The Immortal Game (37 page)

ALSO BY DAVID SHENK

The Forgetting

The End of Patience

Data Smog

Skeleton Key

(with Steve Silberman)

*1 The moves in
chatrang
were very similar to but not exactly the same as in modern chess; overall the pieces were far less powerful, making the game significantly slower. Modern flourishes like castling and en passant capture did not exist. But, strikingly, the Horse in sixth-century
chatrang
advanced in exactly the same two-squares-up, one-square-over maneuver as today’s Knight. The
Ruhk
also moved exactly the same as the modern Rook. The Foot Soldier nearly perfectly mirrors the modern chess Pawn, moving forward one square at a time, capturing other pieces diagonally, and getting promoted to Minister—the predecessor to the Queen—upon reaching the back row.
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*2 Standard notation, the universally accepted scheme for conveying chess moves, is crisply efficient, but so abstract that it takes some getting used to. Only the barest minimum of necessary information is conveyed for each move:

•The move number: 1. to indicate White’s move; 1…. to indicate Black’s.

•The symbol of the piece being moved: K for King, Q for Queen, B for Bishop, R for Rook, and N for Knight. Pawns are indicated by the absence of a piece symbol.

•The grid location of the piece’s destination (a6, c3, etc.).

•Other symbols to indicate special action: × for capturing a piece; + for check; ++ for checkmate; O-O for castling on the Kingside of the board; O-O-O for castling on the Queenside.
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*3
Development
: Activating the pieces by taking them out of their starting positions to more active and effective squares.
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*4
Check
: An attack on the opponent’s King, which can be answered by capturing the attacking piece, interposing a piece, or moving the King to an unattacked square.
Checkmate
: An attack on the opponent’s King that cannot be countered and from which the King cannot escape—thus handing victory to the attacker.
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*5 The same story is also told of the Croat Svetoslav Surinj, who, in 1271, was said to have won the right to rule the Dalmatian towns on the Adriatic by beating the Venetian Peter II in a chess match.
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*6 The medieval French historian Robert de St. Remi reported in the early twelfth century that participants in what came to be known as the First Crusade relied on chess as one of their chief diversions between battles. It was a rich irony that, in the midst of a real war against the Muslims, the Christian Crusaders relaxed by playing a war game that Muslim culture had nurtured and delivered to them.
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†1 The very first mention of the chess Queen occurs in the ninety-eight-line elegiac poem “Verses on Chess,” found in the Einsiedeln monastery and dated reliably back to the 990s. Historian Marilyn Yalom speculates that the shift from Minister to Queen was probably inspired either by the powerful German Queen Adelaide, wife to King Otto I (they later became emperor and empress of the Holy Roman Empire), or by the next queen and empress, Theophano, wife to Otto II, the son of Otto I and Adelaide.
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*7
Kingside
: The side of the board closer to the King’s original square, as opposed to the Queenside.
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*8 Castling is a onetime defensive and offensive move wherein the King essentially changes places with one of his Rooks. Castling must occur before either the King or the Rook in question has moved, and cannot occur while a King is in check. The move itself involves shifting the King over two squares toward the Rook, and then moving the Rook to the other side of the King, on the adjacent square. (Today, the consensus is that castling should be accomplished by move 12 or so, unless the player has something special up his sleeve or forgoes the castle in order to take advantage of a terrible blunder by the opponent.)
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*9 The optional two-square Pawn move had actually been around for a few centuries in some assizes, but it wasn’t standardized until around 1475, when the Bishop and Queen changes were also widely introduced.
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*10 Checkmate in two moves: 1. f3 e5 2. g4 Qh4++
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*11 Mary and Darnley did wed, with fateful results. Their son, James, succeeded Elizabeth after her death in 1603. ( James, incidentally, was not a fan of chess. “I thinke it ouer fond,” he remarked just before becoming the English king, “because it is ouerwise and Philosophicke a follie…. [it] filleth and troubleth mens heads with as many fashious toyes of the playe, as before it was filled with thoughts of his affaires.”)
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*12 Locke’s empiricism was in contrast to the rationalism of René Descartes, the vastly influential French mathematician and philosopher from earlier in the same century who founded modern philosophy, famously declaring, “I think, therefore I am.” “Descartes’s rationalism was designed to shake our faith in our senses and, instead, place reasoning and logic at our core,” explains Williams College professor of philosophy Steven Gerrard. “Locke’s empiricism argued for just the opposite: all knowledge must begin with our humble senses.”
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*13 This treatise came to be known as the
Innocent Morality
, named after its purported (and not implausible) author, Pope Innocent III.
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*14 Thomas Jefferson tells a similar story: “When Dr. Franklin went to France on his revolutionary mission, his eminence as a philosopher, his venerable appearance, and the cause on which he was sent, rendered him extremely popular. For all ranks and conditions of men there, entered warmly into the American interest. He was therefore feasted and invited to all the court parties. At these he sometimes met the old Duchess of Bourbon, who being a chess player of about his force, they very generally played together. Happening once to put her king into prise, the Doctor took it. ‘Ah,’ says she, ‘we do not take kings so.’ ‘We do in America,’ says the Doctor.”
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*15 Of Jefferson, a friend wrote: “He was, in his youth, a very good chess-player. There were not among his associates, many who could get the better of him. I have heard him speak of ‘four hour games’ with Mr. Madison. Yet I have heard him say that when, on his arrival in Paris, he was introduced into a Chess Club, he was beaten at once, and that so rapidly and signally that he gave up all competition. He felt that there was no disputing such a palm with men who passed several hours of every evening in playing chess.”
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*16 “Fox and Geese” was another popular board game of the era, in which one player represents a flock of geese trying to restrict the movement of the other player’s lone fox. “Polititians” refers, simply, to chess and the way all chess players pretend to direct political (or military) action on the chessboard.
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*17 The official score was eight games to two, because Philidor had offered that any draw should count as a win for Stamma.
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*18 This was not a developing move because that Knight had previously been moved out of its starting position—it had already been developed. Rather than developing his other Knight, or a Bishop or a Pawn, Black moved the King’s Knight a second time.
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*19 “Steinitz has been known to grieve much when he has lost at chess,” wrote H. E. Bird in 1893. “At Dundee, for example, in 1866 after his defeat by De Vere his friends became alarmed at his woe and disappearance. Again, after his fall to Rosenthal in a game he should have won at the Criterion in 1883, news were brought that he was on a seat in St. James’ Park quite uncontrollable.”
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*20 Two separate incidents at a 1934 Alekhine-Bogolyubov match in Germany drew attention to Nimzowitsch’s questionable judgment. “One day when a high officer in a Nazi uniform entered the press room,” recalls veteran chess observer Hans Kmoch, “Nimzovich brusquely demanded to see his credentials. When the perplexed officer didn’t answer at once, Nimzovich asked him to leave. The other reporters, including myself, were horrified, expecting the Nazi to react violently after receiving such an order from a Jew. But, amazingly, nothing happened. The officer simply left.”During a separate match in Poland, Nimzowitsch attended a luncheon at the home of the notorious Reichminister Hans Frank (later dubbed the Butcher of Poland and eventually hanged at Nuremberg). “At the luncheon,” recalled Kmoch, “he [Nimzowitsch] demonstrated his usual persecution mania by complaining first about a dirty plate and then about a dirty knife. The Reichminister, seated directly opposite him, pretended not to hear.” Nimzowitsch also goaded the Reichminister with boasts of his diplomatic protection—probably not the smartest tactical decision by a Jew in the presence of a powerful, merciless Nazi.
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*21 While Freud himself apparently never considered the impact of chess on the human psyche, he did pointedly use chess as a metaphor for psychoanalysis. In each, he suggested, one can easily study the basics in a book, but “the gap left in the instructions can only be filled in by the zealous study of games fought out by master hands.”
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*22 Most cases of schizophrenia have a strong genetic component, but even among that population, the disease is thought to be often precipitated by environmental stress or emotional trauma. Other instances of schizophrenia may well be caused
entirely
by outside stress, with no genetic predisposition at all.
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*23 Ironically, Ströbeck’s school was later named after Germany’s most famous chess champion, the Jewish mathematician Emanuel Lasker, who had been forced to flee the country in 1933.
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*24 There are persistent claims that chess is mentioned in the Talmud, either as
nardshir
(sometime before the sixth century
C.E
.) or as
iskundrée
(third century
C.E
.). If either reference were substantiated as chess, this would make it the earliest known references to the game and would cement indeed the special relationship between chess and the Jews. But the arguments are far from convincing. In the eleventh century the Jewish scholar Rashi interpreted
nardshir
as chess. It is much more likely that the term referred to the backgammon precursor
nard
. More recently, several scholars have made the case that
iskundrée
must be chess, since it is portrayed in the Talmud as distracting ancient scholars from their studies. “This can only mean a game which is serious even in play—it can only be chess!” insists Alexander Kohut. While it is not impossible that Jews from the Talmudic age were acquainted with the game, the evidence is just not there.
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*25 One pithy illustration of the drastic differential in preparation is the Round One game between the American Samuel Reshevsky and the Soviet Vasily Smyslov. Reshevsky took ninety minutes to make his first twenty-two moves. Smyslov took eight minutes. The Russian team had exhaustively worked out an opening preparation that went that deeply into the game.
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†2 “We should note,” writes Russian historian Isaac M. Linder, “that chess has been found not only in excavations of princes’ citadels (Grodno, Drutsk, Volkovysk, and Novgorod), but also in excavations around cities (Vitebsk), in semi-dug-out living quarters, and in the courtyards of craftsmen and other simple people (Vyshgorod, Nikolo-Lenivets, Minsk).”
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*26 “Marx adored chess,” writes Daniel Johnson, “and—much to his wife Jenny’s exasperation—would disappear with his fellow émigrés for days at a time on chess binges. Despite devoting much time to chess, he never rose above mediocrity.” One story has Marx so agitated about a late-night chess loss to a friend that he stalked over to his opponent’s house early the next morning to demand a rematch.
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*27 “Grandmaster,” the most exalted title in chess, is a lifetime designation conferred on its best players by the world chess organization, the Fédération Internationale des Échecs (also known as FIDE), since 1950. One can earn the title in several different ways, the most common being the triumph over other grandmasters in a minimum of three official tournaments. In 1950, there were twenty-seven officially recognized grandmasters; in 2005, there were about 1,100.The more precise method for rating top players was the Élo system, developed in 1964 by the Hungarian-born American physics professor Árpád Élo. Élo ratings were rooted in a statistically based mathematical formula that gives a running game-to-game score to all competitive chess players, as if each player is playing in one long tournament throughout his or her entire career. Every player’s score is adjusted after each official game against another rated player. The amount of the adjustment is determined by the rating of the player’s opponent, along with the totality of prior wins and losses. A specific rating does not guarantee but usually closely corresponds to a FIDE title. Most players with a rating of 2500 or higher, for example, are grandmasters. Most players rated between 2400 and 2499 have the second-highest title, “international master.”When Élo first debuted his rating system in 1964, two players shared the highest rating of 2690, world champion Tigran Petrosian and Bobby Fischer.
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*28 Ironically, just as Fischer became an American hero, he and his mother came under FBI suspicion of being Soviet agents.
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*29 Kasparov demanded a rematch, which IBM rebuffed, preferring to bask in its victory. Deep Blue was permanently dismantled shortly afterward. Ever since, Kasparov has many times aimed to undermine the credibility of the Deep Blue team and the validity of the 1997 match. He spent much of a 1999 speech raising suspicions, concluding with a rhetorical flourish: “The reason I am telling you the story is not to wake up some old ghosts or to tell how badly IBM behaved. But I think that IBM committed a sort of crime against science, because by claiming the victory in the man-versus-machine contest, which was not accomplished, IBM dissuaded other companies from entering the competition.”
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