King's Gambit

by Paul Hoffman

  To Ann’s chagrin, I started entering the occasional chess tournament in Chicago. She was bothered by the stories of how chess had absorbed me in my youth, and it was a game whose appeal she did not understand. I needed to play chess to engage my mind, which was otherwise atrophying at Britannica. I wanted to see how long it would take me to recover my college playing strength, and of course I wanted to surpass it. I knew that my brain cells were too ossified for me to become a champion. I did not expect to earn a certain title or win a specific tournament. I just wanted to play a really great game against a formidable adversary. A tournament game can take five hours, and unless you are constantly vigilant, you can throw away a winning position that you’ve painstakingly built up over the afternoon with a single ill-considered move.

  Most intellectual and professional pursuits—academics; my career in publishing, writing, and television; other games that I have taken up—have come easily to me. I was the valedictorian of Staples High School in Westport, a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard College, and the editor in chief of a national magazine at the age of thirty. I performed mathematical paper-folding tricks on David Letterman, and spent an entire hour on Oprah talking not about my dysfunctional childhood but about the future of consumer technology. (To give Oprah and her millions of viewers a glimpse of this future, I strapped her into a virtual hang glider while she claimed I was ogling her butt.) Chess—and Britannica—were the chief exceptions to this success; the finer points of the game eluded me in a way that nothing else had. I had learned the rules of chess as a youngster but wasn’t able to master the game. If I couldn’t make Britannica work, I was now determined to conquer chess.

  IN LATE SPRING OF 2000, AROUND ALEX’S FIRST BIRTHDAY, I FINALLY ESCAPED from Britannica and moved my family halfway across the country to Woodstock, New York, into a two-centuries-old converted barn. The Man Who Loved Only Numbers had been published in fourteen languages, and I had a contract to write another book, Wings of Madness, the story of Alberto Santos-Dumont, a flamboyant Brazilian inventor who piloted a flimsy flying machine around the Eiffel Tower in 1901, two years before Kitty Hawk. A fringe benefit of my research in early aviation—and the consulting work I was now doing for magazines and Internet companies—was that it took me almost weekly to New York City, where I had greater access to the chess world.

  I visited my old haunts around Washington Square Park and played in tournaments at the renowned Marshall Chess Club. I also picked up assignments to write about chess from The New Yorker, Smithsonian, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, which helped to justify my increased involvement in the game. Very few journalists covered chess in the mainstream press; my articles received attention, and I became the master of ceremonies for a few high-profile chess events in New York City and the color commentator on ESPN2 for seventeen tense hours of live chess between Kasparov and a computer. I even had the opportunity to face Kasparov in a game, and later I helped him prepare a speech—on achieving one’s full potential in life—that he delivered to a group of Swiss bankers.

  As I waded back into chess, I strove to separate my own chess playing from the overall insanity of the pastime. I tried to ignore my opponents’ behavior and react solely to their moves on the board. In other words, I tried to play pure chess. Like so many goals I’ve had regarding the sixty-four squares, this one also proved to be elusive.

  EARLY IN MY RETURN TO CHESS, I WENT BACK TO HARVARD TO PLAY IN A FOUR-ROUND tournament, on a wintry weekend when the Charles River that runs past the campus was freezing over. I had not spent a night at Harvard in two and a half decades. The college arranged for me to sleep in a guesthouse among the freshmen dormitories in Harvard Yard. I was delighted with the accommodations because it was actually the first time I had stayed in the Yard. In my college days, the historic dormitories housed all but a few freshmen, and I was one of those who didn’t make it. Consigned by the university to an off-campus apartment building, where a dean’s secretary had been murdered, I missed out on the excitement, camaraderie, and freshman bonding of the Yard.

  So often in my life I’ve felt on the sidelines—even at times when, by any external measure, I wasn’t. But I was actually marginalized my freshman year, and it was mostly my own doing. I had outsmarted myself when Harvard inquired about my roommate preferences. Asked on a form for the time I went to bed, I was supposed to check one of three boxes: early, average, or late. Now, I had been a poor sleeper most of my life. If I didn’t get eight hours, I’d wake up with a headache or mild nausea. As for falling asleep, it usually took me a while, with all the events of the day swimming in my head, and so I needed to allow for an extra hour to wind down. To get sufficient rest and make it to high school on time, I had to go to bed at 8:45 P.M. Most of my friends needed much less sleep, and I had an exaggerated idea of late-night college life.

  I hoped to go to bed at Harvard at 11:00 P.M., but I thought “early” on the form meant midnight, “average” meant 2:00 A.M., and “late,” 4:00 A.M. So I drew a thick line through all the boxes and, in a panic that my 11:00 P.M. plan was too ambitious, wrote 8:00 P.M. in the margin.

  The dean’s office unfortunately did its job too well and paired me with two other oddballs who presumably also returned the forms with marginalia and who often hit the sack by 8:00 P.M. One was a Zoroastrian (causing me to consult an encyclopedia even before my classes began) and a brilliant budding physicist who, while still in high school, was reportedly part of a team of researchers who discovered a new subatomic particle. My other roommate hailed from the South, and I arrived at Harvard on my first day to find a Confederate flag in the common room, which doubled as his bedroom. I think I was the embodiment of everything he found distasteful, an Eastern liberal intellectual atheist from modern-day Sodom, New York City. He had the annoying habit of taping index cards with words he was learning in German One to the bathroom mirror. He would close all the window shades in our fourth-floor suite before he would change so much as his shirt, never mind his pants. Once I woke up in the middle of the night and was distressed to find him standing by my bed in his pajamas, looking at me. The few times I brought a girl back to our suite, both of my roommates were either as giddy as Teletubbies or absurdly formal, as if the Queen of England were visiting. If I wanted sane company my freshman year, I should have spent more time at the Harvard Chess Club.

  My return to the campus years later did not go well. I was hoping that the four-round Harvard Open, which anyone could enter, would be my breakthrough as an adult player. I wanted to defy the general view that tournament chess was primarily a young man’s game and perform better than I had in school. I wanted to execute brilliant maneuvers in front of the current members of the Harvard chess team, who had not been born when I played for the same team. In the first round, I faced an older master, John Curdo, once the strongest player in New England. Although he was ranked substantially higher in the chess world than me, I hoped to win because he was past his prime, and I convinced myself that if we got into a tactical melee, my middle-aged mind could calculate variations faster than his seventy-year-old mind. But I soon got an inferior position because I fell for an opening trap that every self-respecting player except me seemed to know. For the remainder of the game Curdo tortured me and proved me wrong by outcalculating me.

  In the second game, I played a newly minted Harvard graduate and achieved a decent setup only to throw it away when I couldn’t find a constructive continuation. Then I reflexively checked his king three times, which gave me some fleeting emotional satisfaction, but unfortunately didn’t bring me any closer to cornering his king and in fact just drove it to a safer place on the board while misplacing my own pieces that had participated in the feeble assault. (There is a dismissive saying in chess, “Patzer sees a check, patzer gives a check.” Patzer, from the German verpatzen, “to mess things up,” is a pejorative term for a clueless player. It is correct to check, or attack, the enemy king when it has nowhere to move to; the king is then in checkmate
and the game is over. But if the king can flee, as my opponent’s could, the check may not accomplish anything or even make things worse.) Now all my adversary’s pieces were on better squares than mine, and over the next wearisome forty-two moves, he ground me down, won a key pawn, and forced me to give up a rook. All I had left were two pawns and my king versus his rook and king. I saw that I could not stop him from picking off my pawns. With no remaining army to protect my poor monarch, I knew he would be able to use his rook to drive my king to the edge of the board and snare it. I resigned rather than give him the pleasure of actually mating me.

  In the third round, I squared off against a twenty-something jabberer who had the same pathetic score of 0–2 (zero wins and two losses) as me. I played unusually passively and he eventually won a pawn. In the fifth hour, I introduced complications in an endgame that he should have won. We were both exhausted. He went astray in the thicket of possibilities and the game petered out into a sterile ending in which each of our respective armies was so depleted that neither of us had sufficient firepower to checkmate the other. We agreed to a draw. In the fourth and final round, I faced a doughy boy who looked even younger than his thirteen years and who, like me, was at the bottom of the tournament ladder. I was in a foul mood to begin with and his behavior made it worse. He blitzed out all his moves and left the board whenever it wasn’t his turn. I thought he was making an arrogant show of trying to beat me without thinking about the moves. I played the opening carelessly, overlooked an opportunity for a clear advantage, and instead blundered away a pawn. As the child took advantage of my error and eagerly captured my pawn, he let out a loud, snotty snort. I thought he was lampooning my lame play. On the fourteenth move, he shifted his queen so that it opposed mine, forcing what he thought would be the exchange of ladies, which would bring him closer to realizing his pawn advantage. He smiled, got up from the table, and skipped around the room. I saw no alternative than to comply with his plan. But after I made my move, I realized that I had overlooked a killer continuation that would have won his queen (not simply swapped his queen for mine) and subsequently the game. I was angry at myself for missing it. Once you make a move in tournament chess, it is absolutely forbidden to retract it. But the child was still away from the table, frolicking with his friends, so he didn’t know that I had moved. I glanced at the players at the neighboring boards, and when I saw that they were so engrossed in their own games that they would not witness what I was doing, I reached out, took back my move, and assayed the winning continuation instead. Ignorant of my infraction, the boy returned to the board and saw that I had won his queen. He gasped, resigned the game, and left abruptly.

  When he gasped, I felt terrible, and my humanity returned. What the fuck had I done? It was obvious to me then that I had read too much into his behavior. He probably intended no disrespect by his quick and distracted play but just wanted to get the miserable tournament over with and go home. I also realized that he had a cold and what I’d interpreted as a snort of derision was simply an effort to clear his clogged nose. Two acne-pocked members of the Harvard chess team came over and congratulated me on my false victory. I was disgusted with myself. I had let myself become so unhinged by a board game that I had cheated a child. It was my only ethical lapse ever at chess, a game that had once symbolized for me a pure refuge from the vicissitudes and pettiness of everyday life. It made me question whether I could ever play inspired chess and remain a whole person. Here, sadly, I had managed to do neither.

  The Harvard experience made me very contemplative. For me, chess was clearly unfinished business: I needed to explore the complex personal issues—psychological, philosophical, and familial—that the game raised. I needed to understand why this noble activity brought out the monster as well as the artist in those who played it. My immersion in the game was largely a psychological odyssey, a mission of self-discovery.

  I wanted to know what it was like to compete at the top and whether the demands on the psyche were as great as they appeared. I wanted to get a sense of how the minds of champions worked and whether their minds differed from mine. I wanted to witness how chess professionals handled the emotional highs and lows of victory and defeat. I wanted to talk to others who were as excited and bewitched by the game as I was. I wanted to figure out why chess was so addictive. I wanted to understand why there weren’t more women playing and become acquainted with some of the few who had managed to penetrate this testosterone-charged domain. I needed to know if I could play chess without compromising my humanity.

  Insanity, I should add, may be something to avoid in life, but it certainly is not incompatible with strong chess. From December 1883 to March 1884, the Cambridge University chess team collaborated in a game played by mail against the Bedlam Insane Asylum. The mental patients won, reportedly on the Black side of the Sicilian Defense, in a brisk twenty-five moves.

  2

  FATHERS AND SONS

  “The apple never falls far from the tree.”

  —a proverb in forty-two European languages

  “Luzhin walked through all three rooms, looking for a place to hide the pocket chess set. Everywhere was insecure. The most unexpected places were invaded in the mornings by the snout of that rapacious vacuum cleaner.”

  —VLADIMIR NABOKOV,

  The Defense

  MY FATHER LOVED GAMES, AND WORDS, AND PLAYING GAMES with words. He was famous among my childhood friends as an affable raconteur and prankster. He tried, for instance, to convince them that he owned the local oil company. Whenever a truck with “Hoffman Fuel” emblazoned on its side barreled past the school bus stop in Westport, he’d smile and shout at the driver, “How’s business?” At election time, he’d stand up in a Volkswagen convertible parked by a supermarket, wave to shoppers, and ask for their votes. Sometimes he built an audience by delivering an impromptu stump speech. He also liked to entertain my friends with nonsense verse—“Of all the fishes in the seas/ my favorite is the bass/ who climbs up on the seaweed trees/ and slides down on…his hands and knees”—and captivate them with intriguing tales of the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, and other political upheavals that he believed had been just. The kids at the bus stop would recite political songs that he’d taught them: “A tisket, a tasket/ Put Hitler in a basket/ Defeat that meanie Mussolini/ And his henchman Franco.” When we were a bit older, he told us wild stories about his unconventional life, like the time a pornographer made a movie in his Greenwich Village apartment.

  Before my parents’ divorce, my father’s words literally filled our house: an errant cigarette butt once set fire to his office because there were so many papers and manuscripts scattered about. There were also piles of files devoted to the celebrities whose peccadilloes and misdeeds he enthusiastically wrote about for national magazines. At the peak of my dad’s article-writing business, he employed two ladies part-time to read dozens of newspapers from around the country, clip any juicy gossip—about the actress who swam nude in the White House pool, or the CEO who was in rehab—and file the items so that he could crib from them later in his own lurid pieces.

  Puns were his forte. He called a story about the Fondas’ drinking problems “Absinthe Makes the Fondas Grow Heartier.” He also put his mind for wordplay to good use as a writer of radio jingles for advertisers and captions for New Yorker–style cartoons. He once asked an artist to sketch a person at a cocktail party speaking to J. Edgar Hoover and titled the picture “Have you booked any good reds lately?”

  My dad favored simple, direct prose, and he was such a facile stylist that a leading women’s magazine once hired him to write an entire issue, with each saucy story appearing under a different pseudonym. When he edited Pageant magazine in the mid-1960s, he put racy and provocative titles on the cover that tapped into people’s unarticulated fears and desires. As a kid I was titillated by these cover lines and derived naughty pleasure from reading the accompanying articles:

  DOCTORS PHOTOGRAPH BEDROOM BEHAVIOR!


  How Their Findings Can Help You…

  OPEN LETTER TO NEGROES:

  Why We Whites Really Fear You

  CHASTE…MISUNDERSTOOD…RESTLESS: THE AMERICAN NUN

  A special report on her unspoken problems

  HOW FEMALE TEACHERS WARP OUR BOYS

  THE MEN WHO STEAL CHILDREN’S PETS—

  for profit & slaughter

  THE ‘QUEER’ ONES:

  Why one man in six can never respond to a woman

  A MINISTER’S OWN STORY:

  “WITH LSD I SAW GOD”

  EVERY NIGHT OVER 60,000,000 AMERICANS BREAK THE LAW IN BED—

  Do you?1

  It wasn’t just that the titles were arresting and hyperbolic; the articles themselves pushed the boundaries of formerly taboo discourse in supermarket magazines. Today such cover lines are commonplace, and we are numb to them, but in the 1960s they drove hundreds of thousands of newsstand sales.

  My father was as comfortable with high literary culture as he was with pop culture. He spent his days in the world of tawdry magazines and his evenings at the New School lecturing on Thomas Pynchon and demystifying trilingual puns in Lolita and obscure historical references in The Waste Land. One summer he made a pilgrimage to Europe to visit Yeats’s and Joyce’s childhood haunts. He had a near photographic memory for literature and would recite long passages verbatim from Djuna Barnes, Henry Miller, and Nathanael West. He could even tell you the physical location of a passage he was reciting (“a quarter of the way down page 119”). An Evelyn Wood speed-reader, he often consumed two or three novels a day. He particularly liked the writers whose work—often banned in its day as obscene—explored homosexuality, sadomasochism, and erotica in general.