King's Gambit

by Paul Hoffman

  Short acknowledged how ironic it was that he and Kasparov had joined forces in 1993, just before their World Championship bout, to break away from FIDE and found the Professional Chess Association. “Before the match I was hardly on speaking terms with him because of stuff like the sneering,” Short recalled. “I was also annoyed with his behavior in the GMA [the Grandmasters Association, a kind of players’ union]. His idea of democracy in an organization is that you have to agree with him; if you don’t agree with him, he quits. There is this immense egocentricity in him which sometimes shows its ugly side. All top people in whatever field are to some degree egocentric but Kasparov…”

  Short stopped in mid-sentence and just shook his head for a while before continuing. “He has his faults. He has big faults. Nevertheless he is a great, great figure, and there is nobody even remotely close to him in the chess world. No other player has anywhere near his visibility. No other player writes a column for The Wall Street Journal and appears regularly on CNN. Take the two current world champions, Vladimir Kramnik and Rustam Kasimdzhanov—does the public know who they are? FIDE even removed Kramnik’s name from the rating list in 2002 because he was inactive in tournaments. That’s just grand—a world chess champion who doesn’t want to play chess.”

  I was sitting across a desk from Short in his study, which contained a few thousand chess books and chess journals, when I noticed that he was distracted by something on his computer. He was admiring a cheesy, possibly Photoshopped image of a shirtless Russian sub-master, Yana Portnjegina, lying stomach-down on a bed, her hands covering the sides of her bare breasts. “Have you seen this?” he asked. “It’s the World Chess Beauty Contest.” The Web site contained pictures of dozens of female chess players. Many of the photos looked like they were for mail-order brides, and I suspected that some of these women were in the market for husbands to help them emigrate. The women came disproportionately from ex-Soviet republics and Eastern Europe, even more disproportionately than chess players did. Only one American, for instance, Anna Hahn—who defeated Jennifer Shahade and Irina Krush to become the 2003 U.S. women’s champion—supplied a picture. Viewers were asked to rate the women on looks alone, on a scale from 1600 to 2700, mimicking the chess rating system. The pictures could be downloaded or sent as e-mail postcards, and there were message boards on which viewers posted ribald and raunchy comments. The site claimed that all the photos were submitted by the contestants themselves, but it included pictures of a sixteen-year-old American junior star, who never supplied any.

  “I know that some people in your country like Jennifer Shahade think the site is degrading,” Short said.5 “She’s right, of course, but what can I say—I like the girls.” Short in fact was one of the official arbiters of the contest, and he took his work seriously, posting comments of his own below the photos that intrigued him.

  Watching Short peruse the photos of the young women, I had a fanciful notion that the development of specialized skills and character traits in early childhood is like a country fair in which you are allotted a fixed number of tickets to spend on the various concessions. This particular fair is of short duration and happens only once in a lifetime. Nigel took the chess roller-coaster a dozen times, and rode the honesty ride twice, and so he had insufficient tickets left to take the Train Beyond Adolescence more than a stop or two. I myself missed the athletic concession, and I should have ridden—damn it—the chess coaster three or four times.

  GIVEN THE ODD MIXTURE OF RESPECT AND CONTEMPT SHORT HAS ALWAYS felt for Kasparov, I was curious to know how he prepared himself mentally for their match. “I didn’t do that much psychological preparation,” Short said. “It may seem a strange thing to say, but I feel that psychology is overestimated. It only becomes important when players are equally matched. To use a ridiculous analogy, if I got into a boxing ring with Lennox Lewis, I could be much better prepared mentally and have a healthier psychological approach, but at the end of the day…My main problem was Garry. The guy simply played stronger chess than me. The first thing to do was to try to bridge this gap. I needed ammunition.”

  For three months before the match, Short worked on his openings with his trainer and chief second Lubomir Kavalek, a former champion of both Czechoslovakia and the United States. Many of Kasparov’s opponents, Short concluded, avoided taking him on in sharp, theoretical openings. “I realized I was totally outgunned as far as opening theory was concerned,” Short said. “His preparation was light-years ahead of mine.” Short decided he would play sharply, but at the same time sidestep theoretical lines that Kasparov and his coterie of high-powered seconds would have extensively studied. “I elected to play things I hadn’t previously played,” he said. “I made a conscious decision to avoid the French Defense, which was always one of my mainstays.”

  When you play a new opening, you obviously benefit from surprise value. But there is also something to be gained from adhering to a battle-proven weapon whose subtleties you’ve mastered from hundreds of hours of actual combat experience. Kasparov, for one, made a career of pretty much one king-pawn defense, the Najdorf Sicilian, and even though his adversaries expected it, his intimate familiarity with the resulting middle-game structures outweighed the occasional opening novelties unleashed by his opponents.

  “After our match,” Short recalled, “Kasparov told me he had discovered a forced win in a particular, highly theoretical main line in the French, one that I might easily have played. So it was good that I avoided his strength. My openings worked fine. Yes, I got hit in one sharp Nimzo-Indian, which he busted during the match. But one hit is almost inevitable in twenty games. I didn’t lose the match because of the openings.” Indeed, Short bravely came out swinging with forceful lines as White against Kasparov’s expected Najdorf. “I lost because he created too many problems for me,” Short explained. “He was in a lot of trouble in several Black games, but he put up tremendous resistance move after move. I was just too nervous. I was trying to play exactly. I was over-thinking things and got into terrible time trouble in the first half of the match. I wasn’t used to the enormous pressure. It was very easy for my seconds to say move faster—they weren’t the ones sitting across from this volcanic force who kept creating one problem for me after another even in positions where I had the advantage. I simply got outwitted—not even outplayed.”

  Short was thumped in the first half, 71?2–21?2. The second half went much better, an even 5–5. “I played a lot faster,” he said, “because I was finally finding my form. Still the winning margin, 121?2–71?2, was a very convincing victory for him, but I think it was harder than the final score indicated. He suffered to some degree, and he was more tired than I was at the end, but he was always going to come out on top—the difference was just too large.”

  I remember being impressed during the match by how Short kept returning, bruised and battered, to the chessboard and putting up a fight even when he was far behind. “You always have to find reasons for hope,” Short told me. The searching for reasons actually started before the match began, and it centered on Short’s perception that chess dominated too much of his opponent’s life. Kasparov was generally accompanied to key events not by his wife of the time but by his mother, Klara, and Short derived strength before the match by imagining that Kasparov was envious of his relationship with Rhea and their two-year-old child, Kyveli. Three hours before the first game, Short told Lawson and his two seconds, “When I win this match, Kasparov will like me for it. Just mark my words. Something odd is going on here. Something very odd. He has a great burden, which he wants me to take on. But he doesn’t quite realize it. He just envies me my normal, happy family life. I sense it. And it’s something the world chess champion can never have.”

  At a ceremony in which the two players drew lots to see who would start with White, Short’s wife studied Klara’s appearance and concluded that Kasparov’s team was worried. “Look at Mrs. Kasparov,” Rhea told Lawson. “She has dyed her hair blonde. She is wearing clothes that
are too young for her. I thought Mrs. Kasparov was a very strong woman. But if she is desperately trying to hold on to her youth, then that is a weakness. Maybe she is less strong than she was.”

  For Short, the nadir of the match was the ninth game. The British bookies had long stopped giving any odds on his winning the match. Short decided to repeat a Nimzo-Indian from the fifth game in which his home-cooked novelty on the tenth move earned him a quick draw as Black—he had used a mere twelve minutes for the entire game compared to the world champion’s hour and a half. This time Kasparov was ready—his sous chefs had spent days and nights cooking up a good rejoinder to the innovation—and when Short repeated the same tenth move, the Russian shot him a crocodile grin and banged out an improbable-looking response that Short had not even considered, let alone analyzed.

  Six moves later Kasparov could claim a decisive advantage, and by the fortieth move he had simplified the position into a winning two-pawns-up textbook rook ending, which Soviet chess trainers had surely drilled into him as a child. On the forty-sixth move, the world champion made an inexplicable error that permitted Short to escape with a draw, but then he, too, blundered and resigned six moves later. Short had now lost five games in the match and won zero.

  “I was in tears,” Short recalled. “I had been completely destroyed in front of the whole world. I was in a lot of pain, terrible pain. It was really awful. I wanted him to stop hitting me. I wanted to go home. I spoke to Rhea. She didn’t quite say pull yourself together because she’s a bit more sophisticated, but it came down to that. I realized that I needed to go out and bloody well fight. It was a real test of inner strength. If I had given up, as I was inclined to do, I can say now that I never would have forgiven myself. I chose to fight him.”

  What helped Short continue was the knowledge that Kasparov himself had been down five games in the first match against Karpov in 1984–1985 before finally getting on the scoreboard in the thirty-second game, after a nerve-wracking marathon of nineteen consecutive draws. In his own match with Kasparov, Short went on to draw the next five games before scoring his first win. He recalled his jubilation: “I won the sixteenth game. Since it took Kasparov until the thirty-second game to score against Karpov, I told myself I was twice as good as Kasparov. You have to seize on every angle to try to motivate yourself. OK, it wasn’t good enough. But if you do your best, and your best isn’t good enough, so be it. I lost to a better player, a really great player, so I don’t regret it.”

  Short’s eyes turned to his computer screen. He was checking out another Russian woman in the beauty contest. Twelve girls and twenty minutes later, he was ready to speak about chess again.

  THE HIGH POINT OF SHORT’S CHESS CAREER WAS HIS 1992 VICTORY OVER Karpov in the semifinals match to choose Kasparov’s challenger. Karpov had been the number two player in the world since 1985 and the number one for ten years before that. He had been Short’s hero in the mid-1970s after Fischer retired prematurely. “I needed food as a player,” Short said. “Fischer was no longer providing it. I was on a starvation diet. The last game in the Spassky match was this rook-against-bishop endgame. Was that supposed to suffice for the next twenty years? Were we expected to play it over again and again? A young player has to see something new. Then Karpov came along. I never understood people who thought his games were boring. I found his play very interesting if slightly cynical because he’d often be quite happy to make a draw with Black.”

  In 1976, when Short was eleven, he had the opportunity to meet Karpov in Amsterdam. The then-world champion invited the British prodigy to his hotel suite. “I went to meet the great Anatoly,” Short recalled. “He was very polite and nice to me. These things are important—how people behave toward insignificant beings. It is one thing to be nice when you are standing next to Mr. Bush—the Kasparov approach. It’s another thing how you behave with the nonentities. Little did Karpov know that he was going to have some trouble from me later.”

  When the media asked Short in 1992 what his chances were against Karpov, he said fifty-fifty. “Not a few people in British chess thought I had taken leave of my senses,” Short told me. “They really thought I had completely lost it. How could I possibly think that I had a chance against this legendary player who had always been higher rated than me? But that was my honest assessment. I thought I had identified his weaknesses, and might succeed if I aimed solely at his weaknesses rather than playing to my strengths, which were to some degree his strengths, too. I made him uncomfortable, and it worked. I remember comments afterward by people like Susan Polgar—Karpov played very badly. Yes he played very badly, but I made him play badly. That’s the point. That’s what she didn’t understand—OK, Susan was young at the time. If you give the guy enough problems, he’s going to fuck up at some point. Maybe not fuck up all the time, but at some moment he’s going to slip.”

  Short began his match preparation with a thorough analysis of Karpov’s games. “I grew up on Karpov,” Short said, “so it wasn’t as though I was unfamiliar with his style. There wasn’t a big difference between our ratings, but I understood well that there were certain types of technical positions—fairly quiet positions where it was a question of microscopically improving the placement of pieces—in which I couldn’t hope to compete with him. It’s not that I played these positions badly—I just knew he was better than me. I needed to take a page from our dear, late, multiply-stabbed friend, Simon Webb.”

  In 1978, Webb wrote a practical manual for players called Chess for Tigers. In one chapter, “How to Trap Heffalumps,” he discussed how strong players (tigers) could defeat even stronger players (heffalumps):6

  On open territory a Tiger doesn’t stand much chance against a Heffalump; he can’t even dig a Very Deep Pit to trap it, because Tigers aren’t much good at digging. What he can do, however, is to entice the Heffalump on to swampy ground and hope it falls into a bog and gets sucked underground by the quagmire. The only trouble is that Tigers are even more prone to getting stuck in bogs than Heffalumps are, and they’re not much good at struggling out of them.

  The poor tiger is in a quandary.

  He can put up a fight neither on open plains nor in the jungle; so his only chance is to head for a swamp and hope that the Heffalump gets stuck before he does. If the Heffalump has any sense he would keep well away from the swamp, but Heffalumps, in spite of their great strength, are not always sensible when it comes to staying away from swamp.

  Short explained that his own strategy was to lead heffalump Karpov into the swamp. The Englishman had noticed that as Black, Karpov was not comfortable in slightly cramped positions in which White was able to advance his king pawn to the fifth rank, one row into Black’s position, supported by the White queen pawn on the fourth rank. In response to White’s king-pawn opening, history showed that Karpov either moved his queen-bishop pawn one square, initiating the so-called Caro-Kann Defense, or responded in kind by moving his own king pawn. If Karpov played the Caro-Kann, Short would play the Advanced Variation and achieve the desired cramping that had frustrated the Russian in the past. And if Karpov instead copied Short’s first move, bringing about a double-king-pawn opening, the Englishman planned to play an obscure variation of the Ruy Lopez called the Worrall Attack. “Does the Worrall win?” Short rhetorically asked. “No. It’s probably weaker than the normal stuff. But Karpov had very little experience with it in his entire career. Someone used to play it at my local club in Bolton so I was familiar with it.”

  As Black, Short prepared only for the queen pawn. Earlier in Karpov’s career the Russian had been a very successful king-pawn player—a leading slayer of the Dragon Sicilian—but Short thought that Karpov was so ossified in his current ways that he wouldn’t turn back to it. “You have to reinvent yourself as a player just to force your brain to go in a different direction,” Short said. “You can have your broad base of knowledge, but you always have to add to it—and I didn’t see Karpov doing that.” In his many weeks of preparation, Short followed
his hunch and spent only ten minutes on a king-pawn defense.

  “I would have looked like an idiot if he had played e4,” he admitted. “I knew that Karpov was a fantastic natural talent—very competitive, very resilient, very determined, and most of all very practical. I remember a famous game against Korchnoi from Baguio 1978 when Karpov had a dead lost position but didn’t give up. He was able to take advantage of Korchnoi’s time trouble to make some tricky knight moves and get a mating attack. Karpov had this ability to create difficulties for his opponent at all times, even when he had the rare lost position. I have a lot of admiration for him. He was right up there in the pantheon. But I sensed that in the 1990s he was just coasting and would not put in the work necessary to play e4 again.”

  Fortunately for Short, the gamble paid off. Karpov stuck to the expected queen-pawn opening. As his chief defense Short chose the Queen’s Gambit Accepted. “It’s a respectable opening,” he said. “It’s not junk, and Karpov had never faced it in a World Championship match. He had loads of experience with King’s Indians, Grünfelds, the Queen’s Gambit Declined. Then you are down to real junk. So QGA was my main defense.”

  Short began the match as Black, though, by playing a much maligned gambit known as the Budapest—some called it “real junk”—in which he jettisoned his king pawn on the second move. “I don’t think he had ever faced it—at least I couldn’t find a game,” Short said. “I did it just to get the guy thinking.” If White knows his way, he can get an easy game and the advantage of the two bishops by returning the pawn at an early stage, but if he is too materialistic and tries to hold onto the pawn, Black gets active piece play as compensation. Unsound openings are only unsound if your opponent remembers the refutation—or figures it out when the clock is ticking. If you play the same flawed line more than once, you can count on your opponent looking up the correct response.