King's Gambit

by Paul Hoffman

  Then World War II forced radical intellectuals of his generation to reassess their commitment to Soviet Communism. My father felt betrayed in 1939, when Stalin signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler and allowed Germany to invade Poland. Stalin’s subsequent slaughter of his own people confirmed my father’s decision to align himself with Leon Trotsky, the banished Bolshevik leader (and, incidentally, a chess fanatic who purportedly planned the details of the Russian Revolution by moving pieces around on a chessboard). Trotsky was not as authoritarian or ruthless as Stalin; he objected to appeasing fascist countries and called for a democratic worldwide socialist revolution. Over time my father mellowed into a New Deal Democrat.

  There were other Communist sympathizers in my family, like Aunt Molka, the mother of the ex-husband of my father’s sister, who was a colorful presence at Thanksgiving. My father dismissed her as a closet Stalinist and warned me to stay clear of politics while we ate turkey lest the mealtime pleasantries erupt into an internecine feud between Communist splinter groups. Molka was a world-renowned marionettist, and my dad was particularly distressed by a puppet show she performed in which she reenacted, with unrestrained enthusiasm, the fatal ice-picking of Trotsky when he lived in exile in Mexico.

  Although my dad had renounced Communism before I was born, my friends and I still knew him as a political and social activist. As a child, I was both proud and embarrassed by my dad’s utopian and leftist views, just as I had conflicted feelings about our cluttered house. My dad was an early opponent of the Vietnam War—he was active in the War Resisters League—and I admired him for challenging my friends’ and their parents’ belief that they had to support the President of the United States.

  Years before I was eligible to be drafted, my father was scheming about how I could avoid Vietnam. As an atheist, I would not be able to receive a conscientious objector exemption to military service on religious grounds. And so he started dragging me, at the age of seven or eight, to Friends Meeting Houses, so that I would be able to claim that I was raised as a Quaker pacifist; he made sure I signed the guest book at the meetings. To create a further paper trail of my opposition to the war, he also took me to peace rallies in the hope that I’d be arrested, or at least end up in the newspaper. And he sent me to a radical sleepaway camp near the submarine base in Groton, Connecticut.

  We spoke Esperanto there, painted ban-the-bomb signs, and stuffed envelopes with antiwar brochures. I became very good at drawing mushroom clouds. In the evening our long-haired counselor would abandon us: he’d take the signs we had made and join other peaceniks in blocking access to the nuclear subs. Every few days we would get a new counselor after the previous one had been arrested for trespassing on military property. Late one night, pro-war townies set the camp on fire. The barn burned and horses stampeded. I begged my parents to retrieve me.

  Still, the frightening experience did not sour my father on doctrinaire summer camps. For the next three years he sent me to an all-boys Quaker camp in Vermont. I enjoyed the outdoor activities—swimming, canoeing, hiking, lean-to building—but rejected the religious underpinning, subdued as it was. I did not like singing “Kumbaya.” I resisted weaving Eyes of God. I started skipping the morning meditative Quaker services, to the consternation of the camp’s earnest director, and played chess instead with a friend.

  The counselors in Vermont were not arrested in demonstrations. They supervised us closely all summer long, although they occasionally coerced us into doing questionable things like hoeing in the nude. A dozen of us would walk around naked on a hillside, in various stages of pre-and post-puberty, turning over soil, pulling weeds, and harvesting carrots. I may have learned a bit about gardening, and the need to apply sunscreen, but I was ashamed to take off my clothes again in front of anybody for the next decade.

  My father’s radicalism extended to his ideas about primary-school education. He was the president of the Summerhill Society of America, an organization devoted to establishing alternative, progressive schools modeled after A. S. Neill’s controversial Summerhill in England, where kids were not confined to classrooms and could run around doing whatever they pleased: playing chess all day, or even nude hoeing, if they were so inclined. Given my dad’s affiliation with Summerhill, my own education—public schools in affluent Westport, Ivy League college—was surprisingly traditional. My parents disagreed about where to send me, and so their solution was that my mother chose the elementary and secondary schools, my father selected the summer camps, and I picked the college.

  My father wanted my education to include Marxism. When my parents were lying in bed late at night and my mother couldn’t sleep, he would explain The Communist Manifesto to her. It was the perfect cure for insomnia, she told me, although that of course was not his intention. My turn to understand The Communist Manifesto came at Harvard when, with my father’s approval, I took a large lecture course on Marx from the celebrated ex-socialist neocon thinker Daniel Bell. We had to read twelve hundred pages of Marx, not just the published works but drafts of them. I found the writing tedious—much of it was detailed description of every conceivable job in Industrial Age England—and two days before the exam I had managed to get through only a measly two hundred pages.

  In the end, it required drugs—the first I had ever taken—for me to conquer Marx, please my dad, and retain my summa cum laude grade point average. One of my college buddies had received a prescription for Dexedrine from his physician father, who assumed his son would be buying amphetamines from street peddlers in Harvard Square and preferred that he obtain pure stuff from a pharmacy instead. But he warned his son not to take Dexedrine after exam week. He had too many patients, he said, with high-powered jobs, many in government, who were addicted and needed ever-increasing, destructive doses to achieve the same effect.

  My studious compulsiveness required me to spend a day in the Science Center Library researching possible ill effects of Dexedrine in obscure medical journals—time that would have perhaps been better spent reading more Marx. I ended up taking the minimum dose and found that I could concentrate with laser focus on whatever I wanted. Anything I turned my mind to seemed to be the most exciting subject in the universe. I spent a long day in the Winthrop House Library scanning one thousand pages of Marx. I took the five-part final on speed. When I received my exam books back, the teaching assistant had written, “A, A+, A, A+, A. Superb work!! Too bad you didn’t talk more in section—we could have used your insights.” I think I received the top score. I could have been the poster child for Dexedrine. I hadn’t felt like I had taken a drug. I wasn’t jittery or manic at all. I felt totally rested and alive. I was having the best day of my life. It was scary how great I felt. I sensed Dexedrine’s addictive appeal and never took amphetamines again.

  I recently found my Marx exam in the attic. When I review it now, and see the teacher’s approving red check marks next to my essays, I am mystified that I was ever able to discourse, to my father’s great delight, on Hegel, Montaigne, Feuerbach, homo faber, lumpen proletariat, and the Eighteenth Brumaire.

  Today there is a debate in the chess world about drug testing. FIDE officials dream of chess becoming an official Olympic sport, and so, in compliance with International Olympic Committee standards, they have introduced random drug testing at tournaments (prompting one wag to suggest that FIDE officials are the ones on drugs if they truly think that chess will ever be played in the Olympics). Critics of the testing point out that chess has never had a drug problem. They also claim that there is nothing to test for because no medicine is known to boost chess or other intellectual performance. My two days on Dexedrine suggest otherwise. Amphetamines, I’m certain, could make you more alert and focused at the chessboard and help you cram the latest twists in opening theory just before the critical game, even if you forgot them a day later. OK, your brain cells will eventually sizzle if you do too much speed, but by then you will have played moves that will immortalize you in the chess hall of fame.

  I
N LATE JANUARY 2004, JOEL LAUTIER ENTERED THE ANNUAL AEROFLOT OPEN in Moscow, along with 163 other grandmasters from thirty-two countries—a world record for most GMs in a single tournament. There were 650 competitors in all, playing in three sections, for $150,000 in prizes. For nine straight days they would play a game a day, each one lasting typically between four and six hours. Lautier, with a stratospheric rating of 2676, was the sixth-highest rated player in Aeroflot, with a mere two dozen rating points separating him from the number one seed. Consequently Joel hoped to win one of the top prizes—uncontested first place paid $25,000.

  At Joel’s suggestion, I traveled to Moscow for the second half of Aeroflot, accompanied by my college friend Matt, an artist and keen observer of the human condition (particularly mine). Matt doesn’t play tournament chess but appreciates my enthusiasm for the game. At Harvard, more than a quarter century ago, he watched me confront one of the first desktop chess computers, at the Boston Chess Club; it played so slowly that I abandoned the game in the middle.

  On our Russian adventure, I made the tactical error of requesting aisle seats opposite each other on the plane. That left the seat next to Matt free for occupation by a Russian master from Brooklyn who’s been known to walk ten miles to a chess club just to get a game. He has a very aggressive playing style—he likes to develop his queen as early as the second move, in violation of chess common sense—and he has a camel’s overbite and lips that are always twitching. How he could afford to go to Moscow was anyone’s guess; maybe he had cajoled someone into backing him. He spent the nine-hour flight mumbling to himself while shifting flat, button-size chess pieces around on a dingy magnetic board and doing mathematical puzzles from a book for clever children. Every so often Matt shot me a reproachful look. While the plane was taxiing to the gate, the Russian master could not contain his hyperaggressive impulses. He was the only one who prematurely removed his seat belt and stood up.

  “Sit down!” the Aeroflot stewardess commanded.

  “J’adoube!” (“I adjust!”) he responded, as he stumbled back into his seat. This common chess expression is what players say when they want to suspend the touch-move rule so that they can adjust a piece without having to move it.4

  Matt and I sped in a jalopy of a taxi from the airport to the massive Hotel Russia on Red Square. The hotel, which billed itself as the largest in Europe, was both the site of the tournament and the place we were staying. We arrived during the fifth round and went straight to the playing hall, which was crammed with hundreds of competitors. Suspended from the ceiling was a large, dusty inflatable plane with a faded Aeroflot logo. Matt’s first impression of the tournament was that it reeked of testosterone, like a high school locker room after a basketball game. I had become inured to this familiar tournament smell.

  We peeked at Joel’s game against Artashes Minasian, an Armenian GM in his mid-thirties, and I tried to explain to Matt how Joel was beating back the do-or-die King’s Indian, a counterpunching response to his queen-pawn opening. Joel won the game in thirty-four moves, and now, midway through the tournament, he had a score of three wins and two draws, putting him in a tie for the lead with seventeen others. Over the next two days, he went on to draw his sixth game and then, in the seventh round, demolish another King’s Indian. “Petrosian once said that the King’s Indian paid his rent,” Joel gleefully told me, “and now it’s paying mine.”

  In the evenings after his games, I had expected Joel to hit the chess books, but he wanted to party and show us late-night Moscow. Our second day there was a holiday called Defenders of the Motherland Day, a kind of Russian equivalent of Veterans Day. What remained of the Communist Party held a nostalgic, boisterous, red-flag-waving rally; elderly men paraded through the streets in ill-fitting army uniforms from their youth. After Joel’s seventh-round rout of the King’s Indian, he took us to an artsy supper club where twenty-year-old women in ersatz military fatigues held a runway fashion show to mock Defenders of the Motherland Day. With their breasts exposed, they wielded grenades and marched down the runway to the blasting tune of “You’re in the Army Now.”

  I liked the new Russia: I had not expected this degree of open, cheeky dissent, the women engaged in the kind of performance art I might see back in New York. Even in the incessant snow and freezing temperatures of February, Moscow was surprisingly vibrant, with its mix of proud old-world Bolsheviks and the cavorting representatives of a skeptical new generation. After dinner, Joel and I went to a subterranean rock club and had another beer. “This one is for the King’s Indian Defense!” I said, raising my stein. “May foolhardy Black players continue to venture it!”

  I felt guilty keeping Joel out late when he had to play chess the next day. With two rounds remaining, his score of 51?2–11?2 put him in a sixway tie for second place, only a half point behind the sole player in first. Joel was in an excellent spot to win substantial money—even to garner first prize, if Caissa smiled and paired him with the current leader and Joel knocked him out. “It’s good for me to party,” he explained to me at 1:30 A.M. “If you weren’t in Moscow, I’d be doing too much chess and there’d be diminishing returns. Soon I’ll be hungry for chess. I’ll prepare a couple of hours, to 4 A.M. or so. Then I’ll get a decent sleep because my game is not until the afternoon.”

  We got back to the Hotel Russia at 2:00 A.M. and Joel immediately checked the next-round postings. “Damn!” he said, “It’s the worst possible pairing. I get Pavel.” Joel was scheduled to play White, and I imagined Pavel Tregubov to be a fearsome Russian heavyweight, a World Championship contender who’d learned chess at the age of two and actually knew how to marshal the Black forces in the King’s Indian. The Russian-born Tregubov turned out to be a close friend and neighbor of Joel’s in Paris. They had studied chess together for hours, trusting each other to the point where they knew each other’s opening secrets. It would be psychologically difficult for Joel to go all out against his chess helpmate, and vice versa—and it might risk undermining their friendship—even though a win in the penultimate round would bring Joel that much closer to a lucrative first-place finish.

  It was no surprise the next day when Joel and Tregubov—by tacit or explicit agreement—played a quiet, bloodless draw. And yet, going into the next and final round, Joel remained only half a point behind the leader—and therefore was still in contention for first place. Thousands of dollars—and priceless prestige—were at stake.

  JOEL’S OPPONENT WAS A SEASONED PROFESSIONAL, RAFAEL VAGANIAN, FIFTY-TWO, the first great player to emerge from Armenia after Tigran Petrosian, the ninth world champion. In the 1980s, the heavyset Vaganian had been among the chess elite, and yet he had never ascended to the very pinnacle. Botvinnik regarded him as a natural but lazy talent and once said “that Vaganian played as though chess did not exist before he came along.” This was a backhanded compliment: Botvinnik admired Vaganian’s verve at the board but disapproved of his reluctance to study the games of his chess forebears.

  GM Genna Sosonko, writing in a book called The Reliable Past, interpreted the fact that Vaganian wasn’t a World Championship contender as a deliberate choice:

  [He] lacked the obsessive desire to become not just one of the best, but the very best, to subordinate everything in life, if only for a time, to those little wooden figures.

  To ascend that final step in chess, Vaganian would have had to give up a life

  filled with friends, long sessions at the dinner table often lasting far into the night, dates and parties, cards and dominoes, jokes and tricks…. He was too fond of all the joys of life…to trade them all in for immortality in the form of his photograph hung up for posterity amongst the apostles on the chess club wall.

  In the heat of a tournament, though, Vaganian had the killer instinct. At Aeroflot, he and Joel were both braced for a fight to the death. “The only way to go was all out,” Vaganian wrote afterward, “because a draw would yield both of us nothing but a small amount of cash. A win, however, would yield to a high placing
, probably a tie for first (which is what happened) and, if everything fell into place, even the first prize would be within reach.”

  Unfortunately for a night owl like Joel, this fateful last game was scheduled for early in the morning, instead of in the afternoon like the previous eight rounds. The game was one of six conducted on a roped-off, elevated stage at the front of the playing hall—an arrangement that was frustrating for the spectators. From beyond the ropes, I could watch Joel but not see the board clearly. The moves of the game were posted on monitors in a nearby press room and on the Internet. In the press room, I could see the position but not him, so I went back and forth between the monitors and the tournament hall.

  Joel had White, and the game began as a Queen’s Gambit Declined, Exchange Variation, with Joel developing his dark-squared bishop to the fourth rank, as he liked to do in this line. This was no surprise to Vaganian, because he had reached this very position against Lautier three years before in a blitz tournament and defeated him. On the seventh move, however, Joel varied from their earlier encounter by moving a knight instead of a pawn. They sheltered their respective kings on the same side of the board and staked out territory in front of their monarchs, Joel with pawns and Vaganian with pieces.

  On the seventeenth move, Vaganian made an impressive rook sacrifice to break up the advanced pawns in front of Joel’s king and launch an attack. I had noticed that Joel reflexively tapped the floor with his right foot when his game was complicated. But here, after his twentieth move, his foot was still. In fact, his whole body was fatalistically tranquil and subdued—because the outcome of the game was now apparently beyond his control.