gambit, Benko Gambit. They can be named for the nationalities of the players who first favored them—English Defense, Slav Defense, Spanish Game—or for the tournament—Cambridge Springs, Grand Prix Attack—in which the openings made their mark. As for subvariations—a line within a line like the Beck’s Beer Variation—there is more room for the originators of new sequences to be humorous. There is now a Toilet Variation, named for where its inventor thought it up. Short told me about an insipid sequence of moves called the Monkey’s Bum, so named, he thought, because someone reacted to the moves by saying, “If that’s any good, I’m a monkey’s bum.”

  8: Morphy developed this approach over time. In his youth, he played rashly, but his opponents were too weak to take advantage of it. “One peculiarity of Paul’s play, during the infantile stage of his chess life, while his father and his brother were his chief adversaries, used to create considerable merriment among the circle of chess lovers with which he was brought into contact. His Pawns seemed to him a hindrance and his first work, upon commencing a game, was to exchange or sacrifice them all, giving free range to his pieces, after which with his unimpeded Queen, Rook, Knights, and Bishops he began a fierce attack upon his opponent’s forces which was often valorously maintained until it resulted in mate” [The Chess Monthly, December 1857, pp. 381, 382].

  9: Or Norma, La Cenerentol, or The Marriage of Figaro—the historical record is not clear [Edward Winter, Chess Facts and Fables, 2006: McFarland, pp. 34, 35].

  10: Fischer said in 1964: “A popularly held theory about Paul Morphy is that if he returned to the chess world today and played our best contemporary players, he would come out the loser. Nothing is further from the truth. In a set match, Morphy could beat anyone alive today…. Morphy was perhaps the most accurate chess player who ever lived. Hehad a complete sight of the board and never blundered, in spite of the fact that he played quite rapidly, rarely taking more than five minutes to decide a move” [Bobby Fischer, “The Ten Greatest Masters in History,” Chessworld, January-February 1964, p. 58].

  11: The curious, literary remark about Castile and the shamefaced king sounds like a quotation, although I’ve never seen the source identified. Among the Morphy legends that are fodder for Freudians is the fabrication that he slept surrounded by a protective ring of women’s shoes. In truth, he was a fashion plate who fancied men’s shoes, which he would arrange in a half crescent in his bedroom so that he could survey them all before picking out a pair.

  12: The film director Milo? s Forman, who often visited top-level chess events, questioned various grandmasters about Morphy’s life and wrote a script about him. When Forman shopped the script, Hollywood expressed interest provided he turned the chess player into a musician. Thus was born Amadeus. Nabokov did not give up on chess as easily as Forman did. “Poor Luzhin had to wait thirty-five years for an English-language edition,” he wrote. “True, there was a promising flurry in the late thirties when an American publisher showed interest in it, but he turned out to belong to the type of publisher who dreams of becoming a male muse to his author, and our brief conjunction ended abruptly upon his suggesting I replace chess by music and make Luzhin a demented violinist” [The Defense, pp. 7, 8].

  13: Irrepressible Freudians do not stop here. The fact that a player cannot touch a piece unless he is going to move it decodes in the unconscious to a prohibition against masturbation. And since he can’t touch the other guy’s pieces either, against mutual masturbation. The inherent weakness of the king represents a prepubescent penis or a flaccid, impotent one.

  14: In Frances Parkinson Keyes’s classic American novel, The Chess Players, Morphy’s sweetheart Charmian Sheppard rejects him because he never consummates their relationship. “Perhaps, you could have married me, if you’d really tried, if you’d ‘forgotten yourself,’ as you said once long ago you were afraid you might, and swept me off my feet,” Sheppard tells him. “But you didn’t—either then or later. You went on playing chess. Afraid! You needn’t have been afraid! All you had to do in Paris was to go a little further—so far I couldn’t have stopped you if I’d tried and I wouldn’t have tried very hard…. And I may as well tell you, now as any other time, that I’ll never marry amere chess player!” [1960: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, p. 290].

  15: It is astonishing to me that Ernest Jones and Reuben Fine, the men who popularized the plug-pop interpretation of chess in the widely cited book The Psychology of the Chess Player, were themselves both chess players. Fine in fact was one of the very top players in the world and would have had a shot at becoming world champion if, for want of money, he had not foregone tournaments in order to earn a living as a psychoanalyst. Only men who loathed their own fascination with the game could invent such an outrageous, sordid interpretation.

  16: Alekhine, too, had a gift for verbally putting his opponents in their place. The great chess writer I. A. Horowitz told this story about the world champion: in an impromptu speech, Alekhine aired his grievances about Bogoljubow, an arrogant rival. “Last night,” he began. “I dreamed that I had died. Naturally, I headed for heaven. As I neared the portals, I was hailed by St. Peter, asking who I was. ‘I am Alekhine,’ I hastened to explain, but the statement made no impression. ‘I am Alekhine, chess champion of the world,’ I reiterated. ‘Sorry,’ said St. Peter, shaking his head. ‘There is no room in heaven for chess players.’ My spirit was dejected. Before leaving the pearly gates, I took one last look around. Eureka! Whom did I spy? Why, none other than my good friend Bogoljubow. Quickly I drew St. Peter’s attention to my rotund crony: ‘There’s Bogoljubow. He’s a chess player.’ St. Peter smiled sadly: ‘He only thinks he’s a chess player’” [I. A. Horowitz, Chess Life, September 1948, pp. 366, 367].

  CHAPTER 12: Endgame: Your Finger Beats Kasparov!

  1: Pascal’s memory for names and dates is also conspicuously bad. It is part of the game’s mystique that chess masters are thought to have great memories. This view was put to the test in the 1890s, when two professors in London presented Harry Nelson Pillsbury, Morphy’s successor as the strongest U.S. player, with an odd list of words and phrases: antiphlogistine, periosteum, takadiastase, plasmon, threlkeld, streptococcus, staphylococcus, micrococcus, plasmodium, Mississippi, Freiheit, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, athletics, no war, Etchenerg, American, Russian, philosophy, Piet Potgleter’s Rost, Salamagundi, Oomisillecootsi, Bangmamvate, Schlecter’s Neck, Manzinyama, theosophy, catechism, Madjesoomalops. Pillsbury glanced at the list, handed it back to the professors, and then recalled the words perfectly, in order. As an added flourish, without being asked, he repeated the list in reverse. Nevertheless, subsequent investigations found that Pillsbury’s talent was anomalous. Skilled chess players turn out to be able to recall chess positions from actual games (although not “positions” where the pieces are randomly scattered) but don’t otherwise have better memories than the rest of us.

  2: Smothered mate is a term that refers to a particularly beautiful and rare form of checkmate: the king on the back rank is hemmed in by its own pieces, and an opposing knight, “reaching” over these pieces, delivers the coup de grace.

  3: Lest you think I exaggerate, let me share a story from Susan Polgar’s Breaking Through about one player’s ability to concentrate in the face of death. The player was Ildiko Madl, who along with the Polgar sisters was a member of the four-person Hungarian team at the Women’s
Olympiad in Thessalonika in 1988. “The Olympiad started smoothly,” Polgar wrote, “but then a tragedy happened. The fiancée of our teammate Ildiko, IM Bela Perenyi, was on his way from Hungary to support us and to participate in one of the side events in the Olympiad. Unfortunately, he never made it to Greece, as on the way he was killed in a car accident. It was quite admirable that, after such shocking and sad news, Ildiko was still able to play well and even score a win against our big rivals, the Soviet Union” [p. 16].

  4: Victor Korchnoi was notorious for losing track of his surroundings when he was playing. A sewage pipe burst at the 1970 USSR Championship in Riga. “First this was sensed by the spectators, who gradually began leaving the tournament hall, and soon the chief arbiter was forced to announce a temporary break. The players, exchanging jokes, began moving off the stage. The lone figure of Korchnoi remained at the chess board. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, raising his head, of the arbiter who had stopped his clock. ‘Has something happened?’” [The Reliable Past, p. 32].

  5: In April 2007, Pascal and Irina were married, in a judge’s chambers in Manhattan. The ceremony took less time than a game of bullet chess, and Alex and I were the witnesses. When the bored judge, who never looked up at them and presumably married dozens of couples that day, told Pascal that he could kiss the bride, Alex blurted out, “My least favorite part!” I shushed him and whispered that he wasn’t being very nice. “I’m kind of joking, Dad,” he said. “It’s about time they got married!”

  SOURCE NOTES

  I want to thank The New Yorker [“The Pandolfini Defense,” June 4, 2001] and Smithsonian [“A Chess Player Realizes the Game Controls His Life,” July 1987, and “Chess Queen,” August 2003] for giving me permission to incorporate these articles of mine into this book. When I’ve quoted printed sources, I’ve taken the liberty of adjusting the spelling of Russian names so that they are consistent throughout King’s Gambit.

  CHAPTER 1: The Insanity Defense

  “a nice and abstruse game…”: Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755, as quoted in Jerome Salzmann, The Chess Reader, 1949: Greenberg, p. 107.

  “Your body has to be in top condition…”: Frank Brady, Profile of a Prodigy: The Life and Games of Bobby Fischer, 1973 revised: David McKay, p. 216.

  “Chess-players once again…”: “The Luzhin Defense,” British Chess Magazine, August 2000, p. 437.

  “In no other type of sport…”: Genna Sosonko, “The Jump,” New in Chess, No. 3, 2000, p. 63.

  “The intermittently institutionalized Mexican…”: Nigel Short, “Chess Can Seriously Damage Your Health,” The Spectator, September 2, 2000, p. 35.

  “I have always a slight feeling…”: Tarrasch as quoted, in many places, including Cathy Forbes, Nigel Short: Quest for the Crown, 1993: Cadogan, p. 2.

  “The most important thing for anyone…”: ibid., p. 15.

  CHAPTER 2: Fathers and Sons

  “DOCTORS PHOTOGRAPH…”: Pageant, January 1966.

  “OPEN LETTER TO NEGROES…”: ibid.

  “CHASTE…MISUNDERSTOOD…RESTLESS…”: ibid.

  “HOW FEMALE TEACHERS WARP OUR”: Pageant, October 1966.

  “THE MEN WHO STEAL CHILDREN’S…”: Pageant, February 1966.

  “THE ‘QUEER’ ONES…”: Pageant, March 1966.

  “A MINISTER’S OWN STORY…”: Pageant, August 1966.

  “Without disturbing the silence that prevailed…”: Capablanca, quoted in E. G. Winter, World Chess Champions, 1981: Pergaman Press, p. 53.

  “My parents used to like solving the chess problems…”: Garry Kasparov, Unlimited Challenge, 1990: Grove Weidenfeld (originally published as Child of Change, 1987), p. 7.

  “I felt the harmony of the game…”: Anatoly Karpov, Karpov on Karpov, 1990: Atheneum, p. 12.

  “Nigel’s first exposure to chess…”: David Short, Nigel Short: Chess Prodigy, 1981: Faber and Faber, p. 25.

  “It became difficult…”: Unlimited Challenge, p. 7.

  “after 15 moves…”: Andrew Soltis, Soviet Chess 1917–1991, 2000: McFarland, p. 23.

  “that with a Knight’s move of this lime tree…”: Vladimir Nabokov, The Defense, 1990: Vintage International, p. 99.45 “best architect…”: Ralph Ginzburg, “Portrait of a Genius as a Chess Master,” Harper’s Magazine, January 1962, as quoted in I. A. Horowitz and P. L. Rothenberg, The Personality of Chess, 1963: Macmillan, p. 146.

  “Eye witnesses present at the closing stage…”: Siegen Olympiad tournament book, quoted in Dominic Lawson, End Game, 1994: Harmony Books, p. 164.

  “I am like the chess King of Charles XII…”: Anthony Saidy and Norman Lessing, The World of Chess, 1974: Random House, p. 19.

  “When a player, upon system, consumes hours over moves…”: Howard Staunton, The Chess Player’s Chronicle, 1851.

  “each player have a three hours’ sand-glass…”: The Chess Player’s Chronicle, February 1852, p. 62.

  “In my country there is only one man…”: Hans Ree, The Human Comedy of Chess, 1999, Russell Enterprises, No. 1, p. 83.

  “Wherever chess nuts gather…”: James Hoffman, “Chess: Once the Game of Kings, Now the King of Games,” Lithopinion, Winter 1970, p. 75.

  “The game lasted a long time…”: ibid., p. 78.

  “In the cab…”: ibid.

  CHAPTER 3: The Pandolfini Variation

  “While Fischer has always been…”: Timothy Hanke, “Finding Bobby Fischer,” American Chess Journal, 1992, No. 1, p. 72.

  “We were in the fifth hour…”: Brad Darrach, Bobby Fischer vs. the Rest of the World, 1974: Stein and Day, p. 167. 70 “I like to see ’em squirm”: Harold Schonberg, Grandmasters of Chess, 1973: J. B. Lippincott, p. 264.

  “The only goal…”: Rudolph Chelminski, “In the Game of Chess ‘Your Opponent Must Be Destroyed,’” Smithsonian, January 1998.

  CHAPTER 4: Russian Domination

  “Thank you, darling…”: Pushkin, in many places, including Garry Kasparov, Child of Change, 1987: Hutchinson, p. 49.

  “Our great teachers…”: Pravda, August 29, 1936, as translated in D. J. Richards, Soviet Chess, 1965: Oxford University Press, p. 63.

  “I am infinitely happy to report…”: ibid., p. 64.

  “Sitting at the chess table in Nottingham…”: ibid.

  “such a lot of people playing chess”: Soviet Chess 1917–1991, p. 2.

  “Pure paranoia is a rare mental illness…”: London Sunday Times, as quoted in Soviet Chess, p. 43.

  “This may sound strange…”: New in Chess, as quoted in Soviet Chess 1917–1991, p. 2.

  “The Soviet chess world was aghast…”: Grandmasters of Chess, p. 231.

  “Almost all of the top players…”: Howard Goldowsky, “A Conversation with Hikaru Nakamura,” ChessCafe.com.

  “Those who were brought up under the Soviet system…”: End Game, p. 17.

  “When Karpov is being mentioned…”: The Human Comedy of Chess, p. 7.

  “had been waiting long enough…”: ibid., p. 3.

  “knew that should he lose the next game…”: ibid., pp. 3, 4.

  “whoever gets such a chance…”: ibid., p. 4.

  “Each time before I sit down…”: Karpov on Karpov, pp. 179, 180.

  “Some people seeing my intense concentration…”: Child of Change, p. 46.

  “Steinitz, the first world champion…”: ibid., p. 33.

  “How could you give…”: chessbase.com/eventarticle.asp?newsid=851.

  “Kasparov launched one of the most violent…”: Ian Rogers, Sun-Herald, March 16, 2003.

  “It saddens me…”: chesscenter.com/twic/event/linares 2003/rdprize.html.

  “Calculation most often comes…”: Paul Hoffman, Archimedes’ Revenge, 1988: W. W. Norton, p. 182.

  “I was lying…”: chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=3505.

  “Once again…”: chessbase.com/eventarticle.asp?newsid=3382.

  “I cannot really…”: chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=3512.

/>   CHAPTER 5: An American in Moscow

  “that Vaganian played…”: Genna Sosonko, The Reliable Past, 2003: New in Chess, p. 75.

  “[He] lacked the obsessive desire…”: ibid., p. 73.

  “The only way to go was all out…”: Evgeny Atarov, “Russian Roulette in Hotel Rossyia,” New in Chess, No. 3, 2004, p. 42.

  CHAPTER 6: Anatomy of a Hustler

  “can be created by giving…”: Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell 1872–1914, 1967: Atlantic Monthly Press, pp. 115, 116.

  “The game of chess is the second most entertaining diversion…”: Claude Bloodgood, Nimzovich Attack: The Norfolk Gambits, 1997: Chess Digest. p. 9.

  “highly irregular”: London Daily Telegraph, May 22, 2005, chessbase.com/newsde tail.asp?newsid=2406.

  “a dead drawn position…”: Viktor Korchnoi, Chess Is My Life, 1978: Arco, p. 17. 183 “he went into raptures…”: ibid., p. 30.

  “All of a sudden…”: Susan Polgar’s column, August 17, 2003, www.chesscafe.com/text/polgar14.pdf.

  “On the chessboard…”: Lasker, as quoted, in many places, including Nigel Short: Quest for the Crown, p. 2.

  CHAPTER 7: Female Counterplay

  “the female is much less deadly…”: Child of Change, pp. 49, 50.

  “We learnt what we needed…”: London Daily Telegraph, January 16, 2002.

  “Come on, what do you think…”: Dirk Jan ten Geuzendam, Linares! Linares!, 2001: New in Chess, p. 75.

  “He’s only got to say…”: ibid.

  “You bring down shame…”: ibid., p. 74.

  “How could you…”: ibid., p. 79.

  “Now I wonder if I could be so prudent to give a pawn…”: Kasparov in The New York Times, Sept. 22, 2002.