King's Gambit

by Paul Hoffman

  Since then, I’ve replayed our conversation dozens of times in my head. His intentions, I now think, were not malicious. When I told him that I was feeling bad, he must have thought that I meant I was coming down with a cold and he didn’t want me to go back out in the rain. Another father might have said, “I’m sorry you’re getting sick. Maybe you should stay inside and skip the ice cream.” And I would have responded, “Oh, no, I’m not ill. I feel shitty because I’ve been in an elevator for hours, and the fresh air, even if it is drizzling, will do me good. A milkshake will cheer me up.” Although my dad was apparently operating out of concern for me, he couldn’t simply suggest that I stay inside. He didn’t want to contradict my wishes. He had to be liked every second of the day, and he feared that if he objected to anything I wanted to do—even something as inconsequential as getting a milkshake—I might be unhappy with him and reject him. (Of course, the whole uncomfortable conversation could have been avoided if he had simply offered to get the milkshake for me.)

  Because he couldn’t handle potential friction about a stupid milkshake, perhaps it isn’t surprising that he also spurned conflict on all matters of any real importance. Rather than being direct with me, he would try to influence my behavior by inventing baroque stories that had obvious morals and object lessons. That summer, though, I was still oblivious to all of this, at least at a conscious level, and I responded by doing what I had always done. I convinced myself that I was somehow mistaken—maybe I had misunderstood him about Baskin-Robbins—and that he was right. He was my dad after all, and if he claimed that the dog had eaten his homework, he must be telling the truth.

  WITH HINDSIGHT IT IS EASY TO SEE MY LIFE AS A GRAND FREUDIAN CASE study. Long before I was clear about my father’s inability to tell the truth, I had an academic interest in deception. As a kid, I was fascinated by the age-old liar’s paradox, in which a person declares, “I’m lying to you right now.” Well if he’s a liar, his statement is false, but that means he’s not lying to you right now, which means he’s a truth teller. But if he’s a truth teller, his statement is true and he’s lying to you, which makes him a liar. This self-contradictory spiral has occupied philosophers since the time of the ancient Greeks. Bertrand Russell, for one, explored the ramifications of the so-called Barber of Seville, a relative of the liar’s paradox. Imagine the Barber of Seville who shaves every man who does not shave himself. Does the Barber of Seville shave himself? If he does, he doesn’t, and if he doesn’t, he does. Another contradiction, Russell wrote in his autobiography, “can be created by giving a person a piece of paper on which is written: ‘The statement on the other side of this paper is false.’ The person turns the paper over, and finds on the other side: ‘The statement on the other side of this paper is true.’ It seemed unworthy of a grown man to spend time on such trivialities, but what was I to do?”

  In my youth I spent many evenings solving and inventing brain teasers that were trumped-up versions of the liar’s paradox, many involving a missionary captured by island savages, each of whom either always tells the truth or always lies. The savages plan to kill the missionary either by roasting him over an open fire or throwing him to crocodiles. They will free him if he can determine with a single yes-no question how they intend to kill him. The missionary doesn’t know whether any individual savage is a liar or a truth teller, and so if he asks one of his captors the direct question “Do you plan to burn me?” he won’t be able to judge the veracity of the answer. I was proud of myself when I realized the missionary could win his freedom if he asked, “Is it true that either you tell the truth and you want to burn me or you are a liar and you want to toss me to the crocs?” (This academic interest in truth telling persisted through college. For my honors thesis in history and science at Harvard, I wrote a 130-page essay on a very abstruse debate in twentieth-century philosophy of science about how to categorize different types of truths.)1

  In late elementary school I invented a sly game that would have horrified my mother and greatly entertained my father. My friends and I would slip items into strangers’ carts at the local supermarket and hope they’d buy them. I developed an elaborate scoring system in which each item in the store was assigned a point value. Small, inexpensive items, such as a candy bar or a pocket-size box of raisins, were worth only a point or two. Small, expensive things such as a tin of smoked oysters were worth four points because even though they were easy to slip into someone’s cart, they would make the cash register clink and were therefore often detected and immediately returned. A large item such as kitty litter was worth seven points, and a big, expensive item such as a two-pound steak or a leg of lamb, even more. The most points were reserved for a large, inappropriate purchase, such as a jumbo box of tampons placed in the cart of a seventy-year-old man. The best way to achieve a high score was to wait for a shopper to rush off to retrieve a forgotten item while her purchases were rung up. I would sidle up to the checkout counter, smile cherubically as if I were the shopper’s son, and place the high-scoring item near the front of the queue so that it would be scanned and bagged before the shopper returned. My friends and I played the game for a couple of months, and the store, which was huge and had perhaps a dozen checkout counters, never stopped us. Maybe they even knew and tolerated us: after all, we moved hundreds of dollars of merchandise.

  Two of my principal hobbies in adolescence, magic and acting, also reflected my obsession with false appearances. For a while, I thought about being a professional magician. I spent many afternoons at Tannen’s, a celebrated magic store and salon in midtown Manhattan where masters of legerdemain swapped trade secrets. For a magician to be great at sleight of hand—at cards, coins, or rings—he must practice thousands of hours, putting in even more time than chess demands. I had too many other interests to find the time. I was more serious about acting, though, and took after-school classes. (Westport—home to Paul Newman and Linda Blair of The Exorcist—had many fine acting programs.) It appealed to something primal in me because I enjoyed escaping from my own world. I liked pretending to be somebody else. Acting was also therapeutic. I allowed myself to get angry on stage in a way that I never could in real life. Magic and acting seemed like benign forms of deception—or maybe not even deception at all, because the members of the audience have given the performers license to fool them.

  I HAD MANY HOBBIES AND INTERESTS, AND IDEAS FOR MAKING A LIVING, before I settled on writing. During my senior year in college, I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. My father hated attorneys—he demonized them as money-grubbing stooges of big business—but I had no intention of being a corporate lawyer. I wanted to work for the ACLU and argue freedom-of-speech cases before the Supreme Court. I wanted to stop schools from ostracizing child atheists. I thought my dad would think that this was a noble career choice. Indeed, at first he acted as though he approved. Yet the day before I went to take my LSATs at New York University, he told me about various people he knew who were unhappy with their lives. Each of these depressed individuals happened to be a lawyer. He didn’t bother to point out their shared profession—that would have been too obvious—he simply left it to me to draw the appropriate conclusion.

  Later that evening I discovered on his desk the partial manuscript of a book called How Not to Raise Your Child to Be a Lawyer. I asked him what the hell he was writing. He told me that I shouldn’t be snooping around his office. I said I was always in his office and that the manuscript was in plain view, perched on top of the typewriter. He said I shouldn’t have looked at it. I said he knew I always used his typewriter, and so he must have left the manuscript there because he wanted me to see it. And the topic, I said, could not be a coincidence. What the hell was the manuscript? I repeated. It was nothing, he said, just something he happened to find. Nothing, I said. How could it be nothing? I told him I could tell from the font and the paper that he was the one who had typed it. You’re right, he conceded, but he claimed that the manuscript didn’t reflect his sentiments. He said he was ghostwriti
ng a book for a famous female attorney. I was furious, and yet I could not get him to admit, no matter how much I pressed him and how agitated I became, that he did not want me to be a lawyer. He retorted that the famous female attorney might not want me to be a lawyer, but that he felt differently. It was she who had the problem. He was just a hired gun, he claimed. Law was a fine profession. In fact, I’d make a great lawyer, he said, because I was good at arguing.

  The next day I couldn’t concentrate on my LSATs. During the test, my head and stomach ached, and instead of focusing on the questions, I kept obsessing about the events of the night before. Accept that he’s ghostwriting a book, I said. Accept that its subject matter is just a coincidence. No, another part of me said, recognize that your father is a disturbed man who will make up anything if it suits his purposes. Acknowledge that he is a pathological liar. I hated that harsh label, but I suddenly realized that that was what he was.

  I started thinking about various fibs that I had told in my own life. Usually I had been fooling myself rather than anyone else, but I still wondered whether it was fair of me to be angry with him. Even though I was a direct person who did not shy away from confrontation the way he did, was I fated to follow his example in conflating truth and fiction? I was also extremely troubled that I hadn’t consciously recognized his lying sooner. I knew that it was not easy for me to remember hurtful events involving someone close to me. I tended to reinvent the other person’s behavior, sanitizing or legitimizing it, and then, after I replayed the invented behavior enough times in my head, I’d get confused about whether the real, unsettling stuff had actually occurred.

  I thought about other things that he must have made up. I remembered that once, when my Harvard roommates were trading stories of their athletic successes, I proudly told them about my father’s boxing because I had no story of my own to share. I boasted that at the University of Wisconsin my father had been the division champion in his weight class. One of my roommates subsequently looked my dad up in the record book but couldn’t find his name. I told my father about this, and he said that it had been one of the saddest days of his life and an awful miscarriage of justice. He said he had won the championship, but for a half second the referee had been befuddled and mistakenly lifted the other guy’s hand, depriving my dad of his rightful place in history. How could it be that I was only now, in the middle of my LSATs, recognizing the obvious duplicity of this incoherent explanation? It also seemed particularly cruel that my father had boasted about his triumphs as a jock, given how tormented I myself had been about sports.

  His sabotage worked—I never became a lawyer—but it also destroyed our relationship. From that moment on, I was never comfortable around him again. He lived just six more years, and I periodically asked him about dozens of stories that I now believed were false. Not once did he concede that he had ever lied to me.

  My father succumbed to cancer in 1982. Afterward, my mother told me that on one of their first dates, in the mid-1950s, he claimed that he was dying of an incurable disease, some kind of kidney disorder. That explained why the old friends of his whom I had run into in the past expressed amazement that he was not yet dead. At the time I thought they were referring to his obesity and chain-smoking, but now I realize that he had duped them, too, with tales of fatal nephritis. My mother said that many of his friends stopped seeing him because he told them one lie too many.

  ALTHOUGH MY FATHER HAD EXPOSED ME TO CHESS HUSTLERS WHEN I WAS A kid, I always regarded these skanky tricksters as betraying the true spirit of the game—much like doctors who take the Hippocratic oath and go to work for tobacco companies. I thought that the game’s exalted status demanded that you try to win by making objectively strong moves. The hustler’s modus operandi, on the other hand, is to play sneaky, third-rate moves, which give him an edge only if his adversary gets bamboozled. But he is gambling: he will be left with an inferior game if his opponent is able to keep a cool head and sidestep the dangers.

  As an adult, I was eager to understand deception at the chessboard. In 2003, I read a multivolume book called Chess Openings for Hustlers written by perhaps the greatest chess con of all time, a man with the evocative name of Claude Frizzel Bloodgood III. “The game of chess is the second most entertaining diversion ever created by the mind of man,” wrote a friend of Bloodgood’s in the introduction to the first volume. “It is second, of course, only to chess with money on the table. If you’ve ever played under the gun, with your cash at stake and the clock ticking, you know what I mean.”

  The author of these words proudly identified himself as a hustler and said that players like him existed in all walks of life:

  You might run into a chess hustler almost anywhere; at the local park on a sunny summer afternoon, in the last booth in the back of a dark bar, beside you on a cross country flight, or down at the neighborhood filling station. Practically anywhere chess is played, you’ll find someone willing to play for money. Whether your cash flow is positive or negative in these encounters depends a great deal on how well you’re prepared for combat.

  In speed chess for money, Bloodgood advocated avoiding mainline openings and assaying obscure but sharp gambits which, though ultimately unsound, often defeat adversaries who cannot make their way through the minefield of traps before the clock runs out. Bloodgood himself was especially successful with the Grob.

  To understand the appeal of these sketchy openings, I visited Tom Plenty, a pseudonymous Grob lover and protégé of Bloodgood’s, who asked me to withhold his real name because his conservative, blue-chip employer might not appreciate his circle of chess junkies. Plenty was a clean-cut man a decade younger than I, and we met in a Cajun restaurant in his hometown. Before the waitress could take our order, he set up a chessboard and challenged me to speed chess. “I’m not very good,” he said, “but I’m good at setting traps. Maybe I can intimidate you with my tricky play.”

  As a rule, chess players who cheerfully announce that they’re going to intimidate you don’t usually succeed. Plenty was no exception—I beat him easily. I wish we had been playing for money. I didn’t tell him that I had spent the two-hour plane flight earlier in the day looking at Grob games in my computer database and memorizing published refutations. I wanted to out-Grob him by coming across as an untrained talent. In the second game I had White and trounced him with a dubious line of the age-old King’s Gambit. The openings I favored, like the King’s Gambit and the Budapest, were less flaky than the Grob, but still far from mainstream.

  Now that I had earned his respect, Plenty told me the story of his chess life, starting with the Fischer-Spassky match. “I was a diligent student then,” he said. “I studied openings and endgames. I read books. I studied pawn structure and really tried to understand the game. Then I fell in with the wrong crowd.” In his early teens his parents dropped him off on Thursday evenings at a college chess club forty-five minutes from their home. It was a college club only in name, because it was open to anyone and drew “chess bums” from the community at large. “I played chain-smoking, pizza-eating, beer-swilling alcoholics,” Plenty recalled, “and these guys introduced me to a drug which I’m now hooked on. It’s called speed chess. It’s superficial chess, but I realized halfway through high school that I sucked at slow chess. I gave up my dreams then of becoming world champion. I knew I’d never be anything more than a Grand Patzer, the upper level of bad players.” But Plenty really loved the game, and he drifted into the hustler world of unsound openings. He discovered that he got the most pleasure in chess when he beat someone in twenty moves with a weird little trap that he was booked up on and his adversary wasn’t.

  Plenty’s introduction to hustling was a book called 200 Traps in Fianchetto Openings (“fianchetto” is a term for the development of a bishop on the long, corner-to-corner diagonal). “I remember being astounded that all these sweet traps were out there,” Plenty said. The very last page of this book discussed the Grob. “I knew this was the Holy Grail, the magic bullet t
hat was going to take me to the next level,” he said. “The Grob was full of really sleazy stuff. When Black responds logically, White just comes in and murders him. I’ve developed a taste for the quick kill. Life would not be as wonderful without the Grob.”

  Plenty researched the opening and located Henri Grob’s widow in Switzerland. He wrote to her and obtained a copy of the German text her late husband had written. He learned German chess notation and memorized the move sequences in the book. “The first night I played it at the club was beautiful,” he said. “I had everyone on the ropes. All the best players were waiting in line to play me, and I was disposing of them one by one. The Grob is a street fight. You say, ‘Look at my thumb!’ and if he does, you sucker punch him. Of course if this doesn’t work, you’re out of luck. You get one shot at the guy and that’s about it.”

  His opponents at the club soon learned how to avoid the pitfalls. “The novelty wore off,” Plenty said, “and they tore me to pieces. But the love affair was still there. I just needed fresh victims. There’s nothing better than when a Grob virgin takes the gambit pawn, and I think to myself, OK, buddy, now you’re in my world.”