Bobby Fischer Goes to War

by David Edmonds

  “Games” come in various kinds. There are, for example, games of perfect information, such as chess, where at each stage of the game one knows all the opponent’s steps to date, and games of imperfect information, such as a sealed auction, where one can only speculate about the sum of money a rival has bid. Then there are games of cooperation (where, as the name implies, players cooperate to achieve the best possible outcome) and games of noncooperation (where individuals act only in their own self-interest, irrespective of what other players are doing).

  One reason Person A may not cooperate with Person B is that Person A’s gain is Person B’s loss: this is a zero-sum game. In nonzero-sum games, both sides can benefit. Compare chess to the usual form of charades, in which there are no teams and individuals take it in turns to act out the title of a book, movie, play, or song in front of the rest of the group, who try to guess it. In chess, your defeat is my victory. In charades, we all win or lose together.

  So how would a game theorist explain the conundrum of Fischer’s apparent bargaining imprudence and his negotiating success?

  In bargaining, theorists have long recognized that there are rational advantages to irrationality, or at least to the appearance of irrationality. One purely academic illustration of this has a woman returning home to discover a dangerous-looking burglar in her house. She recognizes that the burglar has a motive to kill her because she can describe him to the police. If she could swallow a tablet, making her, for a short period, wholly and transparently mad, the burglar might believe she will not be able to identify him later and so might leave her unharmed.

  Some game theorists even go so far as to say that we are biologically hardwired to be irrational—say, to want vengeance even when by hurting others we will only suffer further ourselves. It is possible that we have evolved to be partially vengeful; if my enemies know I will come after them, even at considerable cost to myself, they are less likely to inflict harm on me in the first place. The evolutionary drawback of such hardwiring is that once violence begins between individuals, factions, or nations, it becomes tough to stop, as evidenced by the generations of warring families in Sicily wiped out by the vendetta.

  James Dean, in his 1955 classic, Rebel Without a Cause, made famous the deadly game of “chicken.” In one variant of this suicidal game, two drivers hurtle toward each other from a distance of several hundred meters. The first driver to swerve away from the line of contact is “chicken” and the loser. If neither swerves, there will be a devastating collision. Now, as the driver of one of those cars, if you can convince the other driver that you are not worried about the consequences of a crash or want death, then the battle is half won. When your opponents realize that you have no fear, that victory (or not being defeated) is all that matters to you, that you do not value your life, then they will see no point in trying to test your courage. One game theorist, Herman Kahn, wrote, “The ‘skilful’ player may get into the car quite drunk, throwing whisky bottles out the window to make it clear to everybody just how drunk he is. He wears very dark glasses so that it is obvious he cannot see much, if anything. As soon as the car reaches high speed, he takes the steering wheel and throws it out of the window.”

  Bertrand Russell said that “chicken” was played by two groups: juvenile delinquents and nations. During the Fischer-Spassky match, the preeminent concern of the U.S. administration was the conflict in Vietnam and how to end it. Earlier, in 1969, President Richard Nixon had explained his madman policy to his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, as they strolled along a beach in Florida. As Haldeman recounted it, “He [Nixon] said, ‘I call it the madman theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that “For God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry, and he has his hand on the nuclear button,” and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days, begging for peace.’” When Nixon ordered the bombing of Cambodia with B-52s, the intention, in part, was to signal to the North Vietnamese the potential deployment of the bombers in a nuclear role.

  Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser, had also reflected on the madman theory. In 1959, he had attended two lectures given by Daniel Ellsberg titled The Political Uses of Madness, in which Ellsberg had explored the diplomatic value of extreme threats by an apparently reckless leader. He instanced Hitler’s bloodless invasions of the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. One of Ellsberg’s conditions for success in the political application of madness was that the demands should be limited in scale and the threat so extreme that the mere possibility of its being carried out would be enough to persuade a foe to yield.

  Fischer could no doubt have won the world championship “chicken” contest—he always appeared ready to crash his career. When he stated his all-or-nothing terms for his participation in a match or tournament, it was transparent to those who met him both that he imbued each of his conditions with immense significance, and that his threats were totally credible. He had a record of inflicting financial and career damage on himself on failing to win concessions: when organizers turned down his demands, he had refused to play in tournaments, even withdrawn midtournament. With his all-or-nothing threats, he was not taking up a negotiating position. The threat was not a tactic; he meant what he said. Even as an adult player, Fischer was seen—by officials and friends alike—as an adolescent, capable of viewing everything as a zero-sum game. At the Palma Interzonal in 1970, the distinguished British chess official Harry Golombek asked a rhetorical question: “How had the organizers achieved the minor miracle of getting Fischer to play through the entire tournament?” He himself supplied the answer: “By acceding to all Fischer’s demands.”

  Playing “chicken” when you have no intention of swerving may be a way of repeatedly winning the game, but it is a perilous path. For eventually such a contestant will come up against an opponent unaware of his reputation, or who believes his reputation for recklessness is inflated, or who thinks he has been having things his own way for too long and is prepared to tough it out, or who himself takes a similarly cavalier attitude to death. During one of Fischer’s tournaments, an official implicitly recognized the danger. “Sure, Bobby’s a genius. But what happens if we have three or four geniuses with their own phobias and demands?” Sousse—as we have seen—was an instance of Fischer pushing his demands too far.

  In his description of the inebriated “chicken” driver who chucks out the steering wheel, Herman Kahn put the hazards of playing “chicken” another way. “If his opponent is watching, he has won. If his opponent is not watching, he has a problem.”

  Happily for Fischer, his negotiating partners had been watching every step of his career. Several times he took his match against Spassky to the brink of destruction. He provoked not just the Soviets, but the Icelanders and FIDE to the very limit of their tolerance. Almost each time they caved in.

  With his “madness” established and his demands, if not reasonable, then at least, with considerable effort, manageable, Fischer proved at Reykjavik to be a hugely effective player of “chicken” as well as of chess. A condition for success was that the threat should be extreme—and for the Icelanders, Fischer’s threat to walk out was precisely that.

  15. A LOVE-HATE RELATIONSHIP

  What have you found in Iceland? What have we found? More copy….

  — W. H. AUDEN AND LOUIS MACNEICE, LETTERS FROM ICELAND

  Fischer could have faced tougher “chicken” opposition if the match had been held in a major city, Belgrade, Amsterdam, Paris, Moscow, New York. Another chess federation might not have felt obliged to concede ground. During the contest, practically the entire Icelandic population had to be mobilized—the police, the hoteliers, the restaurateurs, home owners with a room to spare, technicians, the print media. The Icelandic papers gave up most of their front pages to the chess match (splitting broadly along ideological lines: of the dailies, the conse
rvative favored Fischer, the center and left of center tried for balance, and the radical left backed Spassky). Conversation among the Icelandic public was dominated by chess. On park benches, in cafés, locals and tourists could be seen bent over their pocket sets. The shop windows displayed posters of the two contestants. There were decorations around town in the shape of chess pieces. On sale were memorabilia of all kinds, including postcards containing the final position of each game.

  At one time or another in that July and August, more than 15 percent of the world’s grandmasters came to Reykjavik. As well as the three grandmasters among the Soviet and U.S. teams and the German arbiter, Schmid, eight other grandmasters were present, reporting, or simply watching the match—Olafsson, Najdorf, Larsen, Byrne, Evans, Gligoric, Dragoljub Janosevic, and Lubomir Kavalek.

  For this island on the edge of Europe, here was a golden moment: pride, their chess tradition, an invasion by chess tourists and the world press, the sound of cash registers tinkling nonstop—all came together in a national event never seen before.

  But the scale of the operation and the effort involved also demonstrated clearly a fundamental weakness in the Icelanders’ negotiating position. Goodwill, patriotism, love of chess, hard work, hospitality, and decency were not sufficient. With the whole island involved, Iceland could not risk Fischer’s departure and the premature ending of this most intensely important of affairs.

  Part of the pressure was that with the match, Iceland was international news, although foreign journalists’ interests were strictly parochial. They acted like a small-town tour party jotting down pleasing facts and anecdotes for their readers’ delectation: the place, the people, even the pets. There was a fascination with Iceland’s canine population; in the countryside, if a dog barked at a stranger, the owner would be considered guilty of bad manners. In Reykjavik, dogs had been forbidden since 1924, and a campaign was now under way to have the relevant legislation revoked. The Association of Dog Friends threatened to take their case to the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg.

  Happily for members of the press, Icelanders were too good-natured to take offense as the visitors focused on what were, to them, the quaint and the bizarre. Yes, many Icelandic homes have an “elves rock”: elves are said to live underneath, and woe betide the person who moves the rock—he or she will be afflicted with boils. Yes, there are hardly any trees in Iceland, no reptiles, and in July golfers tee off at midnight. Yes, it really is true that in the phone book subscribers are listed by first names only and the cabbies do not accept tips. Yes, because of the small, tightly knit society, intermarriage is not as problematic as in more populous countries and genealogical records allow people to track their ancestors back a thousand years. (Hence, today, Icelanders are the focus of research into DNA.) Yes, Iceland boasts the oldest parliament in the world, the Althing. What is more, the country has a near 100 percent literacy rate, there is almost zero crime, and according to international polls, Icelanders are the people most likely to sacrifice their lives for others.

  Back in the United States, Richard Milhous Nixon was embroiled in ending the Vietnam War and preoccupied with his dramatic breakthroughs to China and the Soviet Union; the leader of the free world was simultaneously preparing to run for a second term in the November presidential poll. A comparison with the president of Iceland was the cause of some merriment in the U.S. press. Dr. Kristjan Eldjarn held this largely ceremonial post in part because nobody else could be persuaded to take it off him. It paid only $12,000. Eldjarn was an archaeologist whose principal hobby was traversing the country hunting for birds’ nests—he was an eiderdown plucker.

  There was particular incredulity at the heroic capacity of Icelandic men to consume alcohol. Spirits were the liquor of choice, since the purchase and sale of beer was banned. Correspondents reported how, over the weekends, respectable citizens could be seen staggering out of bars in the middle of the night, near insensible from drink.

  In the U.S. papers, there was some disparaging comment from the big-city writers about the tranquillity of Icelandic life, which seemed to be conducted at the leisurely pace of grandmaster chess. “Not much happens around here most of the time,” began a dispatch from Joe Alex Morris Jr. for The Los Angeles Times, though he says things perked up in July with the arrival of a Scandinavian dentists convention. Amazement was expressed at the television station’s closing as usual for the whole of July despite the fact that Iceland was hosting an event generating headlines worldwide. “The nightclubs never close,” wrote Joe Alex Morris, before adding his sting: “There are none to close up.”

  How did the locals view this invasion? On the whole, with remarkable good grace. They were even accommodating, slowly, to Fischer. Before arriving in Reykjavik, Fischer had vowed, “I’m going to teach these Icelandic creeps a lesson.” And when he failed to appear for game two, Icelanders returned the compliment. A voice from the auditorium shouted, “Send him back to the United States!” The Icelandic press were uniformly hostile: one paper called his action “the chess scandal of the century” another printed a cartoon showing Fischer’s hotel room and a DO NOT DISTURB notice, under the caption “Come Out and Fight, Bobby Fischer, Or Are You a Coward?” Fischer was labeled “the most hated man in Iceland.”

  Ordinary Icelanders had been baffled and hurt by his behavior. The struggle for survival on this barren island has bred into its citizens a high sense of responsibility for one another. The Reverend Pitur Mannusson called on his congregation to turn the other cheek: “I urge those who have been offended… to hold their heads high if they meet [Fischer] on the street. That is what I am going to do if I meet this sharp-tongued genius.” Fischer’s incessant demands became the butt of local humor. The joke doing the Reykjavik rounds was that Fischer had demanded the setting of the sun three hours earlier.

  Meanwhile, Spassky was quietly winning admirers. Unfailingly courteous and diplomatic, he would chat with those who sought his autograph, and was shown in newspaper photographs enjoying the Icelandic wilderness on rest days. Soon after his arrival, the champion tried his hand at catching fish. Spassky loved the serenity and seemed not to mind how many (or how few) salmon he hooked.

  Everywhere Spassky went, he was greeted warmly. When he went to a sports shop to buy sneakers, the shopkeeper refused to take his cash. When he went to the cinema, they let him in free. The champion could have been forgiven for believing he had arrived in a socialist utopia.

  Ever popular Spassky. MORGUNBLADID/OLFAR MAGNUSSON

  He made friends with several Icelanders, such as Sigfus Sigfusson, the vice president of the Hekla car dealership. Each night Spassky would take a stroll around the Saga, and each night he would walk past Sigfusson’s house on the seafront, where a British Leyland Range Rover stood in the drive.

  One evening, Sigfusson spotted the world chess champion admiring the car. He went out to greet him; the two started chatting and hit it off. A dealer to his fingertips, Sigfusson offered him a car for the duration of the match. From that moment on, Spassky was often photographed driving in his Range Rover to and from the match. “It was free advertising.”

  In the small, close-knit community of Reykjavik, news that Spassky was a gentleman quickly became common knowledge. But as the match settled in, the number of Fischer’s fans also began to grow. Once the challenger got to work and ceased insulting Iceland, Icelanders began to reconcile themselves to his idiosyncratic ways. In sport, the bad boy has always exerted a powerful allure, especially when boorish behavior is accompanied by skill and glory.

  He could not have had a more totally appreciative audience for those skills. The local chess club, the Glaesibaer, bustled between match games; foreigners were allowed to join in, and masters, including David Levy, invited to give simultaneous displays.

  Now they love Fischer, too. (On the left) his Icelandic bodyguard, “Saemi-rock” Palsson. MORGUNBLADID/OLFAR MAGNUSSON

  The Icelanders loved chess, and you couldn’t move an inch without see
ing some symbol of the world championship match. I remember, while I was there I was asked to give a simultaneous display against some schoolchildren. Well, there were probably 100 people in the country at the time who were stronger than me, but they roped in anybody they could because there were so many chess fans from the Icelandic population; everybody wanted to take part in something.

  With the match now rescued, chess fans could look forward to a titanic struggle at the board.

  16. SMASHED

  I would not care to be the man who allows the championship to go to another nation. It would be a serious matter in many ways….

  — BORIS SPASSKY, QUOTED IN THE WASHINGTON POST, 2 JULY 1972

  The first phase of the match had ended with a fearful outcome for the champion. In Karpov’s judgment, Spassky’s confidence had been smashed.

  Game four was played out in the main auditorium, now a camera-free zone. Thorarinsson hinted, tantalizingly, that the camera saga might soon be resolved since there was “one solution [Fischer] will accept”—however, he gave no details. The game itself was a desperately tense encounter. In a display of admirable, even bold, self-assurance, Spassky opted for the Sicilian Defense, a counterpunching opening seen routinely on the grandmaster circuit, but one he himself rarely played; Fischer knew it better than anyone on earth because he had relied on it countless times with the black pieces. Now Spassky was deploying Fischer’s trustiest tool against its master: a bravura psychological stroke.