Harsher and potentially more threatening judgments were made of Spassky. Baturinskii accused him of being under the sway of “objectivist views” over the location of the match with Fischer. At a preliminary discussion with the USSR Chess Federation leadership, Spassky had declared: “I consider it inadvisable to hold the match in the USSR, since this would give a certain advantage to one of the participants, and the match should be held on equal terms….”
Broadly, “objectivism” meant expressing views not based on a Marxist-Leninist analysis. The official Soviet reference book, The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, defined this sin as “A worldview [based on] sociopolitical ‘neutrality’ and [refraining] from Party-based conclusions…. In reality it… masks a social and class-based subjectivism… objectivism is orientated toward serving, albeit not openly, the dominant conservative or reactionary force of the social ‘order of things.’” In other words, Spassky was demonstrating an incorrect political consciousness.
Spassky gave off dangerous political vibrations, but should we call him a dissident? Such he seemed to some contemporary university students. Viktor Korchnoi gives a qualified appraisal: “When I defected, I considered myself a dissident on two legs, while Spassky was a one-legged dissident.”
From his post as second in command of the State Sports Committee, and in charge of ten sports including chess, Viktor Ivonin regarded him with a possibly sinister tolerance: “We accepted him as he was, knowing that it was too late to change him. He is a nihilist. We could have helped him in certain ways, to talk and act ‘more correctly.’ And we tried to do that. But you can’t remake a person. So when he said certain things—perhaps in jest—we decided not to react. But he wasn’t a dissident.”
Yevgeni Bebchuk, the former president of the Chess Federation of the Russian Federation (a republic of the USSR), agrees: “On the other hand, Spassky never accepted the Soviet regime: he wouldn’t say that out loud, but he would say it among friends. From the very beginning, he pretended to play the fool, pretended not to know anything. I would often be called to official meetings in my administrative role, and colleagues on the committees would say, ‘Well, he’s a talented chess player, but he’s a little bit strange in the head,’ and I would say, ‘Well, yes.’ He protected himself. It’s a kind of survival technique, because in Russian culture they take well to fools; they forgive them a great many things.”
Here, Bebchuk is making a peculiarly Russian cultural reference. An established feature of Tsarist Russia, the “Holy Fool,” or yurodivyi (one of “God’s folk”), was a wandering monklike figure, venerated for his or her self-imposed suffering in the cause of humility and intense religiosity. The Holy Fool was credited with mystical powers. But most relevant here, like the king’s jester, the Holy Fool also enjoyed a license to poke fun at rulers, expose evils, and tell unpalatable truths. And when some of his contemporaries try to explain Spassky, they express a tolerance of his “eccentricities and unorthodox opinions” in a tone of voice that might be used of such a figure.
Spassky’s trainer Nikolai Krogius, the psychologist, says the world champion’s politics were the consequence of his complex character—an aspect of which was his hostility to discipline. “He’s like an independent artist, a very blithe person, a bohemian type. And as he was the world champion at that time, he thought everyone had to listen to what he said and take his opinion into consideration—though, to be frank, his opinion was not always the last opinion on a subject and not the most considered.”
Being opinionated was as much about entertaining as scandalizing. Spassky was certainly that risky type—a joker. Grandmaster Yuri Averbakh has a dramatic analysis of Spassky’s approach to life: “Spassky was an actor.” In other words, he wanted to be the focus of attention. Averbakh remembers going to Keres’s funeral with Spassky, “and everyone was dressed in black, except for Spassky, who came in a red suit. It was very funny because there were a thousand people on the streets and he was the only one who stood out. I wasn’t sure whether he simply neglected the usual formalities or whether this was his way of expressing himself. Such exhibitionism was very sad.”
Spassky was also highly convivial. Several of his friends and colleagues claim that once he became champion, he shed any former reticence. Then he wanted to be the life and soul of the party and broaden his social life. There was no shortage of invitations. As well as his strongly expressed remarks, he had a fund of amusing stories and was an excellent mimic. Baturinskii and Averbakh were two of his chess victims. Politicians did not escape: Brezhnev was a favorite. He even dared a (passable) Lenin.
Thus, the views of his chess contemporaries offer no single picture of the world champion other than that he was out of the ordinary, of independent character. They remember Spassky the artist, Spassky the buccaneer, Spassky the joker, Spassky the actor, Spassky the nihilist. Spassky the free spirit, vol’nodumets. Spassky the frivolous, Spassky the un-Soviet man. Even Spassky the Holy Fool.
However we categorize him, there seems to have been an acceptance by the authorities of Spassky’s determination to be his own man and of his distancing himself from the regime. The official answer to their rogue champion was simply to dismiss his views as inconsequential, irritating but not worth taking seriously.
Until, that is, Fischer challenged Soviet ownership of the world title. Then the authorities could no longer escape the tensions between the political role of the world champion and Spassky’s obdurate rejection of that role, and between their distaste for his attitudes and admiration for his incontestable greatness as a chess player.
6. LIVING CHESS
I don’t believe in psychology. I believe in good moves.
— BOBBY FISCHER
There is nothing abnormal about a chess player being abnormal. This is normal.
— VLADIMIR NABOKOV
How can we begin to understand what goes on inside the minds of world-class players while they are moving pieces on the sixty-four squares of the chess board for hour after hour, game after game, week after week? Months of preparation, mental and physical, precede so grueling a contest as Reykjavik. What resources of skill, intellect, memory, and imagination, of stamina and courage, does a match require?
The British Broadcasting Corporation archives contain a clue in a unique recording of a 1930s interview with Alexander Alekhine. Alekhine is preparing for his title challenge with Max Euwe, the only authentic amateur to become world champion. (Nearly four decades later, as president of FIDE, the sport’s governing body, Euwe will preside over the Fischer-Spassky match.) In the precisely enunciated, beautifully modulated diction of the day, the interviewer asks whether Alekhine does not by now know all the combinations in chess. His voice high-pitched and heavily accented, Alekhine replies, “Oh no, believe me, a lifetime is not enough to learn everything about chess.”
Like Fischer, Alekhine was a chess fanatic and loner. He lived and breathed chess; he was fiercely competitive, constantly seeking self-improvement, capable of turning violent on the rare occasions that he suffered defeat. His knowledge of the openings was unsurpassed. In Alekhine’s time, opening preparation could take elite players up to around move nine or ten, before the game spun off in a novel direction. By the early 1970s, theory had progressed to the extent that often the first fifteen moves would be familiar. Now, in their remarkable memory banks, assisted by computer databases, the chess elite can shuffle through a mental card index consisting of both published games and home-based spadework that may cover them to move twenty-five or beyond. Up to this point they will recognize each position after each move from a game already played, the published analysis of a game already played, or their own private study.
Eventually, however, the sheer immensity of possibilities will land both players in uncharted territory. Indeed, that a board game can generate such intricacy is the real marvel of chess.
Writers trying to convey this complexity have their own pet mathematical picture or comparison to illustrate the scale of the numb
ers involved. Thus, in Fields of Force, his book on Fischer-Spassky, George Steiner states that there are 318,979,584,000 legitimate ways to make the first four moves. It is said that there are more possible variations in a game of chess than there are atoms in the universe (roughly 1080) and seconds that have elapsed since the solar system came into existence (roughly 2×1017). As for chess, it is estimated that there are approximately 25×10116 ways for a game to go.
This is the figure for theoretical permutations within the rules of the game. But for any given position, the serious player can immediately rule out of consideration the majority of legal possibilities. Take the opening move. White can advance any of its eight pawns one or two squares and can move each of its knights either to the center or to the side of the board. That is twenty legitimate moves in all. But in fact, almost all serious games begin with a two-move thrust of the king’s, queen’s, bishop’s pawn or the king’s knight to the center. So only four of these twenty moves are regularly played.
Even so, one can see how the possible variations soon spiral beyond ordinary comprehension. Assume that in a typical middle-game position there are eight sensible continuations for each player on each move. Over the next five white moves and five black moves, there will be 8×8×8×8×8×8×8×8×8×8 permutations (810), or 1,073,741,824; that is more than 1 billion paths down which the game could plausibly twist and turn.
How does a chess player cope with the huge size of the chess cosmos? A layperson might assume that the answer lies in sheer computational ability, and that good chess players are those who can calculate further ahead than mediocre ones. And of course there is some truth in this—though not much. Staring at the board and crunching through the possibilities can get one only so far, for there are simply too many branches on what is a near infinitely sized tree. Today’s computers can calculate millions of moves per second. Yet they still struggle against the human insights of the leading grandmasters.
The real explanation of what chess players do is less rational. It is closer to what we might think of as an artist’s vision and has to do with a kind of intuition. A chess player examining a position sees not an inanimate set of carved or molded pieces waiting to be moved from square to square, but diagonals and ranks and latent possibilities, what Arthur Koestler described as “a magnetic field of forces charged with energy.”
Why do grandmasters recognize that at a certain point in the game, a knight should be positioned on the f5 square rather than c4 or d5? Obviously they might foresee that in certain variations, a knight on f5 defends a crucial square, or threatens a particular combination of moves, or supports a particular maneuver. Or it might be that f5 acts as a temporary staging point for the knight’s ultimate destination. However, there can be both more and less to it than that. Grandmasters somehow “feel” that f5 is the right square; it satisfies their conception of the game, fitting into some kind of deep, unarticulated structure. The German grandmaster Michael Bezold spent several months playing chess with Fischer in the 1980s. “He just felt that a certain move was the right move without calculation. And after analyzing, we saw it was the right one.” The Cuban-born José Capablanca, world champion from 1921 to 1927, was noted for relying on his intuition but reproached himself for this, as though his innate sense for the game were in some way reprehensible—or less admirable than an approach of pure calculation.
An analogy between chess and mathematics or music may be instructive. All three pursuits regularly produce prodigies—those marvelously gifted and precocious beings so rarely found in the worlds of painting or poetry, drama or literature, ballet or bel canto, or in other forms of art where raw talent needs to build steadily on experience and developed sensitivity. It is barely conceivable that a fourteen-year-old would have a sufficient range of emotions and experience to write War and Peace or paint Guernica. But he or she could play Elgar’s violin concerto, propose a mathematical proof, or become U.S. chess champion. Genius in chess is a magical fusion of logic and art—an innate recognition of pattern, an instinct for space, a talent for order and harmony, all mixed with creativity to fashion surprising and hitherto new formations. Max Euwe said of Alekhine, “He is a poet who creates a work of art out of something that would hardly inspire another man to send home a picture postcard.”
Comparing the beauty of chess and music, Harold Schonberg, the senior music critic of The New York Times, wrote, “If chess were as popular as music, if as many people responded to its subtleties and nuances, the masterpieces of Steinitz, Capablanca, Alekhine, Botvinnik, and Fischer would not be held far below the masterpieces of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms.”
The creative imaginations that go into a great chess game and a great piece of music are closely allied. Spassky has been called the Mozart of chess; like Mozart’s music, his chess was a brilliantly fluid combination of form and fantasy. He himself took pride in being labeled the “Pushkin of chess,” explaining in a Yugoslav magazine that it was “because of my elegant and harmonic style, I suppose.” Musicians are often good chess players and vice versa, while mathematicians often excel at both chess and music. Mathematicians see in certain equations the artistic beauty that chess players see in certain combinations. Max Euwe trained as a mathematician. A law in vector theory is named after the early-twentieth-century German world champion Emanuel Lasker. Mark Taimanov is a virtuoso concert pianist.
José Raúl Cafablanca y Graupera, world champion 1921–1927, giving a simultaneous display. NEW IN CHESS MAGAZINE
The splendor of Fischer’s chess lay in its cleanliness, its simplicity; if his moves were notes, they were struck not to impress an audience, not to delight himself by their wit or ingenuity, not to achieve beauty (though they had their beauty). They arose out of the logic of the board and Fischer’s profound yet unfathomable sense of harmony.
There is a passage in Stefan Zweig’s novella The Royal Game, that celebrates the uniqueness of chess, while also drawing parallels with music and mathematics.
Every child can learn its basic rules. Every bungler can try it. And yet it requires within those unchanging small squares the production of a special species of master, not comparable to any other kind, men who have a singular gift for chess, geniuses of a particular kind, in whom vision, patience and technique function in just as precise divisions as they do in mathematicians, poets and musicians.
One artist who proclaimed the aesthetic qualities of chess was a moving force in the Dada movement, Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp achieved notoriety in 1917 through showing a urinal as an exhibition piece under the title Fountain. It symbolized his contempt for bourgeois art and was a pioneering exhibit in the revelation of everyday artefacts as objects d’art. But at this time chess was already on its way to taking over Duchamp’s life, eventually ruining his marriage. On his honeymoon, he analyzed chess problems until, it is said, one night, in a rage, his wife glued the pieces to the board. Later he abandoned art altogether for chess—competing for France in the chess Olympiads. He had a unique perspective of both the artistic and the chess worlds. “From my close contact with artists and chess players I have come to the conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.”
Of course, creativity is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for high achievement at the game. Just as professional musicians have to practice continuously, so chess professionals need constant study. They must be abreast of the latest opening innovations. They must plow through the games of their peers. They are always topping up their mental store of patterns, improving their judgment and deepening their feel for various types of position. They also need constant competition in order to remain battle sharp.
Along with artistic vision, memory is a vital ingredient in the chess player’s makeup. And all world-class chess players have shown an astounding ability to recollect games. Fischer’s total recall struck even fellow professionals with awe.
However, a chess player’s memory is of a particular kind. During World War II,
a Dutch chess master and psychologist, Adrian de Groot, made a breakthrough in our understanding of the chess mind. De Groot conducted a series of experiments in which he showed a variety of chess positions to a variety of players, from the expert to the beginner. They were exposed to these positions for just a few seconds, after which they were given a chess set and asked to reconstruct them. Their ability to do so correlated closely with the strength of their chess. Max Euwe, who took part in these tests, never failed to place each piece correctly.
De Groot showed his subjects typical chess positions such as one might come across during a typical game. Later, psychologists widened his experiment by conducting similar tests with randomly placed pieces. The results were intriguing. When the pieces were positioned arbitrarily, the expert performed no better in reproducing the board than the beginner. What the expert could do was recognize regular patterns of pieces. Thus, after the castling maneuver on the king’s side of the board—when the king moves to the knight square and the rook leaps over it—white will routinely have several pieces on certain squares (for instance, the king on the gl square, a rook on fl, and pawns on the f2, g2, and h2 squares). A chess player needs almost no time to absorb such a familiar cluster of pieces. Such clusters can be regarded as akin to phonemes in language; they are the game’s basic building blocks. The top chess masters can instantly make out thousands of such clusters.
Just as some people have an affinity for language, some will also have a natural aptitude for pattern recognition and retention, which is then enlarged by study—perhaps physically expanding the relevant area of the brain itself, as tests have shown happens to London taxi drivers who have to memorize all London streets to gain a license.
Bobby Fischer Goes to War Page 8