King's Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game

by Paul Hoffman

  “And the following day, it was with pleasure that I read in the paper how Mikhail Tal, after carefully thinking over the position for 40 minutes, made an accurately calculated piece sacrifice” [Three Days with Bobby Fischer & Other Chess Essays, pp. 31, 32].

  CHAPTER 6: Anatomy of a Hustler

  1: My honors thesis was called W. V. O. Quine’s Philosophy of Science: An Empiricism Without the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction.

  2: An inflated rating is also possible because a newcomer to a closed pool of high-rated players may be issued a rating that is artificially high. When a player obtains his first provisional rating from the USCF, it is computed by adding 400 points to the rating of anyone he beats, subtracting 400 points from the rating of anyone who defeats him, and averaging those numbers. So if his opponents all have very high ratings and he loses all his games, he will get a rating that is 400 points less than his opponents’ average rating—which may overstate his actual strength. In a larger pool of players, this could not happen because as he lost game after game he would be paired with lower-rated players who were also faring poorly.

  3: The Grob played in reverse is known as the Borg, which, of course, is Grob spelled backward.

  4: The “Heroes of Chernobyl” tournament was by no means unique. On March 9, 2006, the FIDE Web site (fide.com) had this report: “The Ethics Commission received a complaint from the German Chess Federation against IM Miroslav Shvarts concerning a GM norm he said he received in the Kali Cup GM tournament held in Mindzentkalla Hungary in February 2004. According to the Hungarian Chess Federation investigation, the Kali Cup never took place. Therefore the Ethics Commission has decided to apply sanctions against all the participants in the tournament, not just Mr. Shvarts.”

  5: Azmaiparashvili was once Kasparov’s chief second and a participant in a 1992 tournament that Kasparov himself organized in Moscow. In one game, according to Nigel Short, Azmaiparashvili wanted a draw as Black against American GM Nicholas de Firmian and offered him $2,000. “Nick declined,” Short said. “Kasparov went up to Nick and was very angry with him. He said that $2,000 was a very generous offer for a draw and that he should accept. Of course he’s a friend of Azmaiparashvili and wanted to help him. But he was also the tournament organizer, and this was something really shady” [Dominic Lawson, End Game, 1994: Harmony Books, p. 6].

  Kasparov and Azmaiparashvili eventually had a falling out. At Novgorod 1997, Nigel Short was set to play Kasparov in the final round. In his chess column in the Telegraph, Short told the story of how the evening before the game he “was set upon by a large dog while walking. I received a nasty bite in my arm and was admitted to hospital. Bandaged and bleeding, I was in no condition to play chess. Thus, for the only time in my life, I proposed a pre-arranged draw to the great man, which he duly accepted (in fact a draw with Black guaranteed him at least a shared first place). We then decided to concoct [a] game for public benefit.” They decided to “play” the first twenty moves of a game that they believed Azmaiparashvili had faked for the suspect tournament in Macedonia [Nigel Short, London Sunday Telegraph, May 22, 2005, chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=2406].

  6: The USCF has been rocked by cheating scandals, too, but has done a better job than FIDE in ferreting out hustlers among its own leadership. In July 2006, Sam Sloan (the USCF board member who played the Grob opening) filed a complaint with the USCF ethics committee against fellow board member Robert Tanner. Sloan accused Tanner of artificially obtaining the master title by repeatedly playing rated games against the same small pool of low-ranked players—gaining one point at a time, as Bloodgood had. Tanner was a certified tournament director, and Sloan suggested that some of the games Tanner had asked the USCF to rate were never actually played. The ethics committee, while declaring that it “saw no evidence that any fictional games were submitted for rating,” concluded that Tanner had in fact manipulated his own rating by methods that were “inconsistent with the principles of fair play, good sportsmanship, honesty and respect for the rights of others.” Robert Tanner resigned from the USCF’s board of directors on December 5, 2006.

  7: There are also cases of players double-crossing each other and not following through on agreements to throw games. The most famous case occurred at the Fifth American Chess Congress in New York in 1880. The winner, James Grundy, was suspected of reneging on an arrangement with Preston Ware, a master from Boston. The tournament was a ten-person double round-robin. With one round to go, Grundy was tied with Captain Mackenzie. Grundy had lost the previous round to Ware, who had had the audacity to shove his rook pawn two squares on his very first move in response to Grundy’s king-pawn opening. Ware later told the tournament committee that on a walk along the Bowery with Grundy after the game, “he remarked to me that he was poor, and really needed the second prize [$300]; I had in beating him, knocked him out of the first prize [$500]…and it would not make any difference to me if I played easily in our next game, so as to give him the second prize;…he would be willing to give a consideration for it. ‘I suppose you mean for us to play for a draw.’ He said: ‘Yes,’ and I agreed to do it, and $20 was agreed upon as the consideration.

  “We agreed to play on very slowly until the other games were terminated, and to move back and forth…and after I had done so, perhaps three or four times, I observed he was making desperate efforts to win, and finally did so, perpetuating an infamous fraud upon me.”

  Grundy of course denied everything. It was his word against Ware’s, and so the tournament committee let Grundy’s victory stand, even though the moves of the game corroborated Ware’s story [Andy Soltis and Gene H. McCormick, The United States Chess Championship, 1845–1996, Second Edition, 1997: McFarland & Company, pp. 24, 25].

  8: Korchnoi is one of the larger-than-life figures in modern chess. Many players have been on the receiving end of his unrestrained rudeness. Players are prohibited from speaking to each other over the board except to offer draws. Korchnoi was playing a master from an Arab country and in the middle of the game leaned forward and asked, “Do you speak English?” The opponent replied in the affirmative. “Then why don’t you just resign?” Korchnoi said.

  Like many Russians, Korchnoi is superstitious but tries to disguise this from his skeptical Western friends. The Dutch GM Hans Ree joined Korchnoi for his 1977 match in Italy against Petrosian. On their way to the match, Ree wrote, “Victor showed me a letter he’d recently received from a Russian emigrant…. It outlined the science fiction–like scenario of a military laboratory in Moscow where they had the modern technology to project the positions in the games played by Korchnoi and Petrosian in Italy live onto their screen. A crucial position would immediately be spotted by one of the many grandmasters the laboratory had at its disposal, and a paralyzing ray would then be beamed from Moscow ‘straight into the chess centers of the brain’ leading Korchnoi to make the decisive mistake. Viktor and I thought it was hilarious. Chess centers of the brain!

  “They played in a hotel on the top of a mountain. There was also a radio transmitter up there. When the match was over I heard that Victor had arranged for the transmitter to be used as a jamming device during the hours of play to prevent radio waves from Moscow from getting through. Just to make sure” [The Human Comedy of Chess, p. 37].

  Korchnoi apparently believed in mental telepathy. In 1985, Korchnoi “transcended the real world when he won a prolonged game, a French Defense, against one of the strongest players from the early twentieth century—Géza Maróczy (1870–1951). As the Hungarian grandmaster had been dead for many years, Korchnoi had to resort to the help of a medium, who received Maróczy’s moves from the other world. Stated the winner: ‘Of course, one cannot be absolutely sure that the game was indeed played by Maróczy’s spirit, but the entire course of it, with its not altogether certain handling of the opening, but good play in the endgame, is certainly evidence of this’” [The Reliable Past, p. 36].

  Maybe Korchnoi was just trying to top the legendary story of Steinitz and h
is wireless hotline on which he played chess with God after generously offering Him the handicap of a pawn.

  9: In 1960, Korchnoi entered the Soviet Championship in Leningrad. Going into the last round, he had a half-point lead over soon-to-be world champion Tigran Petrosian and Yefim Geller. But Korchnoi found himself in an inferior position and offered his opponent a draw. His adversary turned him down and “then, before my very eyes, went and consulted with Geller and Petrosian…. In the subsequent course of the game, in a time scramble which was the more severe for me, fortune smiled on me.” Korchnoi won a pawn and then the game, keeping his half-point lead over Geller and Petrosian, who had both won their individual encounters. He was crowned Soviet champion.

  Fourteen years later, Geller’s opponent in 1960, David Bronstein, confided in Korchnoi that he had purposely lost the game. Bronstein explained that he detested Petrosian and “during the game…saw how unscrupulously and crudely” Petrosian’s opponent was capitulating. He told Korchnoi that he could not bear to give the guileful Petrosian the satisfaction of being sole winner of the championship. “In an excellent position,” Bronstein recalled, “I made an incorrect piece sacrifice and soon resigned.”

  “But what about me?” Korchnoi asked. “In that way you were betraying me as well!”

  “You were in a bad way. I thought you were losing, and I couldn’t leave Petrosian as the sole winner,” Bronstein repeated.

  Korchnoi concluded that “to become Chess Champion of the USSR ‘honestly’ means to accomplish a great feat. However there is nothing surprising about this. In the professional chess world inside the Soviet Union, the top places lead to colossal privileges, and the battle for these places is bound to involve means not associated purely with chess…. Soon after the championship, on the initiative of the Sports Committee, I was granted a two-room flat. Up to then I had 20 square metres in a flat where there were several families, who shared a communal kitchen, toilet and bathroom, whereas now I had 27 sq. m. in a self-contained flat” [Victor Korchnoi, Chess Is My Life, 1978: Arco Publishing Co., pp. 38, 39].

  10: Fischer used Lasker’s words to start My 60 Most Memorable Games. Fischer was one of the most honest players when it came to annotating his own games. He freely admitted mistakes and gave credit to his opponents. Of a King’s Indian Defense he played against Tigran Petrosian at Portoroz 1958, Fischer wrote: “I was amazed during the game. Each time Petrosian achieved a good position, he managed to maneuver into a better one” and “Panicking and giving him the opportunity he’s been waiting for to sneak P-QN4 in…. Petrosian likes to play cat-and-mouse, hoping that his opponents will go wrong in the absence of a direct threat. The amazing thing is—they usually do! Witness a case in point, I should have just ignored his ‘threat’ with, say, 36…R-R1.” Of a Caro-Kahn with Euwe at the Leipzig Olympiad 1960, he wrote: “After the game Euwe showed me a cute trap he might have played for—and almost fainted when I fell into it! The line arises after…. It’s these tidbits that you remember best” [pp. 27, 136].

  11: “Alekhine’s relations to women were markedly disturbed,” wrote Reuben Fine. “He was married five times. His last two wives were much older; one was thirty years his senior, the other twenty. It was said that he became impotent early in life. Towards his last wife he was openly sadistic” [Reuben Fine, The Psychology of the Chess Player, 1967: Dover, p. 54].

  “Unlike Capablanca, Alekhine was much more interested in chess than women. During the London Tournament in 1922, he and Capa were taken to a show. It was reported that Alekhine never took his eyes off his pocket chess-set, while Capa never took his eyes off the chorus line” [The Complete Chess Addict, p. 189].

  12: Of Karpov and Kasparov’s first marriages, during the years that they contested the world title, Hans Ree wrote: “Initially, their wives may have thought there would be room for something else besides chess in the heart of a world champion. However, they must have realized very quickly that that was not the case. At times some of their laments reached the outside world. Kasparov’s marriage was dissolved very quickly, and his wife told a newspaper that she was going into hiding because she was afraid of her husband. Karpov’s wife, Natasha, was asked on television: ‘Do you like chess players?’ ‘No,’ she replied, ‘Not at all, they are very tiresome people’” [The Human Comedy of Chess, p. 9].

  CHAPTER 7: Female Counterplay

  1: Here’s the record of youngest grandmasters, as compiled by chessbase.com.

  2: In Breaking Through, Judit’s oldest sister, Susan, explained that the “blunder” Kasparov was trying to avoid wasn’t as bad as it first seemed. Although Judit could fork him and win the exchange (a rook for a bishop), Kasparov could have forced a draw by perpetual check [Susan Polgar with Paul Truong, Breaking Through, 2005: Everyman Chess, p. 34.]

  3: “Time trouble is an addiction, perhaps even a physical addiction to the opium-like substances secreted by a chess player’s brain during the time trouble phase” [The Human Comedy of Chess, p. 110]. Among top Americans, Samuel Reshevsky (1911–1992) was the strongest player who was addicted to time trouble. He justified his approach by claiming that the time he took allowed him to work out deeply all good continuations in the positions—and he blamed his occasional flagging on his adversary’s “bad moves” that he had not considered in his long think. After Reshevsky beat Isaac Kashdan in a playoff match to win the U.S. Championship for the fifth time, in 1942, Kenneth Harkness asked the thirty-one-year-old grandmaster the question that was on every chess fan’s mind:

  “Why do you sit for an hour or more over one move and invariably get into time trouble?”

  “Well,” Reshevsky answered, “I’ve heard people say I do it deliberately, just to rattle my opponent and make him blunder—but that’s silly! Why should I make it difficult for myself? All you have to do is look at the two games I lost to Kashdan.

  Both were lost on blunders I made when I was in time trouble.”

  “Why do you do it, then?” I asked him.

  “To exhaust all the possibilities in the position.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Well, I consider all the best lines for my opponent and myself and work out all the possible variations. I want to be quite sure of what I am doing.”

  “How far ahead do you analyze?”

  “Oh, I can see 20 moves ahead quite easily.”

  “You mean with all variations?”

  “All variations of the best lines, yes. That’s how I am able to play the final moves quickly. I know exactly what I’m doing. The only trouble is that my opponent doesn’t always play one of the best defenses and I’ve done all that work for nothing.”

  “Is that why you are likely to blunder yourself?” I asked him.

  “Sometimes…”[Chess Life, February 1943].

  4: “The Soviet Chess Federation was used to seeing its players dominate the chess world and the world rankings,” Polgar wrote. “However, by late 1986 it was clear that in the January 1987 list my rating was going to be 2495, 65 points ahead of the Soviet [Women’s] World Champion, Maia Chiburdanidze. During the Chess Olympiad in Dubai, they held the FIDE Congress where an unthinkable decision was made. All women players in the world would receive 100 bonus points except for me!!!! So when the official world rating list came out, I had 2495 and Maia had 2530 with the added 100 point gift! It was amusing, that even with this colossal injustice, I still remained the third-ranked [female] player in the world and only 35 points behind Maia. According to the rumors, this was part of some political favor owed by FIDE to the Soviets. There was no proper logic to this and there was definitely no justification for it. But when you deal with chess politicians, they can turn a chicken into a turkey without blinking an eye” [Breaking Through, p. 15].

  5: FIDE had previously granted the title to two women’s world champions—one of them was Chiburdanidze—even though they did not meet the rating and performance requirements.

  6: “Chess players have a very retentive memory w
ith regard to the games which they win,” warned Richard Penn in 1842 in The Chess Player’s Chronicle: “Never (if you can avoid it) lose a game to a person who rarely wins when he plays with you. If you do so, you may afterwards find that this one game has been talked of to all his friends, although he may have forgotten to mention 99 others which had a different result” [Richard Penn, The Chess Player’s Chronicle, 1842, as quoted in A Chess Omnibus, p. 412].

  7: Michael Khodarkovsky, the chief trainer of the U.S. Women’s Team, was not immune to scandal, either. He apparently inflated his playing strength, claiming that he was an international master. On January 21, 2007, he was the subject of an article in The New York Times called “Prominent Chess Trainer Retreats From Claim He Held Title.”

  CHAPTER 8: “I’m Not the World’s Biggest Geek”

  1: I should have taken solace in John Mortimer’s contrarian view about chess and intelligence: “It will be cheering to know that many people are skillful chess-players, though in many instances their brains, in a general way, compare unfavourably with the cognitive faculties of a rabbit.” There are those, like Raymond Chandler, who think chess playing takes brains but is “as elaborate waste of intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency” [The Complete Chess Addict, pp. 1, 38].

  2: Pascal’s kindheartedness was well known on the chess circuit. One (true) story has him changing the bedsheets of a debilitated old grandmaster at chess camp, only to learn that the man had a urinary infection.

  3: It should be noted that Fischer claimed to refute only the commonest version of the King’s Gambit, in which White develops his king knight after giving up the pawn. Fischer himself occasionally played a much rarer form of the King’s Gambit, practiced by the first world champion, Wilhelm Steinitz, in which White violates a general opening principle—“Knights before bishops!”—by holding back the king knight and immediately posting his light-squared bishop.