King's Gambit

by Paul Hoffman

  “Chess has helped my mentality,” he continued. “It has helped my brain. It builds discipline in men. Most men act and then think. That’s why we have wars. Chess teaches you to think first and then act. Half a billion people know how to play. My goal is to double that number. If a billion people played chess, I believe there would be no more conflicts or wars. If people think before they act, they won’t turn to violence. The only wars people know will be the harmless ones fought on chessboards.”

  I asked him when he learned the game.

  “My grandfather taught me when I was four,” he said. “When I was five, the kids on my block organized an outdoor competition. The prize was ten bottles of beer. There were eleven kids, ages fifteen to seventeen. I was playing nearby and they needed a twelfth chess player, so I was drafted. I beat everybody. Then there was a big argument about whether they should give ten bottles of beer to a five-year-old. They decided to give me one can of Pepsi Cola. One can! They should have given me ten cans. It made me mad, but the experience launched my chess career. My whole life I’ve been chasing the other nine cans.”

  He rattled off his tournament successes: at seven, champion of his grade school; at ten, champion of all schoolboys in Kalmykia; at eleven, champion of all Russian schoolchildren; at fourteen, Kalmyk champion; at twenty, champion of the Soviet Army; at twenty-three, champion of all university students in Moscow. He gave up tournament chess, he said, to concentrate on his language studies at Moscow’s Institute of International Relations (learning Japanese, Mongolian, English, and Chinese), make his first million (as the first importer of Japanese cars into Russia), and enter politics (as an elected member of the Russian parliament in 1990, when he was twenty-eight). He told me that he loved haiku and calligraphy, and he sketched in my notebook the Japanese signs for newspaperman, in appreciation, he said, of the chess articles I had written for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

  “When I became president of Kalmykia,” he continued, “my first decree was about the development of chess. I asked teachers and the minister of education to start teaching chess. Now 100 percent of the kids in Kalmykia play the game. Kids who play chess are able to study well and have excellent results in school. They don’t do drugs. They’re not hooligans. Parents are very happy. This is my dream—to export what we did in Kalmykia to the rest of the world.”

  “What do you think the future holds for chess in my country?”

  “Maybe we’ll hold the next World Championship in Vegas. One of my friends built a new hotel there. And you’ll attend the championship as my honored guest.”

  “I’d be delighted. Which hotel do you mean?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t a new hotel but just an old one he repaired.”

  “What’s the hotel?”

  “I forget.”

  “Let’s get back to your own chess for a moment. What was the highest rating you achieved?”

  “I had a rating equivalent to 2300—a FIDE master. But it was twenty years ago so I don’t really remember.”

  “As the president of FIDE,” I said, “it must be hard to manage all these opinionated players.”

  “You are right. It is a little difficult. Chess players are very special sportsmen. They’re not like football players, karate champions, or boxers. They think they’re cleverer than everybody else. But they’re also a little crazy. I say to them, ‘Please, confine your cleverness to the chessboard. Do anything you want on the board. Your job is to produce good games and get paid for it. My job is to create tournaments and get you paid. Leave that to me.’”

  “Are you disappointed that no Israeli players came to Tripoli?”

  “Well, there are many reasons why someone might not come. Maybe he’s upset because his neighbor’s cat or dog died. Or he could be in bad health himself.”

  “Is that why the Israelis didn’t come? Because their neighbors’ pets died?” I did my best to sound more curious than incredulous.

  “Gadhafi wrote official invitation letters to all of them. They probably each had a different reason. One player, I know, was concerned about security. But official inspectors from FIDE, security experts, came and examined the hotel and walked around Tripoli. They thought the security was fine.”

  “The Libyans must have very sophisticated security, because it’s not visible at all.”

  “Yes, very sophisticated. Extremely sophisticated. But someone will always have concerns. If the tournament was in New York, one of the players would worry about security. When I visit New York, friends say, ‘Kirsan, you must be careful when you walk around.’”

  Berik returned and pointed to his watch. “It’s OK, Berik,” he said. “I am enjoying talking to our American friend. I think he understands me.”

  “I have one last question,” I said. “Tell me why you have devoted yourself to the game.”

  “I do not think of chess as a game. Nor is it a sport. It is an activity that is inherent in our civilization. It is civilization. Chess is science and philosophy. Archaeologists have found chess pieces in India, South America, and Japan. There were chess pieces before there were aircraft, ships, and Communism. How could they exist at all these different places on Earth? No human could have distributed them. Maybe the pieces came from,” and he paused, extended his palms toward the ceiling, and said blissfully, “outer space.” (The extraterrestrial world is a place Ilyumzhinov knows well—he claims that aliens once put him on a yellow spaceship and transported him across the universe.) “Maybe chess is a gift from other planets. Or else chess sprung from the bones of mankind, from our very nature. It is somehow programmed into our genetic code. Tennis and golf are not played everywhere on Earth. But chess is. I am its guardian, its keeper. For me chess is religion. Join me please in spreading the faith.”

  Berik was now nervously pacing in the hallway because Ilyumzhinov was clearly late for another appointment. I thanked the two of them and headed toward the door.

  “Tell me,” Ilyumzhinov continued, “do you think George Bush plays chess?”

  Berik laughed dismissively.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I know one of Bill Clinton’s top aides, and he said that Clinton loved to play hearts.”

  “You must find out. I want to play chess with your president. You’ll come with me to the White House and we’ll have an evening of chess. It will be beautiful. Please see if that’s possible.”

  The last thing Ilyumzhinov did was to show me photographs of the Buddhist temples he’d constructed. “Don’t they look wonderful?” he said, savoring each picture. He was also proud that he had rebuilt the Christian Orthodox churches once leveled by Stalin. His republic, he said, respected religious minorities. Even with his checkered human rights record, history may give Ilyumzhinov credit for easing ethnic tensions in a pluralistic state where there were as many Orthodox Christians as there were Buddhists.

  In 2006, top grandmasters would mount a concerted challenge to Ilyumzhinov’s reelection bid at FIDE. “Either FIDE stays a cowboy organization mired in sleaze and shunned by corporate sponsors,” said British GM Nigel Short, “or it becomes a modern, professional sporting body.” Or, as Karpov put it, “Even a dickhead would do a better job than Ilyumzhinov.” Despite the opposition, Ilyumzhinov was overwhelmingly reelected in June, in a one-vote-per-country system in which grandmaster powerhouses like Russia had no more weight at the ballot box than a Caribbean island whose Olympiad players were no stronger than me. In 2006, Ilyumzhinov also commandeered another term as Kalmyk high muckety-muck after criticizing the Kremlin for not properly attending to Lenin’s embalmed body—the Soviet leader was one-eighth Kalmyk—and offering to purchase Lenin for a million dollars and grandly put him on display in Elista.

  I RETURNED TO OUR HOTEL ROOM AND SHOWED PASCAL THE SEVEN-MOVE draw. “He played OK,” he said, “better than I imagined.” I agreed with Pascal’s assessment of his play but was less certain about what to make of the man himself. I guess I had expected to meet a conspicuously bad guy—a
s a journalist I felt a nebulous affinity for the slain member of my profession. But instead I met a quixotic philosopher-king whose overblown ideas about the cultural importance of chess were certifiably nutty. He saw himself not as an ironfisted ruler, but as a poetic visionary who didn’t need to get bogged down in details—like the absence of roofs in Chess City, the security in Tripoli, or the discrimination against Israeli players—as long as he was doing God’s work by advancing the sacred goal of making chess universal. He believed he was quenching the spiritual thirst of his long-repressed people by restoring Buddhism and teaching them the uplifting game of chess, even if in fact he was also leaving them physically thirsty by not providing drinking water.

  In the good times, when companies paid him a lot for the privilege of relocating on paper to his low-tax haven, and he also reportedly made money from trafficking in caviar, oil, and drugs, he rescued FIDE from insolvency. In the 1990s, he could afford to spend millions of dollars on international chess tournaments, and the chess community was the better for it. Now times were lean, and Ilyumzhinov had to rely on the likes of Muammar Gadhafi to fund his tournaments, and the funding was lower and sporadic and came with all kinds of conditions. Once the money started to dry up, the players were angry with Ilyumzhinov.

  Chess City was certainly not Versailles—it was no more splendid than a clean California resort, although it was architecturally striking in the drably expansive steppe—but Ilyumzhinov undoubtedly saw his own overall contribution to chess as being as lasting and beautiful as Louis XIV’s palace. He had personally spent more than $20 million staging chess matches—and “raised” $50 million for Chess City—and some of the resulting games are masterpieces that will be replayed and enjoyed by future generations of players. Versailles bankrupted a country and fomented a revolution. Ilyumzhinov may well do the same, in Kalmykia or FIDE. What will endure, he knows, are the exquisite chess games that he facilitated. They will survive as long as earthlings are still pushing pawns and moving knights. In his disturbingly elite royalist calculus, the creation of immortal beauty apparently outweighs any human suffering he may have caused.

  PASCAL AND I CAUGHT THE END OF THE LUNCH BUFFET IN THE HOTEL. AFTER the prematurely aborted King’s Gambit, I was eager to play some real chess, and luckily another opportunity soon presented itself. Outside the lunchroom, I ran into women’s world champion Antoaneta Stefanova. The twenty-four-year-old Bulgarian was sitting by herself in a lounge chair, nursing two orange drinks (nonalcoholic of course—this was Libya after all) and playfully blowing smoke high into the air from a pungent cigarette. I noticed she was left-handed, which I found alluring because I didn’t know any other female southpaws. She had prominent crescent eyebrows and thick, wavy blond hair that had bunched up on the shoulders of her trim black jacket. Her eyes sparkled but were also glazed and fatigued. She looked like a Hollywood movie star who was relaxing in her trailer after a taxing morning on the set.

  I had never met Stefanova before, and my first impression was undoubtedly influenced by what Jennifer had told me. “I know it’s strange for me to idolize someone who’s just a year older than me,” Jennifer had said, “but I love how she handles herself at tournaments. She doesn’t hole herself up in her room between rounds but is out partying and drinking and exploring whatever strange city she’s in long after most of her opponents have gone to bed. And yet she usually plays well the next day.”

  I introduced myself to Stefanova and told her I was a friend of Jennifer’s. She nodded approvingly. I asked her about reports on the Web that she and her compatriot, Veselin Topalov, who was then the world’s number three player, were giving a simultaneous exhibition in Tripoli to show support for the Bulgarian nurses on death row.3 To me this seemed a very gutsy thing to do, and I didn’t believe the Libyans would allow it. She shrugged and said she didn’t know what was happening because she hadn’t yet met with the Bulgarian ambassador. She did say that she was going to take on a group of local chess players early that evening. I asked if I could play, too. She perked up and inquired about my rating. I answered and she studied me for a minute before responding.

  “I think I can handle that,” she said, teasing.

  “I’m sure you can,” I said.

  She told me I needed to get the permission of the organizers because the event was being televised and they might want to restrict the players to Libyans. I spoke to three of the organizers and they all seemed lukewarm, but a few hours later they said I could play. (Part of the problem was that for a while the entire event was in jeopardy because a government official thought it would be disgraceful for Libyan men to lose to a woman, especially a foreigner, on nationwide television.) I was excited—it would be my second game of the day against a chess celebrity.

  There were two hours until game time, and Pascal was now my second. He realized that, apart from my incomplete effort against Ilyumzhinov, he didn’t know how I played. I turned on my computer and opened a file of my tournament games. I was a bit self-conscious. The neurotic in me feared that he might think I was too weak to bother helping. But it was soon clear that he was having a good time. He played through half a dozen of my losses and observed that I had an advantage in the middle game in all of them. “Interesting,” he said. “You’re winning. Then you screw up. We’ll work on that later. You should win won games.”

  For the time being, though, we focused on what Stefanova played as White, the color she would have on all the boards in the simul. ChessBase contained 407 of her games as White, going back to 1989, when she was nine. We looked at the first few moves of the thirty-four games she played in 2003. Stefanova was one of the few women in the world to hold the rank of grandmaster, and a player of her strength would probably deviate from her normal repertoire against someone like me. She could play any opening well against amateurs, and would undoubtedly vary her moves from one board to the next. But Pascal and I needed to start somewhere, so we pretended I was someone she respected, against whom she’d employ her usual stuff.

  Stefanova was generally a queen-pawn player. I told Pascal that I would respond by playing the Slav, not the modern…a6 variation that he tried against Bacrot, but the old-fashioned Slav that Vassily Smyslov, the seventh world champion, employed throughout his long career. If White enters the mainline of the Slav, he emerges with a bit more space in the center, but Black has counter-chances. When Stefanova faced the Slav in 2003, however, we saw that she shunned the mainline and played the unambitious Exchange Variation. She immediately resolved the tension in the center by swapping pawns, giving up her space advantage in return for a risk-free mirror-image position that gave her the chance to grind down her opponent by virtue of having one extra move to break the symmetry.

  Pascal shook his head at some of the games. “I hate this stuff,” he said. “It’s slow. I’d lose from fucking boredom.”

  “You’re really encouraging. If you think you’d lose…”

  “It’s not so bad. You just have to stay awake.”

  Pascal explained that even when Black adopts openings that are sharper and more rough-and-tumble than the Slav, a pacifistic White can usually find a way of avoiding all the complications and steer the game into a drawish position. “When White is a chicken,” Pascal said, “it really sucks. I always want a fight.”

  “Of course if I draw her, it’s good for me.”

  “OK. But if she plays the Exchange Variation, it’s not because she wants a draw. She wants to wear you down without giving you winning chances.”

  For the next hour we reviewed specific lines in the Exchange Variation. Pascal showed me some ways to try to mix it up and inject life into an otherwise sterile position. If Stefanova and I were playing one-on-one, she’d presumably see through any complications I introduced, but in a simul where she couldn’t spend much time on any given game, there was always a chance she’d go astray. In any event, to tread water against a grandmaster in this deceptively quiet position with identical pawn structures was a sure route to
a slow and tortuous death. My positional understanding of the game was nowhere near as good as hers. She would just patiently and imperceptibly build up her position, accumulating microscopic advantages until they amounted to a win.

  The last thing we did was look at another opening she might try. It had the wonderful name of the Pseudo Trompowsky, and it could arise on White’s second move after we both advanced our queen pawns. Instead of now making a move that invited the Slav, she could develop her dark-squared bishop to the fourth rank on my side of the board. Nineteenth-century chess theoreticians would be apoplectic. Not only does the move violate cherished opening principles about developing knights first, it seems to accomplish little except “biting on granite,” harmlessly attacking a defended pawn. Moreover, it invites Black to kick the bishop back to White’s side of the board. But the move also has its advantages.

  First of all, it avoids having to keep up with the latest wrinkles in opening theory in the commoner double queen-pawn openings. For players who don’t have the time or temperament to play through hundreds of contemporary games, a little-analyzed opening like the Pseudo Trompowksy can be an important weapon. Second, the move anticipates that Black wants to develop his king knight, in which case White’s bishop will be threatening the steed instead of granite. (In the real Trompowsky, White doesn’t jump the gun, but waits until the knight is developed before attacking it.) Of course, Black need not cooperate and can hold back the knight, as I planned to do. I showed Pascal the line I wanted to play—punting her bishop immediately with my rook pawn—and he gave it his blessing.

  I had to face Stefanova in five minutes, and there was no time to get pumped up with Nirvana. I put on a T-shirt that said “Village Chess Shop, New York City.” With only eighteen hours left in Tripoli, I felt like flaunting that I was an American. We headed to the playing area, and I took my place alongside thirteen Libyan students, some in kaffiyeh, at tables arranged in a horseshoe. Now I understood why Stefanova had been eager for me to speak to the organizers—I stood out like a black sheep. A printed program released by the Libyan Olympic Committee said that Stefanova, who was inexplicably called “Siovanov,” would square off against “13 male and female players from Libya under 20 years old and an American sportscaster named Huffman.”