King's Gambit

by Paul Hoffman

  Jennifer got a four-hour reprieve because Kasparov asked Irina to demonstrate her games first. Irina showed him a drawn game from Elista against Ketino Kachiani of Germany, who knocked her out in the second round. Irina was White and Kachiani defended against Irina’s usual d4 opening with a newly popular defense known as the…a6 Slav. Irina built up a strong positional advantage by posting all of her pawns on dark squares, including two well-supported pawns she had advanced into her opponent’s territory, thereby blunting the mobility of Kachini’s dark-squared bishop.

  “Her bishop is in a zoo behind bars,” Kasparov said approvingly. “How does she save the game?”

  “She doesn’t save the game,” Irina responded. “I screwed it up.”

  “Ah. You saved it for her. Just keep the bishop caged on the kingside. Then crush her on the queenside. What can she do?”

  “Maybe Irina lost on purpose,” Truong joked. “Otherwise she might still be playing in Elista and not have made it back for the training with you.”

  “That’s the answer I wanted to hear,” Kasparov said.

  “I was trying to play on the kingside,” Irina said, as she demonstrated how she advanced two pawns in that sector of the board.

  “You shouldn’t move those pawns. You’ve already won on the kingside. You’ve cut her bishop off there. So leave it trapped and switch your dreams to the queenside.”

  Irina showed him how the actual game petered out to a draw after she allowed Kachiani’s bishop to escape. “It’s a pity,” said Kasparov. “You were so close. Were you optimistic during the game?”

  “Yes,” Irina replied. “I thought I might win.”

  Irina showed him a second game in which she had Black and was hell-bent on pressing a kingside attack that never succeeded. At one point he stopped her and pointed to her opponent’s weak pawns on the other side of the board. “You have to widen your horizon,” he said, “and look at the opposite side. Don’t just look at the king. Look at weak pawns. Winning a pawn is as good as creating a mate in three! Remember, Irina, there are two sides of the board. You need a constant reminder that the game can be won on the queenside as well as the kingside.” Kasparov changed the subject. “How will you respond to e4?” When he’d trained her the previous year, she was not sure how she’d defend against the king pawn.

  “I’ve learned the Petroff.”

  “What if White avoids the Petroff with the King’s Gambit?”

  “I’m hoping no one plays the King’s Gambit against me.”

  “Hoping? You must do more than hope,” Kasparov scolded. Then he cited a recent catastrophic miniature: “Bologan also didn’t study the sidelines and he lost to Shirov in twenty moves. You must avoid that fate!”

  Before breaking for lunch, Kasparov bedazzled the women with behind-the-scene tales of his own games. He also told them how he was working on a book about Karpov and offered the controversial view that Karpov would have beaten Fischer in 1975 had the American champion chosen to defend his title. “Fischer put a lot of pressure on Spassky in 1972. Spassky fell apart after Fischer forfeited the second game by failing to show up. Karpov would have gleefully written a book called How I Won Game Two. Karpov would have said, ‘Mr. Fischer, make an appointment with your psychiatrist.’ He was like a mirror: All of Fischer’s psychological attacks would have backfired.” The older generation of Russians like Spassky felt like rabbits in the grip of a boa constrictor when they played Karpov. “Fischer looked at Karpov’s games,” Kasparov said, “and got scared. The only way Fischer would have survived is if he had lasted twenty-five games, when Karpov’s fatigue might have set in. But it is unlikely he could have lasted that long. Trust me. I can be accused of being anything except being a friend of Karpov’s. His chess did not progress from 1975 to 1983. He could have used Fischer. Just as I needed Karpov for me to become as strong as I am. I despise Karpov as a person but admire him as a chess player. I look back with fondness on some of our games.” Kasparov’s voice softened, and he looked dreamily past the women. “He and I were the only two people in the world who knew what was happening on the chessboard.”

  There was a long silence while everyone thought about the implications of what Kasparov was saying: that he and Karpov were a class apart from all other chess players. That even other top grandmasters couldn’t really appreciate the finer points of how the two Ks marshaled their pieces and pawns.

  Finally Susan Polgar spoke. “I saw Fischer in Budapest,” she said. “He analyzed your 1985 match with Karpov very deeply. He is convinced it was prearranged because he couldn’t believe the mistakes.”

  “Look at all the mistakes in his match with Spassky,” Kasparov shot back. “I’m not saying his match was fixed. And look at his matches with Petrosian and Taimanov—all the blunders there.”

  I was impressed that Polgar had the temerity to raise Fischer’s absurd charge. I assumed that she was simply needling Kasparov for his grandiosity. Later, however, when I told Pascal about her inquiry, he suggested that Kasparov himself might have planted the subject so that he’d have a forum to address it. I had forgotten that I was in the bizarro world of chess, where little can be taken at face value.

  “Do you see yourself playing twenty years from now?” Polgar asked Kasparov.

  “Maybe I will be moving pieces then,” he responded, “but I’m not sure I’d call that playing.”

  The women went off to lunch with Truong, and Kasparov asked me to join him at a deli with Owen Williams, his manager, and Michael Khodarkovsky, the head coach of the Olympiad training effort and the director of the Kasparov Chess Foundation. “I’m worried about Irina,” Kasparov told Khodarkovsky as we sat down at the table. “She is not making much progress. Her problem is that she can be attracted to a certain idea, stick with it even when the circumstances change, and lose control of the board. She plays move by move and loses track of the big picture.”

  Before Khodarkovsky could defend Irina, Kasparov was berating our Hispanic waiter, whose English was poor, for bringing a glass of tap water. “I only drink bottled water,” Kasparov declared. While the waiter scurried away to correct the situation, Kasparov explained that his mother had taught him never to drink tap water. I wasn’t about to argue with him, but this was New York City in 2004, not Moscow in 1974. The waiter returned with a bottle of sparkling water. Kasparov opened it and poured himself a glass. “I didn’t ask for bubbles,” he said as he shoved it back toward the befuddled waiter, who took it away and returned with an ice-cold bottle of Poland Spring. Kasparov screwed up his face, and Williams interpreted the expression: “He wants room temperature water.” The waiter enlisted the help of the cashier, and the two searched unsuccessfully for unrefrigerated bottled water. “Maybe you can heat it a bit,” Williams suggested, but Kasparov had run out of patience. As he got up to leave the restaurant and go in search of water elsewhere, he pointed to the sandwich column of my menu and said, “Order a chicken salad for me.”

  Five minutes later Kasparov returned with his own bottle of water, and the waiter put a chicken salad sandwich in front of him. “I don’t want a sandwich,” Kasparov growled. “I asked for chicken salad.” This time, he left the restaurant and didn’t return. Williams, Khodarkovsky, and I ate our meals in silence. When the waiter cleared the plates, I asked Khodarkovsky what we should do with the uneaten sandwich. “We’d better take it with us,” Khodarkovsky said. “If he asks for it, you don’t want to be the one to tell him you threw it out.”

  When the training session resumed, Kasparov was charming and vivacious again, as if the awkward lunch had never happened. Jennifer finally presented her games. “I expected my opponent to play the Najdorf,” she said. “She’s been playing it her whole life—there were fifty games in the database. But she surprised me by playing the Richter-Rauzer instead”—the same defense Irina had played against her in the art gallery.

  “How old is she?” Kasparov asked.

  “Seventeen.”

  “So she’s played t
he Najdorf for seven years,” he scoffed, as if he thought that was insufficient time to master this complex opening. “Now, I’ve been playing the Najdorf my entire life.”

  Jennifer played through the game, and they agreed that she could have been more aggressive in the opening but had an advantage in the middle game. She was nervous as she showed Kasparov how she overlooked a simple threat and blundered away a rook for a bishop. The thirteenth world champion was supportive. “I understand why you blundered,” he said. “You were better the whole game. This was the first time she had a threat. She had played passively move after move and you forgot that she could attack.” Changes of pace, he explained, are difficult even for seasoned pros.

  “What would a woman play in this position?” Truong piped up, trying to be funny.

  “What would a man play?” Kasparov responded.

  “We were both in time pressure,” Jennifer added, “although she had even less time than I did.”

  “Let me give you some advice,” Kasparov said. “Never look at the opponent’s clock. After the first match with Karpov, I realized that I should never look at his clock. I would get too excited when he was running low. But I couldn’t control his moves. Karpov was capable of making three consecutive ‘only moves’ with just thirty seconds left.” Only move is chess lingo for a situation in which a player has just one continuation that will allow him to survive; in other words, he’ll lose immediately if he does anything else.

  Kasparov did not make Jennifer play out the game to the mate. “The opening was equal,” he said in summary. “From a roughly equal position you outplayed her. That’s good.”

  The Dream Team took a break, and Truong and Kasparov went on the Internet to review the games that had been played earlier that day in the semifinals of the Women’s World Championship in Elista. Kasparov studied the photographs of two of the contestants, Humpy Koneru, seventeen, of India, and Ekaterina Kovalevskaya, twenty, of Russia. “By ChessBase criteria,” Kasparov said. “These women do not qualify for pictures.” It was not clear whether he was putting down how they looked or lampooning ChessBase, the leading Web site for chess news, for publishing photographs of gorgeous young women who aren’t very good players.

  “Typical women’s chess,” Truong said, as they glanced at the games. “There they go again, pushing their a and h pawns—premature aggression. Do you see also how some of these women are mad enough to keep playing when they are down a rook?”

  Jennifer was delighted to work with Kasparov and Susan Polgar, but was dismayed by all of the jokes about women’s chess and what she saw as the surprising sexist views of Polgar herself. Writing in Chess Bitch, she described one of the first training sessions with Michael Khodarkovsky:

  Michael began his session with us by saying, “I know that feminism is popular in the United States, but in Russia we understood that women and men play differently.” Michael advised us: “With this in mind, you should never be ashamed to tell your trainers most intimate details…or when you may not be able to play one hundred percent. Paul Truong, a fuzzy-haired Vietnamese ball of energy with a tittering laugh, clarified Michael’s statement for the team: “Does everyone know what Michael is talking about?…Menstruation!”

  The training sessions, which had seemed like a great idea for advancing women’s chess in America, were turning into a feminist’s nightmare.

  I thought I had entered the twilight zone, an impression that was furthered when Susan Polgar, one of my childhood heroines, joined forces with Michael: “Now, menstruation may not require that someone take a day off, but it might affect, for instance, the choice of opening.” Michael mentioned a computer program that a Soviet friend of his had developed, which would determine how, at any given day, the menstrual cycle would affect play.

  Other meetings they had were equally surreal. Truong was the bubbly marketing whiz behind the Dream Team, and like many marketers, he promised the moon. “He told the women that there were millions of dollars involved in the project and that they would all become stars in America,” recalled Pascal Charbonneau, who often accompanied Irina to the training. “He said they’d all be wearing designer clothes because designers would sponsor them. He said they’d have a speech coach to teach them what to say in public and help them handle the pressure of being celebrities and all the journalists who’d be chasing after them. He said if they won a medal they’d go to the White House for sure.” Truong did come through with some promises, like persuading IBM to donate laptops to each of them so that they could run chess software.

  Truong entertained the women with stories of his chess and gustatory prowess. “Truong claims to be part of a special private club that eats the hottest hot sauce in the world,” Pascal said. “Only thirty people are members. And he said the hot sauce was made out of this ridiculous amount of peppers—I think it was thirty thousand tons, but I could be wrong. His point was that it took thirty thousand tons to make a tiny bit. He said that if normal people like us tried the hot sauce we’d probably die. And we’d say, ‘Really, Paul, dying is a bit much.’ And he’d say, ‘Well you’d at least end up in the hospital with very serious stomach problems.’”

  UNFORTUNATELY, THE DREAM TEAM’S SENSE OF CAMARADERIE WAS UNDERMINED almost from the beginning by a controversy over which four women would actually be included; women’s chess is not exempt from the ugly bureaucratic intrigue that seems to infect the game at both the national and international levels. These backroom deals—such as those made in the late 1980s to stop Susan Polgar herself—advance or retard the careers of individual players. Here, the three highest-ranked women, Polgar, Krush, and Zatonskih, were certain to represent the United States in Calvia, but only one of the two other players, Shahade or Goletiani, would join them. The squad was supposed to have been selected by the time Kasparov trained them over the Memorial Day weekend. Whichever player, Shahade or Goletiani, had been ranked higher by the USCF on the April 2004 rating list was supposed to make the team. Before the April rating list was issued, preliminary calculations suggested that Shahade was going to edge out Goletiani by a few ratings points, but Khodarkovsky complained to the USCF that Goletiani’s rating did not include her first-place performance of 71?2 points out of 9 at the Women’s Continental Championship in Venezuela in September 2003.

  The USCF did not routinely rate foreign tournaments—it was the United States Chess Federation after all—but apparently there was an old, little-known precedent for rating certain international tournaments provided the player made a request beforehand. The USCF claimed that Goletiani had not made such a request, and Khodarkovsky said she had. The USCF backed down and decided at the eleventh hour to include the tournament in Venezuela, and Goletiani’s rating then eclipsed Jennifer’s by seventeen points, 2376 to 2359.

  Irina, who is known to be vocally indignant about behavior she perceives as unethical, lodged a protest in support of Jennifer. There was no paper or e-mail trail to substantiate that Goletiani had made a request beforehand, and it seemed unfair to her that Khodarkovsky, who was the coach of the whole team, was advocating on Goletiani’s behalf. Moreover, if the Continental had been rated in a timely manner, back in 2003, and not at the last moment, Jennifer could have chosen to enter additional tournaments to try to regain her lead over Goletiani. As it was, she found out that she had relinquished the lead only when it was too late to do anything. Jennifer was disappointed that Polgar, who had faced such overwhelming discrimination in her own chess career, did not speak out publicly against the injustice of including the Venezuela rating.

  That spring, the USCF worked behind closed doors to address the Shahade-Goletiani controversy. The chess federation hastily scheduled a seven-person 2004 U.S. Women’s Championship for late June at St. John’s University in New York City and declared that the winner would take the fourth spot on the Olympiad team. “It’s annoying,” Jennifer told me then, “because I think I would have beaten out Rusa if the ratings had been legitimately calculated. But what can I do? I�
�m tired of arguing. Chess politics is a huge distraction from my enjoyment of the game.”

  Over the next month Jennifer prepared for the 2004 championship, more than she ever had before. She worked with her old coach, Victor Frias, and her brother. She studied all of her adversaries’ games and cooked up an opening surprise for each of them. One of her opponents, Tatev Abrahamyan, liked to play the French Defense, against which Jennifer had had trouble in the past. Greg knew the pseudonym that Abrahamyan employed when she played games on the Internet Chess Club. Her pseudonymous games with the French Defense were stored in cyberspace, and Greg and Jennifer saw that Abrahayman did especially poorly in one particular line. Jennifer decided to repeat the line in the tournament and won easily. “I felt naughty doing this, like I was taking advantage of some deep dark secret,” Jennifer confided later. “But it felt good.”

  By the penultimate round she had already clinched the title of U.S. women’s champion and the fourth spot on the Olympiad team. Chess Life magazine ran a close-up of her face on the cover along with the one-word title “UNSTOPPABLE.”