King's Gambit

by Paul Hoffman

  I wish I could have watched Jennifer win the championship, but I was not in the United States at the time and had to content myself with checking the Internet to follow her progress. A week after her victory, I met her in the Village for a celebratory drink. A stranger approached us on the street and asked her if she remembered playing him. “Not really,” she admitted.

  “It was a few years ago,” he said. “We played three games.”

  “Did we?” she said. “What was the result?”

  “I won one of them,” he said.

  “That’s funny,” she said, grinning. “I only remember two of the games.”6

  The man left, and Jennifer told me about the conclusion of the championship. “I was guilty of all sins the evening I knew I won,” she explained. “Pride—I was calling all my friends and telling them I won. Gluttony—I went to a French restaurant in Williamsburg and stuffed myself with wine and mussels. Sloth—I never prepared for my last-round game with Irina. And, oh yes, vanity—I was thinking about what I was going to wear the next day. I went over to Greg’s house and showed him the game that clinched it for me. He said I was a great champion.” She called her coach, who told her the last game with Irina was still important. Of course, she had thought a lot about playing Irina before the tournament. “I knew I’d have Black,” she recalled, “and she’s tough with White—I don’t do so well against d4. But with the title in the bag I was wired. I was too excited and blissed out to care.

  “When I lose, I’m in pain. It’s not depression but a crappy why-am-I-so-dumb? feeling. It passes quickly if I get away from the tournament hall and watch a movie, have a glass of wine, or spend time with friends who aren’t in the chess world. When I win, though, the glow stays with me.”

  For a week after winning the championship she was on a high. “I wandered around the streets and parks of the East Village, sipping an iced coffee,” she wrote later. “My victory made everything appear to be shot in Technicolor: the emotional content of every experience was heightened. Every joke became funnier, every conversation more satisfying, and every dessert sweeter.”

  She was delighted that she had overcome enormous hurdles to fight her way onto the Dream Team, a club that had not been eager to admit her. Still, she remained an outsider on the team. She was less chess-centric and politically and socially more liberal than her fellow players and coaches, and the only one among the eight of them—Polgar, Krush, Zatonskih, Khodarkovsky, Truong, Kasparov, and Alexander Chernin (an opening theoretician who was brought in to assist the women)—who was born in America.

  The Dream Team came together for one final training session six weeks before the Olympiad. For Jennifer it was the most uncomfortable meeting of all. It coincided with the Republican National Convention in New York, in which George Bush was nominated for a second term. The Kasparov Chess Foundation asked each of the women to sign a contract that prohibited them from writing or talking publicly about their experiences at the Olympiad without first clearing it with the foundation. The contract also required them to forgo alcohol for the entire event. “I avoid drinking during tournaments,” she told me at the time, “but what if the occasional glass of wine helps me relax? Besides, I don’t want to be told how to conduct myself away from the chessboard. As for the gag order, it’s outrageous. I’m not going to sign away my freedom of speech.” She was finishing her book and planned to write about the Olympiad.

  What irked Jennifer most, though, was a lecture Polgar gave the team that she thought was directed at her in particular. Polgar began on an innocuous note, reminding the women that they were a team. They were sisters, she said, united in the common goal of winning a medal for America. She then said that they were role models for girls and should always dress, speak, and act appropriately. Jennifer was wearing a John Kerry T-shirt from an anti-Bush rally a day or two before. The black T-shirt said “PROTEST IS PATRIOTIC” in magenta lettering. If they had daughters, Polgar continued, they should behave in a way that would make their daughters proud. Jennifer was so offended that she skipped the next day’s training.

  IN OCTOBER 2004, THE DREAM TEAM TRAVELED TO CALVIA, WHERE THEY squared off against squads from eighty-six other countries. Each four-person team fielded three players in a given round, and there were fourteen rounds in all. I followed the games on the Internet and was disappointed to see that Khodarkovsky only allowed Jennifer to play twice. She was permitted to compete in the first round against Venezuela, in which she drew with Black against a weaker opponent. Then she was benched for the next four rounds. Khodarkovsky played her for the last time, as Black again, in the fifth round. Against a Swedish opponent whose rating was two hundred points lower than hers, Jennifer did not play her usual tumultuous Grünfeld, but tried to play it safer and recover her bearings by assaying the tamer and more solid Nimzo-Indian Defense. Still, she was less practiced in the particulars of the Nimzo-Indian and was unceremoniously routed by a blistering kingside attack. “They should never have started her with Black,” her brother told me. “She’s much better with White, and that would have given her confidence.”

  “One of the team meetings was very awkward,” Pascal recalled. “Khodarkovsky said something about having to play ‘full force’ the next day. We all looked at each other uncomfortably. ‘Full force’ was a code phrase for playing without Jennifer.” Khodarkovsky never fielded Jennifer in the remaining nine rounds.

  “She stayed outwardly upbeat and supported us through all fourteen rounds,” Irina told me. “That was important to our success but it couldn’t have been easy for her.”

  The Dream Team won the silver medal behind China’s gold, the best performance ever for the U.S. Women’s Team. Before Calvia there had been Internet gossip and chess club speculation about whether former women’s world champion Susan Polgar could still be at top form, after her voluntary eight-and-a-half-year absence from international competition. In Calvia she played all fourteen rounds and achieved the highest score, 101?2 points, on Board One, with seven victories and seven draws. She had the best rating performance (2622) of all the women in the championship. And Polgar had now played fifty-six games in four Olympiads (in 1988, 1990, 1994, and 2004) without a single loss.

  IRINA PLUNGED FURTHER INTO CHESS AFTER CALVIA, PLAYING DURING THE next two years in important events in Montreal, Edmonton, Chicago, San Diego, Philadelphia, France, England, China, Siberia, Kalmykia, Italy, Germany, and Israel. After she graduated from NYU in 2006, she chose to devote at least the next year to chess, postponing the decision of how she would make her living. “I need to run with chess,” Irina told me. “It’s the activity I enjoy most in life.”

  Jennifer never completely hit her chess stride after Calvia. She played in the 2005 U.S. Championship in San Diego, but had a disappointing performance. “I miscalculated something early on,” she told me, “and then, because I had lost confidence, in subsequent games I crazily rechecked my calculations four, five, maybe six times. You can’t waste time like that—particularly with my playing style, which is all about calculation.” As a result, she found herself in even worse debilitating time pressure than she normally faced. After San Diego she started playing less chess and buried herself in completing Chess Bitch. The writing life agreed with her, and in the summer of 2006 she became full-time editor of the USCF’s new Web site, for which she wrote news stories and a blog and posted photographs she’d taken of American players. She had found a way to meld her interests in chess and the arts into a job.

  Paul Truong must have gone heavy on the hot sauce after Calvia because he went into hyperdrive helping Susan Polgar become one of the most recognized chess celebrities in the world. The media reported that, in August 2005, she set a world record for most games played simultaneously. For sixteen and a half hours, from 10:30 A.M. to 3:00 A.M., she faced 326 opponents in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. She beat 309, drew 14, and lost to only 3. All in all, she walked 9.1 miles from board to board.

  I was praising Susan Polgar’s performanc
e at a dinner when Pascal, whose deeper immersion in the chess world makes him more skeptical than I am, started to calculate how fast she would have had to play each game: sixteen and a half hours, or 990 minutes, divided by 326 games comes out to about three minutes a game—including the time walking from board to board. And Pascal, who has given many exhausting simultaneous exhibitions himself, with far fewer opponents, was not the only one who found the three-minute figure suspiciously quick. A few days later, international master Andrew Martin of England, who had set the previous record of 321 games, came forward and publicly questioned whether her feat was physically possible in only sixteen and a half hours.

  “I just don’t understand this,” he wrote on the ChessBase Web site, in a long piece on the difficult circumstances of his record-setting simul. Of Polgar, he asked, “How can one play so many games in such a short time?…That’s less than 1 min per game overall!” But Martin did not explain how he had gotten the three-minute calculation down to one minute (presumably he was attributing two minutes a game to the walking of 9.1 miles, but why?). “How long were these games, how many moves…How do you persuade so many people to sit there for so long waiting for the moves to be played?” he asked. “Susan is a great player, so of course she is capable of a great result. But has the marketing gone too far on this occasion? What credibility can we attach to these figures?”

  Polgar responded on ChessBase with photographs of the event and a very detailed description of the arrangements. She accepted his one-minute-per-game estimate but claimed she had actually played that quickly. “There is one fact I would like to clarify,” she wrote.

  Each game did not take a minute to complete by both sides but only by me. While I was walking, my opponents had plenty of time to think. We did not allow any pass. Therefore, a move must be made as I arrive at the board. Then I responded basically instantly. My moves against the weaker players did not take more than a second or two at most. If each game averages 30 moves or even less, it would take about a minute or less to complete.

  Even after this extensive rebuttal, there were still those who felt that questions had been left unanswered. Did all of Polgar’s opponents really move the very moment she reached their boards? What about the time she presumably lost to bathroom breaks during the sixteen-plus-hour marathon? Perhaps the chess world is so competitive that even the best players will occasionally give in to pressure to appear even more invincible than they are. Or perhaps it is simply that there is so much jealousy in top-level chess that accusations of impropriety are inevitable. The principal complainant, Andrew Martin, was hardly a disinterested observer, but a man whom Polgar intended to displace in the record books. Either way, these messy disputes that seem to occur at all levels of play are far from the spiritual aspects of chess that drew Irina to the game. Even players as accomplished as Kasparov and Polgar can’t remain totally above the suggestion of scandal.7

  8

  “I’M NOT THE WORLD’S BIGGEST GEEK

  “On the college chess circuit, there are certain maxims: Advance your pawns, protect your king—and don’t be surprised if your opponent has gray hair.”

  —THE BALTIMORE SUN

  EARLY IN 2004, BEFORE JENNIFER SHAHADE KNEW OF THE rating shenanigans that might rook her out of a spot on the U.S. Olympiad team, her brother gave me a seven-hour chess lesson. We concentrated on openings because my knowledge of them was extremely thin. Now, a day-long lesson was obviously not optimal—by the fifth hour my head was foggy and my hand cramped from writing down moves and entering them in my computer—but it was the best we could do given Greg’s busy schedule and mine. Greg Shahade, twenty-five, was once one of the country’s leading junior players, but after the 2003 U.S. Championship he cut back drastically on tournament chess. He still played late-night blitz on the Internet and gave the occasional chess lesson to a friend, but he had switched his allegiance from I-can-barelypay-the-rent chess to I-can-buy-the-building poker. He played Texas Hold’em online and maximized his earnings by playing four to six games simultaneously. (Jennifer would eventually follow her brother into the world of online poker. “It’s not as challenging as chess,” she said, “but the money makes it interesting.”)

  In our chess marathon, Greg showed me some sharp, unorthodox responses to various lines in the Sicilian, and a couple of weeks later I had a chance to use one of them—an audacious queen move in which White ignores Black’s attack on his knight—at a rapid tournament at the Marshall. My twenty-something opponent was a relative newcomer to the tournament scene, and I was favored to beat him easily. He was clearly uncomfortable with the rapid time control (twenty-five minutes a side for the whole game) and moved too fast early on when he should have taken more time to think. By the tenth move I had sacrificed a knight and a bishop and had to shelter my king from check, but I was poised to capture his rook and assault his king.

  All this was according to plan: Greg had showed me this very position in the final hour of our lesson. As I stared at the board at the Marshall, I wished I had been more than a stenographer when Greg and I looked at the position; I should have questioned him about the subtleties. I faced the choice of retreating my king to the left or the right. I remembered writing down that Greg had chosen the left, but now, with the clock ticking, the move looked suspect. I feared that my opponent’s attack on my king would come faster than my counterattack. Could I have written down the wrong move or did Greg screw up? Damn, I thought. Forget the lesson and just analyze.

  I decided to move my king to the right. Within a few moves I had a winning game and was cheerfully pursuing his king. There were many ways to culminate my attack, but I had consumed too much time determining the very best way of proceeding instead of just making natural, albeit perhaps second-best, moves that would have won anyway—that’s how strong my position was. Soon I was in danger of losing on time but made what I deemed a brilliant move. I slid my rook forward and chopped off his centrally posted bishop that was defended by his king pawn. I had noticed that the king pawn was overworked as a defender; when it recaptured my rook, it would no longer be defending the Black knight, which I’d then merrily execute with my queen.

  But the neophyte sitting across from me found a hole in my plan. He didn’t immediately recapture my rook with the pawn, but first moved his knight to check my king and then used the knight, not the pawn, to take my rook. I was horrified that I had missed the powerful intermezzo—the in-between move of the knight check—and a few seconds later made a worse howler by losing my queen to another knight fork. I resigned in disgust. It was the first time in my life that I had blundered away my queen in a tournament game, and I was embarrassed to do it in front of two of the stronger players at the Marshall who happened to be watching.

  My opponent wanted to review the game. I agreed, even though I was simmering inside. In the postmortem he kept earnestly suggesting horrible continuations, overlooking mates in one and mates in two. That made me feel even worse. I had lost to this studious patzer because of my own stupidity. I knew better than to equate intelligence with chess success, but at the time I felt like the world’s biggest idiot.1

  I had been working at chess as an adult for three years now. Although I certainly had a more sophisticated understanding of the game than I did when I was a child, my response to losing was hardly more mature. Not only was I still finding the game too stressful, I was encountering a problem that I didn’t remember having in my youth: unless my opponents were total schmucks who taunted me or otherwise misbehaved, I had trouble defeating them if I knew they’d get upset.

  One evening I faced a small nine-year-old boy in another rapid tournament at the Marshall. He was a nice kid who was shy and respectful. On the twentieth move, I won a key pawn. I was also ahead on the clock, and it should have been a simple matter to land the knockout blow. All the bishops and knights had been exchanged, and I could immediately infiltrate his back two ranks with my queen and rooks.

  But he looked so distressed when I won t
he pawn. His eyes were tearful, his shoulders sagged, and he slumped in his chair. I empathized with him and started spending more time on my moves because I had trouble focusing on the position. Instead of taking over his home ranks, I dallied and advanced a rook pawn. He tried to drum up counterplay by advancing his pawns toward my king, but I still had an objectively winning position although I was now perilously short of time. When I finally got around to dominating his home rank with my queen, he sobbed and sank even further into his seat. His discomfort was so visible that I lost whatever remained of my concentration and wasted additional time trying to recover it. I didn’t follow through by piling on my rooks, but captured another pawn with my queen. This, too, should have won, but I now had less than twenty seconds. We traded pawns on the kingside—I was still winning—and then, Zap! He grabbed a pawn near my king with his rook, offering the rook as a sacrifice. I saw, as my clock ran down, that he could force a draw by perpetual check if I took the rook. So instead I preserved my advantage by seizing another pawn and checking his king. He retreated the king into the very corner of the board.

  I could have now forced the exchange of queens, bringing about a two-pawn-up endgame that I could win without effort, but instead I harassed his queen by attacking it with my rook. He ignored the attack and instantly responded with another rook sacrifice near my king. This time I could not turn down the rook (because he would have mated me on the next move), but after I captured it he could clinch a draw by perpetually checking me. I started to propose a draw, but before I could finish my sentence, he gently interrupted me and pointed out that my flag had fallen. I had lost the game on time. I was crestfallen and annoyed by this defeat, even though I had brought it on myself.

  I spoke to Greg afterward. “You did what?” he said, incredulously. “You felt sorry for him when you were beating him? You’re crazy, Paul. You’re completely crazy. You should crush these kids and make them really cry.” Indeed, I was a head case, the tormented duelist who draws his pistol first but can’t get off a shot. We humans are supposed to learn from our mistakes, yet here I was repeating the same self-destructive pattern I had followed when I played Greg’s sister. I was ahead on the clock and on the board but allowed myself to be flummoxed by my opponent’s eleventh-hour, desperado sacrifices and my reservations about winning.