King's Gambit

by Paul Hoffman

  World-class players generally follow certain standard sequences of opening moves—like the Rossolimo Variation—until one of them forgets what has been previously played or purposefully varies with an intended improvement. In this encounter the two combatants quickly deviated from established play, although the position they reached had themes familiar to anyone who knew the Dragon. White responded with the so-called Yugoslav Attack and was pursuing Black’s monarch on the kingside, bombarding him with pawns and pieces, and Black was counterattacking on the queenside. The Black side of the Dragon is not for the timid; because Black moves second, he is often one tempo behind in the race for the king. To mix things up, Black sometimes employs a double-edged maneuver called an exchange sacrifice—giving up a rook for a knight. The rook is generally a much stronger piece than the knight, but Black initiates the trade in order to strip White’s king of a protective wall of pawns. Black is going for broke when he willingly parts with the powerful rook. He accepts a weaker army in return for an acceleration of his attack. If he doesn’t quickly checkmate White’s king, or restore the material balance by capturing a couple of loose pawns, the rook’s absence will eventually defeat him.

  Pascal spent eight minutes on his fourteenth move trying to make sense of what would happen if Drenchev offered the exchange sacrifice. Caissa, the muse of chess, was kind that day, and the Canadian had an inspiration seconds into his long think. He saw that he could respond with an unexpected sacrifice—or “sac” in chess lingo—of his own. He could boldly refuse to execute the offered rook, thereby giving up his own knight and effectively pardoning the rook for capturing it, and simply press ahead with his own all-out assault on Drenchev’s king. Pascal concluded that his attack would be so fast that he’d succeed in checkmating Drenchev long before his opponent could profit from the extra knight. To ignore the gift rook was a deliciously devilish idea, but there was an unfortunate problem: it was all fantasy unless the Bulgarian actually decided to sac the exchange. Pascal made a bishop move typical of the Dragon in the hope of enticing the sac, and then he sat back quietly, calmly, drawing on whatever acting ability he had to conceal his enthusiasm and deviousness. Two moves and less than half a minute later, Drenchev fell into the trap and grabbed the knight.

  When Pascal refrained from immediately making the “obvious” rook capture, Drenchev looked uncomfortable. The Bulgarian knew from the hesitation that something was up. Pascal in fact was checking his analysis one last time before electing to spare the rook, and the longer he thought—albeit this happened in seconds, not minutes—the more Drenchev squirmed.

  For Pascal’s part, he could not fully enjoy the success of his swindle because he was feeling increasingly queasy. “I had eaten a ton for breakfast,” he told me later. “I was completely stuffed.” He said that he hadn’t gotten much sleep because his girlfriend kept him up late playing Internet poker. And then he pointedly added: “My position in the game was much too exciting.”

  As Pascal studied the chessboard, he became so nauseated that he had to stop thinking and just proceed as planned. He got up from the table. He knew he couldn’t make it to the restroom, so he rushed out a side door of the tournament hall and, with no one watching, vomited in the grass. Then he headed to the washroom, cleaned his face, and returned to the game. Fortunately his analysis was airtight. Drenchev also saw that checkmate was inevitable and testily resigned after only five more moves. The hour-long, twenty-two-move encounter was an exquisite miniature in a competition in which the games typically lasted four hours and at least forty moves. Drenchev dismissed the loss as a cheap trick and insisted he would have had the better position if he’d played differently at certain junctures. Pascal replayed the game on a chessboard in his mind. He tried the Bulgarian’s suggested improvements and saw immediately that they would have failed, but he kept the refutations to himself. “He was angry,” Pascal told me. “I didn’t want to antagonize him further.”

  IN CHESS IT IS HARD TO HIDE FROM DEFEAT. WHEN YOUR CROQUET BALL mysteriously veers to one side, you can always look for pebbles in the grass. When his aces beat your kings, you can always blame the cards. But when your bishop is deflected, you cannot search for imperfections in the playing surface or lament the roll of the dice. Of course, there is a small element of luck in chess: I was lucky that Rossolimo was inebriated. I am fortunate if my opponent adopts the one opening I happened to cram the day before. But most players consider chess the consummate game of skill and therefore, rightly or wrongly, associate success at it with overall intelligence. That’s why losses are so hard. No good player ever readily admits to himself that he was defeated because of his opponent’s brilliance.

  That may be why there is an enormous amount of rationalization among chess players. The loss of a chess game has been so often attributed to illness that more than one master has joked that he’s never defeated a healthy opponent.4 After an unwelcome defeat, the loser may blurt out an explanation—“I was too tired,” “The tournament hall was too hot,” “Camelovich’s cough was distracting”—but if he is sane, he knows in his heart that this is just an excuse. Nothing can belie the annoying reality that even a truly clever tactical strike, to which there is no adequate response, could not have been launched if the loser had played differently at an earlier point. (Pascal’s mating attack, for instance, would not have succeeded if Drenchev had restrained his rook from capturing Pascal’s knight.) This knowledge is foremost in the loser’s mind. He cannot rest until he discovers where he went awry. To this end, he goes over the game repeatedly, on the board or in his head, mulling over lost opportunities. Chess players live in an alternative world of what might have been.

  There’s also no way to disown the damage that you and your opponent deliberately do to each other. You cannot apologize when your bishop skewers his queen, and he offers no excuses when his pieces descend on your king. And when you announce “Checkmate!” any effort to sound soft and sweet goes unnoticed. He still detects malice and smugness in your voice—and most of the time it’s not his imagination. Chess is a zero-sum game.

  And yet I don’t know of any pastime that is more addictive. Because chess is so hard on the ego and stressful on the body, it is surprising that players, particularly those who lose disproportionately, don’t simply abandon it. A few of them do, but many more try to make up for their losses by immersing themselves further in its intricacies and lore—hoping, ultimately, to conquer the game. At various points in history, clerics of different faiths have banned chess because they believed it to be so consuming that men who took it up might neglect spiritual and family life. (The pope, cardinals, and bishops defied the prohibition by playing secretly among themselves.) More recently, Afghanistan under the Taliban and Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini outlawed chess for much the same reason.5

  MANY PLAYERS CLAIM TO HAVE BEEN SEDUCED BY THE INHERENT BEAUTY of the game, and chess masters sometimes describe themselves as artists. They regard the chessboard as a painter views a blank canvas or a sculptor a lump of clay. Chess may be esoteric—you need to have extensive experience with it to appreciate it fully—but that doesn’t make it any less of an art.6 There is mesmerizing splendor to a well-played game, and the aesthetic satisfaction is different depending upon the style of the player. For example, the games of Anatoly Karpov, Kasparov’s archrival and predecessor as world champion, have a certain classic elegance. Karpov’s graceful coordination of pieces and pawns is as pleasing to the eye as is the formal geometry of the Parthenon. Pascal’s victory over Drenchev has a wittier, more contemporary form of beauty. Kasparov’s games, in which he so decisively overpowers his opponents, have the terrifying appeal of a tornado or a tidal wave.

  In practice the possibilities in chess are boundless, although theoretically it is a mathematically finite activity—-there are, for example, 988 million positions that can be reached after four moves for White and four for Black. In any given position one move is undoubtedly best, although in most positions we as a species lack
the mental resources (as well as, for the moment, the computer resources) to determine that move. If we knew with certainty the best move, there’d be no point in playing. The game would be as silly and mindless as tick-tack-toe.

  Without being able to calculate the best move, you develop plans and strategies and play accordingly. That’s the fun of the game. Every grandmaster agrees, for example, that it’s important to control the central squares, but how to achieve this is a matter of long debate. Some players think it’s best to immediately occupy the central squares with pawns. Others hold back the pawns and bring bishops and knights to bear on those squares. The intellectual joy of chess is that you can have a considered opinion about which plan is best and stand behind that opinion by trying the plan in actual games.

  Chess also endures: the moves of a good game from a top-level tournament are recorded for posterity and examined by future generations of players. Of all board and card games, only chess has this kind of immortality. Instructional bridge books often show hands played by famous champions, but the culture of bridge does not require all students of the game to know these particular hands. But every devoted chess player has studied the games of the 1972 World Championship, in which Bobby Fischer defeated Boris Spassky. And every conscientious chess student has played move by move through the nineteenth-century attacking masterpieces known as the Immortal Game and the Evergreen Game, whose very names capture their transcendent nature. The creation of lasting beauty makes those who have mastered the sixty-four squares believe that chess is more than a game. When a grandmaster plays a game, he is doing much more than engaging in a cerebral battle with a human opponent. He is contributing to the evolution of chess technique.

  And yet aesthetic considerations alone cannot explain why men and women become obsessed with chess. The thrill of competition, the euphoria of victory, is what really keeps players returning to the board. Its warlike struggle awakens the minds and bodies of people who may be anesthetized to other aspects of their worlds. “Chess is like life,” Spassky once proclaimed. Fischer was more extreme: “Chess is life.”

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, chess has traditionally been a male domain. Only 3 percent of U.S. tournament competitors are female. A study described in the Journal of Personality and Individual Differences, which engendered much snickering in the popular press, found that the testosterone levels of male masters (and 99 percent of all U.S. masters are male) rose in anticipation of playing a game and shot up again as they mated their opponents. The researchers measured depressed testosterone levels in men who were on the receiving end of a mating attack. I’m sure I’m not the only player who was disquieted by these findings. I delved further into the scientific literature and was relieved to learn that researchers also expected testosterone spikes in male medical students waiting in line at a graduation ceremony to receive their MD degrees, CEOs calling their brokers to cash in stock options, and home run hitters rounding third base. It seems that those of us who are endowed with XY chromosomes are simple creatures. Anything that gives us pleasure and confirms our mastery of the world elevates our testosterone.

  ALTHOUGH CHESS IS REGARDED AS A GAME OF GREAT INTELLIGENCE, AT THE same time it is often associated with insanity and obsession. Every chess club, it seems, has at least one resident who left his wife or job to play the game all day. The only two Americans to reach the pinnacle of chess, Paul Morphy and Bobby Fischer, suffered from paranoia. Morphy withdrew from tournament chess at the peak of his career, in 1859, and spent the next two decades worrying that relatives and friends wanted to kill him. Fischer, whose mother was Jewish,7 believed there was a worldwide Jewish conspiracy to destroy him, and he praised 9/11 because of the number of Jews who were killed in the World Trade Center. He reportedly had the fillings in his teeth removed because he feared that they were capable of receiving radio messages beamed by his enemies.

  In addition, an entire body of literature, psychoanalytic and fictional, from Ernest Jones’s “The Problem of Paul Morphy” to Stefan Zweig’s Chess Story8 and Vladimir Nabokov’s The Defense,9 depicts the game as an incubator for psychopathology. Of the fictional works, Nabokov’s 1930 novel is the most well-known portrayal of the chess player as madman. Nabokov’s story reached a wide audience in 2001 with the release of the film The Luzhin Defense, starring John Turturro as Luzhin and Emily Watson as his fiancée. Luzhin’s chess teacher, Valentinov, is thoroughly evil. He is the most important figure in the young player’s life, but leaves his protégé when he thinks Luzhin doesn’t have what it takes to become world champion. Years later, when Luzhin is playing against the Italian maestro Turati for the World Championship, Valentinov appears in the tournament hall to rattle his former pupil’s concentration and sabotage his chances. Luzhin has a breakdown at the board and abandons the game in the middle, but in his delirium sees how he can finish Turati off with an improbable rook move. Luzhin’s doctor tells his fiancée that he must never be allowed to resume the game or play any chess whatsoever. Valentinov then kidnaps Luzhin so that he can complete the game with Turati, but Luzhin escapes. He decides to make one final move in what he sees as the chess game of life, exiting the world by leaping from a high-story window.10

  The movie engendered much fretting in the chess press. “Chess players once again have to come to terms with chess being depicted on screen as the mental equivalent of a dangerous drug,” British Chess Magazine opined. And yet the magazine decried the “alarming number” of real-life players who had killed themselves by jumping from windows or bridges: the Estonian grandmaster Lembit Oll, in 1999; the Latvian international master Alvis Vitolins, in 1997; the Armenian international master Karen Grigorian, in 1989; and the Russian international master Georgy Ilivitsky, that same year.

  The first player to kill himself in this unusual manner was the German master Curt von Bardeleben, who had been on the receiving end of one of the most famous mating attacks in chess history, orchestrated by world champion Wilhelm Steinitz at Hastings in 1895. Von Bardeleben was so sickened by the position of his exposed king that he disappeared from the tournament hall before Steinitz had a chance to finish him off with a beautiful checkmate in ten forced moves. Von Bardeleben’s suicide in 1924 undoubtedly influenced Nabokov, who—in the kind of coincidence that befell his fictional characters—rented an apartment from one of von Bardeleben’s relatives, a one-legged general “solely occupied in working out his family tree.”

  Self-defenestration is now engrained in the mythology of chess. The latest fatality, in June 2006, was Oxford-bound Jessie Gilbert, a nineteen-year-old talent on the English women’s chess team whose father faced charges of sexually abusing her and other young women. During a tournament in Pardubice, Czech Republic, Gilbert plunged from the eighth-floor window of her hotel room.11 (In December 2006, a jury acquitted Gilbert’s father of all charges.)

  In a remarkable essay called “The Jump,” in the magazine New in Chess, Dutch grandmaster Genna Sosonko was forthright about the extent of psychosis and suicide in modern chess. “In no other type of sport,” he wrote,

  does one encounter such a large number of peculiar people, engrossed in themselves and living in their own world…. Any chess game contains a wide range of emotions, with joys and vexations, great and small. This accompanies any type of creativity. But whereas in painting or literature, for example, it is possible to cross out, rewrite or change, in chess a movement of the fingers, communicated by the mind, is final: often it can be repaired only by sweeping the wooden pieces off the board. Or you can castigate yourself, by hitting your head against a wall, or by rolling around on the floor, as one modern grandmaster does after losing a game.

  Sosonko observed that it is the rare game in which a player steadily accumulates advantages and turns them into a full point. “But even in this case,” he wrote, “a player who is honest with himself knows what he was afraid of at a certain moment, what he was hoping for, and how he flinched after miscalculating in a variation.” More commonly a grandmaster game i
s a seesaw battle, proceeding often along the following lines: “slightly worse, clearly worse, a mistake by the opponent, joy, winning chances, time trouble, missed opportunities, draw.” The mood swings rattle a player’s “inner mental core…which can lead to difficult, far-reaching consequences, especially if this core is shaky or diseased.” Were people with “shaky unstable psyches” especially attracted to the game, Sosonko wondered, or was the game itself—what Nabokov called this “complex, delightful and useless art”—inherently destabilizing? In Luzhin’s case, the mental fatigue of tournament play may ultimately have broken him, but it was a childhood undermined by a harsh, disapproving, adulterous father and a withdrawn, suicidal mother that set the stage.

  Sosonko noted that two of the jumpers, Alvis Vitolins and Karen Grigorian, were much better at speed chess than they were at long tournament games. “The time allotted for play allows one to sink into thought, generating doubts and uncertainty. And for them—with their sharp falls in mood and excitable nervous system—this served only as a stimulus for mistakes and oversights. Blitz [chess], however, demands instant reactions; psychology and self-reproach retreat into the background, and there remains only that which is obvious in them—great natural talent.”

  Many chess professionals wish that Sosonko, and even Nabokov, had kept their thoughts about chess insanity to themselves. They fear that “The Jump” and The Defense harm the game by contributing to the stereotype of chess masters as eccentrics and social misfits. Most grandmasters, they argue, are just regular guys like Vladimir Kramnik, Kasparov’s successor as world champion, who is considered normal, bland, and unexceptional in every way except his chess (and even his chess seems a bit dull, with some pundits claiming that he beat Kasparov by boring him to death), and Boris Spassky, who went to the opera and the finest restaurants in Reykjavík between games during the 1972 championship while Bobby Fischer was closeted alone in his hotel room, huddled over a chessboard.