Mortal Games

by Waitzkin, Fred;

  7

  NEW YORK

  The world championship brought about a renaissance of spirit in the New York chess scene. In the days before the match, everywhere one went in chess circles—clubs, local tournaments, coffee shops, parks where there were clusters of chess tables—the talk was about how Karpov and Kasparov hated one another or whether or not Karpov was over the hill or what Kasparov had up his sleeve against Karpov’s Zaitsev variation of the Ruy Lopez. The world-famous but physically worn out Marshall and Manhattan chess clubs, which had been barely hanging on financially since the Fischer days, were suddenly getting phone calls from prospective new members, from fans seeking information about the match, as well as from poor chess players trying to wrangle free tickets.

  According to Bruce Pandolfini, chess teachers around town who had been virtually out of work were suddenly getting calls each day from prospective students. Some of the callers were the well-to-do parents of kids attending private schools such as Dalton, Trinity and Browning, middle-aged men who had rooted fervently for Bobby nearly two decades before and had just seen Kasparov on the David Letterman show or read an article in the newspaper saying that he was the best ever. “How could it be? Better than Bobby Fischer?” Not that these parents cared about chess skill per se, but recalling Bobby and those heady afternoons in front of the television in ’72 brought a flood of emotion, like hearing Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band when you hadn’t heard it for years, and they were prepared to lay out fifty or sixty dollars an hour for their little kids to learn to play the elite game in a way that they themselves never quite managed. So their brilliant little ones came to Pandolfini and to other chess masters for their first lessons, primed with the knowledge that Bobby Fischer was better—daddy had said so—than this Russian guy, what’s his name?

  In the southwest corner of Washington Square Park, half a dozen blocks from our apartment, regulars were buzzing about the match, and pronouncing the names “Anatoly” and “Garry” with the familiarity of members of their families. The match seemed to invest park games with a new crispness and sense of purpose, and I found myself going in the evening to watch for an hour or two. From the age of six to nine or ten, Josh had lived a considerable portion of his life in this section of the park. Each afternoon after school, he had come here to hone his tactics in speed games against retired workers, drop-out chess masters, failed lawyers, alcoholics, hustlers of various commodities, a rag-tag crew bonded together by a sense for the huge importance of chess and of the park itself, particularly this little corner that was a circle of nineteen marble chess tables set into the pavement to prevent their being stolen in the night.

  There were many like Josh and me, who stopped by each day for a few hours of thrills and sporting conversation, but some lived the park life, playing intense games from the late morning into the night, sweating over tough positions through the stifling summer while looking forward to fall, when the wind whipped through the trees overhead, driving the pace of money games. Park regulars ate Greek and Chinese takeout on the grimy tables where Fischer had played when he was a kid, while staring at a position from Robert Byrne’s column in The New York Times. Even in the winter, a down-and-out master might be found sitting in front of his pieces, hoping for a customer, and occasionally this poor fellow with no money and no place else to go would have to sleep on one of the benches partially sheltered by his table. During the cold months, chess hustlers marked time until the spring, when college students, businessmen, whoever (if they were weak players they were known as “fish” to the hustlers), began showing up in front of the tables with renewed optimism.

  To a significant degree, in the park a man’s self-worth was determined by how well he played the game. When Josh and I used to come here every day, players were improving or losing their edge, reputations were rising and falling, but the professionals, the men who made their living playing against passersby, gauged themselves relative to the sheriff. Israel Zilber, a Latvian international master with a winning record against the immortal Mikhail Tal, was the sheriff, the top gun in the park. A man of fifty-odd years, Zilber appeared to be in his seventies. He was mad and played his games while singing Latvian lullabies to the squirrels in the trees overhead, and sometimes while he moved the pieces he reminisced about imagined games he had won against Karpov and Kasparov. When he had been the champion of Latvia thirty years before, Zilber had been a natty dresser, and now he wore the layered clothing of the homeless, adorned with a sheriff’s badge and cap and clumps of costume jewelry which bent his fingers into the shape of talons. The international chess community is very tight, and players around the world knew about Zilber’s park residence. Often top players visiting New York would come to the park to test their endgame technique against him. One afternoon, Josh and I watched him play for hours against the great sixteen-year-old prodigy, Zsuzsa Polgar from Hungary. Zilber was a great endgame player and this lovely, well-mannered girl did not seem to be offended by his odor or that he sang to the squirrels while waiting for her to move.

  During those years, second-best in the park was Vinnie the hustler, a man who played better the more he rapped and razzed his opponents. Vinnie’s games were always a circus and he gave many chess fans joy. But like all the park players, other than Zilber, Vinnie played the game with a sense for his limitations. Showman that he was, Vinnie was not in Zilber’s class, and he knew that he would play out his years as the deputy, second-best draw in this community of ceaseless shootouts, except for those rare times when the sheriff mysteriously hobbled away from his table for a few days.

  The sheriff disappeared from Washington Square when Josh was about ten, and after a few months, park regulars said that he had frozen to death sleeping in a hallway somewhere in the city. Within a year or so, many of the guys whom Josh had sparred against were gone. A couple of the best players had died. Vinnie had spent considerable time in the hospital, and some in the park were saying that Vinnie was very sick. Years of tough games, taking drugs, no money, living the outdoor life, did not make for longevity. A few other park players we knew were in jail doing long stretches. For a time, cards, backgammon, checkers and drugs became the games of choice in the park, and Josh and I stopped coming. The sad state of affairs there seemed to mirror the perilous condition of professional chess in this country, where even our top grandmasters could not make a living and were beginning to turn away from the game to find ways to support themselves.

  But during crisp October afternoons in 1990, with the match about to begin, chess players reclaimed the territory from the card players and drug pushers. With Garry living just fifty blocks uptown at the Regency Hotel, patzers and masters alike were feeling more respectable about spending their days toiling over the Coca-Cola–and fast-food–stained marble tables. Groups of titled players (grandmasters and international masters) in town for the match made their way south to this corner, and were soon offering park hustlers delicious time odds in blitz. But Ilya Gurevich, junior world champion and a breathtaking tactician, took odds from no one. He was a freshman at NYU and he spent each afternoon taking scalps, building a reputation while he earned spending money. Ilya was the new sheriff. Vinnie was out of the hospital, watching Ilya’s games while he sipped white wine and made side bets. He was telling the guys that soon he would be back at one of the tables, taking care of business.

  “Garry’s going to bust him,” said Al, a tall, handsome man Josh used to play, who had sweet tactics but knew little opening theory. I hadn’t seen Al for three years and he confided to me that he had just come out of the joint, where for the last months he had imagined sitting in the park in the morning with a cup of coffee and the paper, playing over Garry’s game against Karpov from the night before. I loved the way the guys in the park called him “Garry.” When an assistant to the organizer of the championship gave me some complimentary tickets for opening night, I gave a few of them to guys in the park. They promised to dress up.

  “I don’t feel like
playing,” Garry told me a day or two before the first game. Despite Al’s prediction, which was the prevailing match assessment in the park, Garry didn’t feel as though he were about to bust up Karpov. “I’m not ready,” he said, in a thin voice. “I’m not in good shape right now. I’m not prepared.” Garry had rented the seventeenth floor of the Regency Hotel on East 61st Street for his family and the team of trainers, and although he had stayed here many times before, with the match about to begin the luxurious suite seemed claustrophobic. The ceilings were too low and the smell of Kadzhar’s last high-cholesterol meal always hung in the air. When Garry looked out the window, the view was of rising acres of concrete and glass. No more breaking surf and sweet sea air and visions of squashing Karpov like an insect. Garry had left his confidence on Martha’s Vineyard. Perhaps the Azmaiparashvili episode had thrown him off-center. He was reluctant to talk about it, but from New York he had hired bodyguards for Zurab’s family in Georgia. Maybe the incident had jolted him into recalling Karpov’s suffocating strategies over the board as distinct from the daydream of winning easily. Maybe he was just nervous because the match was about to begin. The great world champion Mikhail Botvinnik, an early mentor to Kasparov, had preached that in the days before an important tournament, and especially before a world championship match, a player must keep his mind off chess, take walks in the country, relax, allow his energy to build and his mind to freshen. Kasparov felt as though he couldn’t allow himself this interlude. In the last days, he played practice games against his trainers, cramming. If a door opened or someone said a word while he thought, Kasparov snapped at him. After drawing a game against one of his trainers, Mikhail Gurevich, a world-class grandmaster, Kasparov appeared to be down in the dumps. Pacing from room to room, he was irritable and jumpy. “He’s always this way when he goes into a tournament without enough preparation,” said Masha.

  At the press conference Kasparov explained his decision to play beneath the banner of the prerevolutionary Russian flag, and Karpov seemed unruffled. He responded glibly that if Kasparov were truly a democrat, he would disavow the imperious drawing-odds that world chess champions have held as their edge for more than forty years. Drawing-odds gave Kasparov the advantage of retaining his title if the twenty-four-game match ended in a 12–12 tie. Karpov smiled, while Kasparov appeared awkward and unprepared while declining this proposal.

  Each Monday, Wednesday and Friday evening at 5:30, unless a player took one of his three sick days, Karpov and Kasparov squared off in the intimate three-tiered Hudson Theater in midtown Manhattan, where the best tickets went for a hundred dollars. The production, staged by Dan-Antoine Blanc-Shapira, was similar to the one in Paris at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées. Above the stage, mammoth video screens were mounted on each side of a fifteen-foot computerized chessboard. The cameras picked up each nuance of a player’s mood. They magnified twitches of anxiety or the face of feigned tranquility, so that a viewer might catch Kasparov’s mood shift even before Karpov sensed it. Reading the two outsized faces while watching the ebb and flow of attacks on the colorized display board, and listening to Bruce Pandolfini’s smart commentary over cordless earphones, was powerful theater. Even very weak players found themselves drawn into the illusion that they were understanding the game the way the big boys played it.

  On opening night, the first moves were delayed a few minutes by a minor fiasco. As the standing room crowd of about 650 filed into the Hudson Theater, it became apparent that the first rows of chairs were too close to the stage: the rustling and whisperings of fans would be a distraction to the players. At the last moment, the first three rows were roped off. The complimentary tickets I had been given were in this section, and when I arrived at the theater I noticed that several of my friends—a lawyer, a magazine publisher, an editor and three guys from the park dressed in dark suits (I had an uneasy feeling about how they might have laid claim to these outfits)—were standing in a line behind an assistant to the organizer, who was exchanging their tickets for others in the first balcony, apologizing profusely and giving each of them a fifty-dollar bill. My more affluent friends pocketed the money sheepishly, but the park guys did not conceal their satisfaction. Soon, the weather would turn bad, and a park hustler wouldn’t be able to earn that much in a week. From their point of view, Kasparov was already making good on his promise to help American chess professionals.

  Kasparov is extremely attuned to his moods, and before the start of the first game his confidence played upon him like a teasing, inconstant woman. I asked him why he worried so much about it. He was the same player, after all; he had his memory and ideas, his unequaled ability to calculate deep variations. Garry answered that having a positive state of mind was like having extra material on the board. Since coming to New York, he had been making Andrew Page and his mother feel desperate with his expressions of ennui. Around me, he was more controlled and analytic. “Confidence helps you to make the decision faster,” he said. “If the position is complicated, and you lack confidence, you hesitate. Maybe it’s a good move, maybe bad. If you are confident, you use less time and then you don’t worry about your decision. But also, there is another factor. You affect your opponent with your confidence. He feels it and maybe he backs off. It helps you to gain the initiative.”

  “And now, what will be your strategy when you are feeling shaky?” I asked.

  “Try to play bold chess. Take risks. Pretend that I am confident.”

  In the first game, playing the black pieces, Kasparov surprised commentators at the match by choosing an aggressive line in the King’s Indian defense instead of a more staid and solid variation in the Grunfeld that he had used in earlier matches. At the world championship level, players normally push to win with the white pieces, trying to build upon the small but tangible advantage of moving first, while the player with black is usually satisfied to draw. Playing black, a grandmaster will often try to create an ironclad position, anticipating threats and avoiding crucial weaknesses in his own position, while he counterattacks enough to keep some of White’s big guns bogged down defending and unable to join ranks with the forward troops in a lethal attack. Certain lines of the King’s Indian lead to dizzying and unpredictable complications, in which Black may gain the initiative, but to play such attacking lines entails considerable risk—especially so against Karpov, who might be history’s greatest counterpuncher.

  For the first five minutes of the games at the Hudson Theater, the players made their moves surrounded by scores of photographers. On opening night, they were also swarmed by television crews. On the huge screens, Karpov’s angled face was focused, inscrutable. Kasparov’s expressions were metallic and haughty—he seemed to be establishing terms: I will give you no quarter. Whether I am playing white or black, I will play to win.

  Respected chess journalist and international master Jonathan Tisdall, who had covered all of their championship encounters, commented that Kasparov’s demeanor and choice of openings suggested a kind of confidence and overaggression that had hurt him in the last match in Seville. Indeed, for much of the game, Kasparov appeared to be unconcerned about the little man in front of him, as though he himself operated on a higher plane. By the seventeenth move, Kasparov, playing with black, had equalized the game. This was something of a victory for the world champion. White had lost the little advantage that comes with moving first.

  In the King’s Indian, jagged pawn configurations sometimes pin-wheel into complex and promising attacks for Black. But to gain equality, Kasparov had traded off a few pawns and pieces, which had the effect of smoothing the position. Instead of wading into a double-edge melée, Kasparov had reduced the tension. The pieces and pawns were now more or less symmetrical. There were no apparent imbalances to exploit for either side. The position seemed lifeless, likely to wind down into a draw—when Kasparov abruptly muddled things by moving his dark-squared bishop to a long open diagonal. Was there an attack here? Was Kasparov about to manufacture something out of nothing?r />
  As a player, Kasparov stretches to make complications, to create profound confusion. Then, with a mind which sees farther and faster, he works his way through the dense chess jungle, as he likes to call it, until, bleeding and exhausted, he discovers the winning way. Karpov’s style is dominated by prophylaxis, stopping the play of the other side. Karpov’s genius is more difficult to appreciate. His is the style of constraint, of undoing, of denial. Working apparently without emotion, his strategy in some games is nothing more than to expose the weaknesses in his opponent’s strategy. Each attack, each bold movement forward in chess, creates something of a void, a weakness, a lessening of what was there before. When troops rush ahead to assail the king, there are fewer left behind to defend the fort; when a knight bounds forward to initiate a queenside attack, it may leave a pawn vulnerable to attack, or a weak square where a strong enemy piece can eventually lodge itself. Each attack creates some measure of risk. Grandmasters are continually weighing potential initiatives against weaknesses and risk. The element of timing is crucial. Will the attack succeed before the weakness can be exploited?

  With hardly a pause, Karpov countered Kasparov’s bishop by sliding his rook back to its original square at the opposite side of the board. After a few more moves, it became clear that Kasparov had underestimated this move, or even missed it altogether. Unwittingly, Kasparov had improved the quality of Karpov’s pieces. After two pawn exchanges, Karpov’s bishops were suddenly controlling more squares than before, and his queenside rook was no longer hemmed in by pawns. Pieces expand and shrink in power relative to their ability to move around the board and the number of squares that they control. Karpov had gained a positional advantage and was now threatening to win a pawn. On the big screen, Garry was disgusted with himself. A weak player sitting in the audience commented, “It looks as though Kasparov forced Karpov into a good position.” Yes, but the distance between a stunning attack and a clumsy failure can be very tiny—a miscalculation of one square in a variation that might extend eight or ten moves deep, traversing hundreds of squares. Garry had said that because of his lack of play during the past year, he had been having difficulty calculating accurately, that he had been unable consistently to back up his intuitive assessments with precise tactical analysis.