by Paul Hoffman
Nigel Short is one of the few grandmasters who, like Sosonko, has publicly acknowledged the extent of the insanity in their profession. In a review of The Luzhin Defense, called “Chess Can Seriously Damage Your Health,” Short wrote that he found the movie all too real:
The intermittently institutionalized Mexican champion Carlos Torre once described the strains of top-level chess as “maddening.” The ten time British champion, Dr. Jonathan Penrose (who is, fortunately, far from batty), collapsed during an Olympiad. And only a fortnight ago Vladimir Bagirov dropped dead, practically at the board.
Short also could not resist commenting on the otherworldliness of his fellow players. The review continued:
So awkward, clumsy, poorly dressed and inarticulate is our dear Luzhin that it is a wonder that any woman should find him attractive, and yet a romance of sorts, and even a marriage, eventually occur…. I cannot help being reminded, wicked though that may be, of one or two of my colleagues, who against all odds somehow enter into matrimony. Literally being unable to knot a tie or tie a shoelace is apparently no impediment to conjoining with the fairer sex.
I believe that madness is rampant in championship chess, particularly in the tier of players just below the top. After all, to reach the pinnacle of chess requires a certain psychological stability. The world’s top grandmasters are successful in part because they are able to recover from devastating losses.12 Every player, even Garry Kasparov, collapses in the odd game, but he has the inner strength to pull himself together and not let defeat unduly interfere with his subsequent concentration and performance. A lack of confidence can stop players who are close to the summit from making the final ascent. They may devote even more time to the game than the champions (and therefore be more isolated from the rest of the world) because they think that an extra fifteenth hour of study a day will get them to the summit. On the other hand, if their self-worth depends solely on their chess results, they may not recover if they stumble and lose a random game.
But is the pastime bad for the players, or are certain players bad for the pastime? Former British champion Bill Hartston once observed, “Chess doesn’t drive people mad. It keeps mad people sane.” Morphy and Fischer’s behavior became truly bizarre only after they retired from the game. Their fate should not stop anyone from playing chess any more than Van Gogh’s hacking off his ear should deter people from becoming painters or Mark McGwire’s alleged steroid use should discourage children from playing baseball.
Certainly, those who avoid chess are depriving themselves of something sublime. Siegbert Tarrasch, a nineteenth-century champion, famously put it this way: “I have always a slight feeling of pity for the man who has no knowledge of chess, just as I would pity the man who has remained ignorant of love. Chess, like love, like music, has the power to make men happy.” Or, as Short said, “The most important thing for anyone close to me to understand is how much enjoyment I get from playing chess and not ever to think of it as some little game to make money at.”
THE CHESS WORLD IS LIKE A HIERARCHICAL MEDIEVAL KINGDOM, WHERE TITLES and rank are all-important: as the British grandmaster Raymond Keene observed, when three chess players pass through a swinging door, they do so in descending order of rating. I’m not a professional chess player. I’m not even a master. I’m an amateur—affectionately if derisively known as a woodpusher—but for an amateur I’m not bad. Of the eighty thousand members of the United States Chess Federation, my numerical rating of 1915, based on my tournament results, puts me in the top 95 percent of all U.S. competitors. I am what’s called a Class A player—the classes begin at J, which corresponds to a rating between 0 and 200—and after one particularly good tournament I was fortunate to have my rating cross the 2000 threshold into the Expert category.13
A rating of 2200 makes you a master. The title international master, or IM, is granted by FIDE (pronounced fee-day), the French acronym for Fédération Internationale des échecs, the international chess federation, and usually corresponds to a comparable rating of 2400 and a certain level of performance, called a norm, in three international tournaments. A grandmaster, or GM, generally has a rating above 2500 and has achieved three higher norms. There are just over one thousand grandmasters in the world. When Pascal Charbonneau and I became friends during the summer of 2004, he was rated 2474 and had the title international master and two-thirds of the norms required for the grandmaster title. Bobby Fischer, at his peak, was rated 2785. Garry Kasparov achieved the highest rating ever, 2851, in July 1999. God is said to be rated 3000.
This means that I’m like the guy at the karaoke club who everyone says has a good voice because professional musicians never visit. If you gathered five hundred random people off the street and organized a chess competition, I’d be victorious unless I was extremely unlucky and a serious player on a rare break from his chess studies happened to be walking down the avenue. And yet the difference between my command of the game as an A player and Kasparov’s, or even Pascal’s, is almost unfathomable. They can work magic on the chessboard while I’m still struggling to hold the wand, let alone wave it to make rabbits appear.
I BECAME DISILLUSIONED WITH CHESS IN HIGH SCHOOL AND STOPPED PLAYING altogether for two decades after college. But then in the year 2000, when I was forty-three, I experienced a series of personal and professional crises that were as bewildering and unnerving as my parents’ separation had been three decades before. The crises strained my own marriage (after unsustainable rallies, Ann and I eventually split up, as I was writing this book) and precipitated a career change. But they also brought me unexpectedly back to chess.
After ten good years in the magazine business, first as the editor in chief of the science monthly Discover and then in various executive positions at the Walt Disney Company, I moved to Chicago in the summer of 1997 to become the publisher of Encyclopaedia Britannica. My charge was to reinvent the esteemed if crusty 229-year-old publication that was faltering in the Internet age. I was hired by Britannica’s rumpled new owner, Jacqui Safra, a reputed gazillionaire in his fifties whose family, it was jokingly said, had invented banking during the Ottoman Empire. My interview with Safra was disconcertingly short. He looked over my résumé and asked only two questions. “You say you like mathematics,” he said. “Then tell me, what is thirteen times thirteen?” Of course I immediately answered 169. “You say you like chess,” he continued. “Well, what’s the shortest possible mate?” Two moves, I said without hesitation, and I proceeded to describe the so-called Fool’s Mate.14 The answers to these simple questions won me the complex job of managing hundreds of academics around the world who were revising and updating the forty-four million words in Britannica.
When I moved to Chicago with Ann, a children’s book author, we both thought that Britannica might be the ideal job for me. I had spent my editing career making scientific ideas hip and accessible without robbing them of nuance and subtlety. I could now do that at Britannica with a much wider range of academic subjects. I am a bookworm at heart, and I enjoyed reading the entries in older editions of Britannica, in which Trotsky wrote about Lenin, and Houdini detailed the history of magic. I also liked to imagine the conversations between the world-famous authors and their anonymous schoolmarmish editors. Albert Einstein once wrote the entry on physics (“Professor Einstein, let me review when it is appropriate to use the pluperfect tense”), and Stephen Hawking also contributed to Britannica (“Splitting atoms may be possible, Dr. Hawking, but not splitting infinitives”).
The Britannica offices were as fusty as the see-through Indian paper on which the old editions were printed, and the company clearly needed a new editorial and business model. Internet users of Britannica expected current information, and the entries were conspicuously out of date; revisions had lagged because the company no longer enjoyed a strong revenue stream from the door-to-door salesmen who had convinced families that their children’s ticket to success was a thirty-two-volume set of encyclopedias. Before Safra arrived with his che
ckbook, one editor might spend hours updating an obscure entry in mathematics while embarrassing howlers in a widely read entry on telecommunications (“Cable television is an experiment,” I think it said) remained uncorrected.
Unfortunately, although Safra resembled the ideal boss—an absentee owner who paid me much more than my Discover salary—he did not leave me alone to supervise the staff and set a new direction. From locations in New York, Chicago, Paris, Switzerland, and the Napa Valley, he reversed my big decisions and micromanaged my small ones. Like the president’s press secretary, I sometimes had to put a rosy spin on directives that I didn’t agree with.
The job had its amusing moments, and Safra himself, who was Woody Allen’s chief financial backer before their relationship ended in society-page litigation, was not uninteresting. He had small parts in three movies (under the pseudonym J. E. Beaucaire, the name of a character in a Bob Hope film). Safra was quirkily paternalistic: before letting me get into a cab alone, he’d eyeball the driver to size up whether he looked like the sort who’d crash the car or otherwise do me harm. And then Safra would call me later to make sure that I had reached my destination unscathed. (Personal security was an issue in his family: his uncle Edmond famously died when a male nurse set fire to Edmond’s home in Monaco.) And yet, despite Jacqui Safra’s concern for me, I found him largely unavailable. Sometimes Safra established specific dates for us to get together but didn’t reveal where we were going to meet. At the last moment I might end up walking a few blocks to see him in a Chicago hotel or racing to O’Hare to fly all the way to Switzerland to join him for breakfast. Once I was summoned to Paris on short notice, where Safra then left a terse message at the front desk of my five-star hotel announcing that pressing business prevented our meeting. I was subsequently awakened in my gold-gilded hotel room at 2:30 A.M. by the phone. It was Safra calling from somewhere nearby. For more than an hour, we reviewed the state of Britannica. The next day, without ever meeting him in person, I returned, utterly exhausted, to Chicago.
Another time he scheduled a two-day retreat at his Napa vineyard (whose mansion was used in the soap opera Falcon Crest) with me and a man who ran many of his businesses; we were supposed to spend the weekend brainstorming about the role of the encyclopedia in the digital age. Again Safra did not show up, but he also did not cancel the chef he’d hired for the weekend. Instead of exploring Napa’s epicurean restaurants, we were largely confined to the mansion, like newlyweds on a romantic getaway, eating truffle omelets and kumquat mousse.
My visits to Britannica’s operations in Eastern Europe, London, Tokyo, and Rio de Janeiro were the best part of the job. I spent vodka-infused evenings in Budapest and Poznan, Poland, working with academics who were translating the encyclopedia into Hungarian and Polish. But, in the fall of 1998, I cut back on business travel because Ann, to our delight, was pregnant. The job in Chicago became increasingly grim, and I cloistered myself in my Michigan Avenue office, stymied in my attempts to make decisions.
That winter I became very sick for the first time in my life. On a frigid Chicago night, I ended up in the emergency room at Northwestern Hospital with a 104.5 degree fever and a hacking cough, waiting to see a doctor as a triage team tried to save the frostbitten toes of a California businessman who’d been walking around outside in sandals in sub-zero temperatures. The chief doctor sent me home at 3:00 A.M. with antibiotics and codeine cough syrup. I quarantined myself in one room of our apartment for two weeks while Ann, who was in her second trimester, slipped food and The New York Times around the door.
One morning I woke up to discover that half of my right hand, including my pinkie and ring finger, was numb and tingling. During the night, I had pinched the ulnar nerve in my elbow (the nerve is relatively unprotected and is responsible for the funny-bone sensation when you whack your elbow). Normally the discomfort would have caused me to straighten my arm in my sleep before the nerve was damaged, but I was apparently too disoriented by my fever to react. People who pass out in a drunken stupor with their arm bent often pinch their ulnar nerve. Hence the condition has been called Saturday Night Syndrome or Drunken Man’s Elbow.
First I was given steroids for a few weeks to shrink the inflamed nerve, but I could only take so many of them before my immune system would be weakened and my whole body would puff up. The doctor switched me to megadoses of ibuprofen. Although I had taken ibuprofen many times in my life without side effects, this time I had a severe allergic reaction—my right cheek and particularly the right side of my upper lip blew up as if I had taken a hard punch. I also got hives on my chest and a half-dollar–size welt on my forearm. To top it off, I was nauseated. The doctor took me off the ibuprofen, and when my face recovered after more steroids, I tried another anti-inflammatory drug for my elbow called Relafen. Again my face inflated, a large welt appeared on my bicep, and I vomited. The last drug he tried was Naproxen, and I had the same adverse reaction. He discontinued all medications and I entered the medical Twilight Zone.
Every few weeks, my lip and cheek ballooned for no apparent reason. First I’d become slightly queasy, usually at about 4:00 A.M., and my cheek would feel taut. I’d take a super antihistamine and, if I was fortunate, it would arrest the tautness. But if my cheek began to bulge and my lip tingled, I’d take a strong dose of steroids. If that didn’t work, I’d race, EpiPen in hand, to the hospital so that the swelling could be monitored to make sure that it didn’t extend to my throat or escalate into anaphylactic shock. I was warned to always stay within a few miles of an emergency room and not to fly.
A leading allergist at Northwestern took an interest in my condition because another patient of hers, a district attorney, had the same peculiar swellings, and it was inconvenient, to say the least, if his face blew up while addressing the jury. She pricked my skin with a standard panel of likely allergens—grasses, elm, oak, ragweed, cockroaches, dust mites, mold, mouse dander, and rat scat—and found that I tolerated everything. The diagnosis: idiopathic angioedema. At first I was relieved: if my condition had a name, maybe medical science had a cure. I soon learned, though, that idiopathic meant “of unknown cause.” I didn’t need a doctor to tell me that I had swollen skin (angioedema) of undetermined origin.
So now I had a deadened hand, a bloated face, unsightly hives, frequent nausea, and a chronic cough. I also developed cough-induced asthma, which meant that the mildest cold went straight to my chest, and I needed a steroid inhaler to breathe normally. I began to feel as though I were losing my mind. It wasn’t simply that I felt so terrible; it was that the doctors had no idea what was responsible, which made me feel somehow responsible. In my darker moments, I thought that perhaps I should look for a hospice while I still had the mental faculties to judge the quality of care.
At work I stopped venturing out of my office for lunch, because I was afraid someone would corral me in the elevator and demand to know why he couldn’t proceed with employing new people that I had given him permission to hire a month before. One of the benefits of my job was the private bathroom that came with my corner office. It was a good place to hide—and check on my hives.
It was during these lunch hours, barricaded in my office, that I began surfing the Web and discovered the Internet Chess Club, or ICC, where people with pseudonyms like Monster Pawn and Nerd Man played speed chess against each other online. At first I had trouble rapidly manipulating the mouse with my numb right hand, but soon I learned. I immediately rediscovered the game’s magic. Not only did ICC offer an hour or two of welcome escape from my problems, but I could see myself improving from one day to the next. My chess victories were evidence, I told myself, that my mental faculties were not, in fact, deteriorating. I could call off the hospice search.
My early morning jog along Lake Michigan took me past a congregation of granite chess tables where people were always playing. I had gone by these tables dozens of times without pausing or slowing down. But a week after I discovered ICC, I stopped to watch. An elderly Russian chall
enged me, and after swindling him out of a rook—I had forgotten how fun it was to set a trap and snare someone—I was hooked again.
Ann gave birth to Alexander on May 20, 1999. Her timing was perfect: she went into labor two-thirds of the way through a marathon session of the Godfather trilogy, before we had to watch the disappointing finale. Alex, on the other hand, was three weeks late, and a big baby. His hands were so large that the pediatrician said that either he’d be a piano player or run the Teamsters. The arrival of this nine-pound-two-ounce squirmy little guy was an incredible bright spot in our lives: I called him ProSobee, after the only kind of formula he could digest, and Alexander the Greatest.
Unfortunately, everything else in our lives continued to be very difficult. Ann contracted childbirth fever, from an infection acquired during delivery, which killed women in the age before antibiotics. We returned to the hospital. I was scared. Ann had gone into convulsions and her lips had turned white. Fortunately the doctors were able to reduce her fever, but she then had an allergic reaction to the antibiotics they administered intravenously.
My job was now completely untenable: the fickleness of Britannica seemed unimportant compared to raising a child and recovering my health. I could no longer face meeting with my staff. I didn’t want to contradict myself one more time and pretend that all the company’s changes in direction were savvy. On the other hand, it was hardly a propitious moment to look for a new job: I had a tiny baby, a wife who was just regaining her strength, and a mysterious health condition that made my face look as if I’d been pummeled. Ann thought that I should just quit and become a full-time writer: my biography of the eccentric peripatetic mathematician Paul Erdös, called The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, had been published the year before and reached the number two spot on England’s best-seller list, sandwiched between a pair of racy reminiscences of Princess Diana. Ann’s idea was appealing, but I had reservations about breaking my contract with Britannica and derailing my career as a publishing executive. I hoped that one day Safra would wake up and see the wisdom of leaving me alone to rescue his company. I also wondered if his seemingly haphazard actions might be part of an arcane business strategy that somehow eluded me.