Mortal Games

by Waitzkin, Fred;

  But not so fast. Winning from such a highly promising position is often more difficult than it appears. The player with the advantage must still guard against a number of tricks, do a great deal of accurate calculating and have an effective plan. While the losing player fights for his life with his greatest guile, the one with the advantage may relax while anticipating his night of glory.

  Many in the Hudson Theater commented upon the wreck of Karpov’s position; few noticed that by giving up his queen and trading into an endgame, even a theoretically losing endgame, Karpov had radically changed the character of the struggle. From the beginning, he had been lost in Kasparov’s home-grown ideas, pummeled and perplexed by the assault of Kasparov’s minor pieces. The two champions had played game 3 in the relatively uncharted terrain of dissonance and paradox. But when Karpov forced the endgame, bewildering complexities unraveled like a dropped ball of yarn. Karpov was known to be a magician in the endings. His situation was bad, but by giving up the queen, he had given his pieces a little bit of mobility, something to work with. And now, the two men were standing on solid ground. A grandmaster could calculate this position. Karpov’s plan was straightforward and pedestrian. He needed to break down Kasparov’s kingside pawn chain to save the game. That would create weaknesses, and if he opened a file for his rook he could exploit them. Children learn these strategic principles from their coaches.

  For Black to realize his advantage in this situation called for little moves, intricate consolidations. It required care and precise technique. Within a few moves it became clear that Kasparov was not prepared for this. He played impatiently, as if still caught up in the glamour and boldness of his earlier conceptions. The world champion made numerous little errors, each depleting his advantage. He pushed his kingside pawns too hastily before developing his bishop for support. Then he squandered a pawn for no reason. Karpov waited for Kasparov to trip over his own feet. This was his best chance. At just the right instant, he blockaded the world champion’s prematurely advanced pawns. As Kasparov pushed too hard to win, he created weaknesses in his own structure, which Karpov exploited. When Kasparov advanced his queenside pawns, Karpov’s rook and bishop were liberated. These pieces began nipping at Kasparov’s loose pawns. Instead of winning, the world champion was suddenly defending: his position was still better, but his advantage was fading. Karpov had changed the shape of the game, intuiting that it was his best chance to throw a blanket on Kasparov’s fire. He completely shut Kasparov down in the endgame. After forty-one moves, the game was adjourned, and the two men and their teams of grandmasters studied the thorny but more or less equal position late into the night. The following afternoon they resumed play and eventually agreed to a draw.

  Perhaps because there was no day off, game 4 seemed to flow from game 3, but Kasparov suggested later that the unique challenges of the previous game drew both players back for more. “Did anyone see Kasparov’s face after bishop f7?” shouted international master Jonathan Tisdall following Karpov’s twenty-second move. Tisdall, a respected international player himself, was covering the match for several magazines, but like virtually all the top minds analyzing in the pressroom, he was reduced to looking for clues about the position by gauging the strain on Karpov’s face or the flicker of incredulity at the edge of Kasparov’s mouth.

  Karpov had brought back his rejuvenated friend, the Zaitsev, for this game. Early on, employing a different variation than in game 2, he had attempted to undermine White’s center at the risk of weakening his own kingside. His team of grandmasters had worked many hours honing this variation, but from Kasparov’s relaxed manner Karpov sensed that the world champion and his team had anticipated all of their homework. Karpov began to suspect that he was steering himself into a massacre. “I suddenly discovered a hole in my analysis,” he wrote later, “. . . I quickly realized that I was standing with one foot over a pit. I pondered this for about fifty minutes before finding a very sharp and unusual continuation. I had managed to . . . use precisely those nuances of the position which Kasparov’s group had failed to find.”*

  On the twenty-second move, instead of recapturing a piece, Karpov played a highly unusual and brilliant defensive move which both shored his kingside and liberated his queenside pawns. It seemed to give Karpov the advantage, but then Kasparov placed his rook where it could be captured by Karpov’s bishop and left it sitting there for the next nine moves. None of the commentators in the Macklowe had predicted this move, which launched an intricate kingside assault. For most of us this game was impossible to follow, but we could feel the power of juggernaut moves, which brought to mind the abiding predicament of these immortal players. During the past decade, each of them had perfected his art largely to distance himself from the other, but instead of distance, together they had created a walled kingdom of two. There was no one else who could compete on their level. Each wanted out of this hateful intimacy, but they seemed destined to battle one another forever. Their intuitions were perfectly tuned and every exotic threat was anticipated and parried with yet another disguised and deadly variation.

  “These games are like Hitchcock mysteries,” said Mikhail Tal, sitting in the pressroom. “No one knows what will happen next.” Tal had won the world championship in 1960 when he was twenty-three, the youngest player to hold the crown before Kasparov. In his prime he had been known as a player able to impose complications that his opponent simply could not figure out in the allotted time, but now Tal made it clear that the depth and abstraction of games 3 and 4 were beyond anything he had ever seen before in championship play. “But for all the complications, at times these games remind me of ice hockey,” he said, “fast, hard, brutal.”

  When Kasparov is feeling confident, as his pieces press ahead he contests the space above the board until he owns it all and his opponent is leaning back in his chair. But in these games, for all of Karpov’s supposed physical frailty, he would not yield this space. Garry leaned forward and Karpov didn’t budge. The two men were as close as dance partners, Kasparov sneering or talking to himself, his mouth twisted in disgust or concern; Karpov looking cramped and uncomfortable, sometimes calculating with his head nodding sharply.

  For hours, game 4 hung in the balance. Kasparov’s queenside was threadbare and Karpov’s phalanx of pawns was heading for pay dirt. Then Kasparov distracted the march of the pawns by attacking Karpov’s weak kingside. If Karpov’s defense were not precise, he would be mated, but as the game approached the end, Karpov was getting the better of it. “It was easy for me to play, because I didn’t have any pieces on the queenside,” said Kasparov, making a joke afterwards. “I had nothing to think about. Positionally, I was completely lost. But still, it was a jungle.” Kasparov saved himself by creating intimidating confusion. In the end, although the champion’s position was dire, Karpov had used so much of his time in the beginning of the game that he had none left to pick his way through the last dangers of Kasparov’s waning attack. On the thirty-ninth move, with virtually no time left, Karpov made a terrible mistake which allowed Kasparov to draw.

  The following Saturday afternoon, it was rainy and cold as I hurried through Washington Square Park on my way home from the New York University Bobst Library, where I often worked. In several hours, I was meeting Kasparov for dinner. Each Saturday night during the match, we had dinner together, and I was curious about his mood following these two remarkable games. I wondered if the art of games 3 and 4 would be enough to assuage his disappointment over failing to win either of them. As I approached the chess corner, I noticed a solitary figure seated at one of the marble tables, an old man who was nodding furiously as if he were in a heated argument with someone. He looked up at the trees and spoke to the squirrels, as though attempting to enlist their support. Israel Zilber, the sheriff. All over the world, chess people had heard rumors that he had frozen to death three years before, but here was Zilber, no question. He was wearing a light summer shirt, and behind a mustache and ratty beard his face was deeply creas
ed and weathered like an old seaman’s. He was shaking like a leaf from the cold and speaking to the squirrels in Latvian, but I distinctly heard him say the name “Kasparov.” Soon his tone became more congenial; he mentioned a few chess moves with an elegant turn of his filthy hand, as though he were offering a reasoned commentary on a game.

  “Zilber, Zilber, how are you?” I said in a loud voice, because he had always been hard of hearing, or at least it had always been hard to get his attention. He looked at me and nodded curtly. Then he returned to his discussion of the game, pointing at wet squares on the board in front of him. It was wonderful to see the sheriff again, but also unsettling. I felt the impulse to tell people that he was back.

  The sheriff was angry about one of the Karpov-Kasparov games. He pointed at a square and raised his voice. The powerful games forty blocks uptown had called him from wherever he had been. In the old days he had often muttered their names, and I used to think that, sometimes, while he toiled in the park for a dollar a game, in his mind he was struggling against Kasparov for the title. Maybe it struck Zilber as unjust that the two Russians were playing for the championship in his backyard. Zilber talked on and on. I wanted to ask him where he had been playing and if he still recorded his games on little scraps of paper and envelopes, as he had when Josh was a little boy. I wanted to tell him that his old nemesis Mikhail Tal had just arrived from the Soviet Union and was analyzing on the seventh floor of the Macklowe. Zilber was one of the few living players to hold a lifetime edge over Tal. But I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Zilber was talking very quickly, and shivering so hard I feared that he was very sick. He had no socks and his ankles looked raw. I took my coat off and handed it to him, but he paid no attention. He was very annoyed. I think he believed that he could take Kasparov.

  By now there were a few of us standing around the table. It was as if drums in the hills had called the guys back to the park on this miserable day. Vinnie appeared, his face swollen, looking sick. Poe was there, another of the men Josh used to play when he was little.

  “Fred, this is a miracle,” Vinnie said to me. “I feel like I am seeing my father again.” Vinnie was feeling very emotional. Perhaps he was recalling the scores of games that he had played against Zilber over the years. Vinnie’s genius in chess had been the art of diversion. He could play sharp tactics while singing rap songs, cursing his opponent’s mother or quoting Immanuel Kant—whatever it took to win. Against Zilber he had sometimes bellowed in his biggest voice or banged the table, trying to distract the old man, but this was like trying to distract the earth. While Vinnie went through his pyrotechnics, Zilber roared at the trees overhead, forced the exchange of queens, and won with the precision of Karpov in the endgame.

  All the park guys gathered around Zilber very quietly. It was a religious moment for them. I quickly walked the half-dozen blocks to my apartment, searched through closets, and pulled out three winter coats, a pair of gloves and some socks. I took a plastic chess set from Josh’s room and hurried back to the park, half-expecting him to be gone. Zilber was still there, muttering and shaking. I tried to give him a twenty-dollar bill, but he shook his head no. He had crushed Tal and didn’t need my charity. I placed the three coats on the table and urged him to choose one. All the guys pleaded with him to take a coat. After a minute or so, Zilber said very distinctly, “I can do better.” I had seen photographs of Zilber in his younger days playing tournaments in Europe and Israel, and in each he had looked like a man-about-town, perfectly groomed in a tailored suit. Perhaps this other life still seemed accessible to him. Vinnie shook his head, admiring Zilber’s sense of style and pride. In truth, all three coats I had brought were a little shabby. This was the happiest I had seen Vinnie in years. The rumor was that Vinnie was dying of AIDS, and a few months later, he was gone.

  Before I headed home, I remembered to offer Zilber the chess pieces, which he accepted with a “Thank you.” When I left it was almost dark and getting colder. All but one or two of the guys had quit the park, leaving Zilber to argue in Latvian. That was the last time I ever saw him. The pieces were set up and the sheriff was waiting for someone to come by and play a game.

  * * *

  Two hours later, in the Regency Hotel, a waiter wheeled in a neat room service table with places set on white linen and a warming cabinet below filled with soup and hot rolls. He uncovered steaming dishes of chicken, potatoes and vegetables. Garry had also ordered a jumbo shrimp cocktail in case one of us felt like nibbling, and he had remembered to order me a beer, which was thoughtful. His mood was subdued. The television was playing subliminally in the background, Indians rushing past on horseback while a cowboy took aim from behind a rock. Garry glanced at them. It was an odd experience watching him play Karpov and then coming here for supper or for a walk in the park. The Macklowe Kasparov was thrilling the chess world with his courage and refined positional understanding, but the more absorbed I was by the games, the more I forgot about Garry. Indeed, Garry seemed irrelevant in light of the world champion who moved the pieces on the big screen. Kasparov was a forbidding presence, a piece of history. Playing for the world championship for month after month must have been a schizophrenic experience for him.

  Garry ate his soup, and I noticed that he had developed a rash at the corner of his mouth. It made him seem vulnerable, beatable. He looked tired. He got up from the table, went to a chessboard and played through a variation.

  “It’s very bad,” he said, referring to the strain. “Even if I rest or take a time-out, it’s always on my mind. It feels as though I am living years of my life in a few months.” He watched the Indians and tried to relax. “I think it’s dangerous to live this way,” he said. “You can’t rest when you’re worried that you might lose the spirit of fighting chess.”

  He ate his chocolate cake, watched the Indians for a few minutes and returned to the chessboard. He moved the pieces for both sides, clicking them ahead in the rhythm of a canter. The sound of his clicking pieces made him feel better. We kept chatting about this or that, but every ten minutes or so he played through a variation. I mentioned that Josh had played the King’s Indian the past weekend for the first time, and that throughout the game he had tried to use the ideas of quality, time and material. Garry was pleased. He cantered the pieces ahead. He picked up the paper and said something about his friend Viacheslav Fetisov of the New Jersey Devils. I mentioned the appearance of Zilber in the park, but he didn’t respond. He was allowing himself a little bit of Garry this weekend, a few minutes here and there, but not so much that he would lose touch with Kasparov.

  I told him that Tal had called the last two games Hitchcock mysteries and wondered if the match would continue at this level of abstraction and intensity. Garry’s expression became a little tight. “How could it?” he said. “We are human. For how many games can you do it?” And then a few minutes later, he said, “The third game could have been a masterpiece, but it takes energy. I didn’t have it.”

  Masha came into the room wearing jeans and her hair in a pony tail. Garry gave her an affectionate pinch and she smiled in a way that said he was her entire life. She climbed into his lap. Garry had decided to take a sick day on Friday because he had felt tired and disappointed. The blitzkrieg had not worked. He had trained for the early knockout, and now he sensed that he might have to go the distance. While she cuddled with him, he looked over her shoulder at the chessboard.

  In game 5, cautious opening play led to a lifeless middlegame. As Kasparov had all but predicted two days before, this was a working day off for the two grandmasters. For the first time in the match, Kasparov did not push to make a fight. It was interesting to notice that, without tension on the board, there was no excitement in the theater. Karpov and Kasparov appeared relaxed onstage. Upstairs in the pressroom, chess journalists played blitz, only occasionally glancing up at a monitor. Klara even smiled once or twice before the players agreed to a draw.

  In game 6, with the black pieces, Karpov outplayed Kasp
arov in the opening. Garry played quietly, no sacks, no fire. Karpov played the early middlegame in his inimitable fashion, absorbing Kasparov’s threat before it could gain momentum, skirting complications, setting up for later. Jonathan Tisdall pointed out that Garry wasn’t tapping his foot on the floor, and wondered if he was tired. Soon Karpov held the advantage, and his well-coordinated pieces were poised for an attack. But then he began making mistakes, four or five bad moves within a short period, which threw the initiative back to Kasparov. In the pressroom, grandmasters were asking one another, how could this happen, so many bad moves? Whenever Karpov or Kasparov made errors, grandmasters on the sidelines were perplexed, as though the natural order had been violated. Kasparov explains that making mistakes and even grievous blunders is “normal” when playing for the world championship, where the tension becomes blinding, particularly as the match goes on. During a pressured, five-hour game, unwanted thoughts intrude upon clever variations. Players cannot help worrying about losing, or how their next move, a crucial one, will be rated by a world of experts and fans. At stake is a lifetime of glory and power, to be cheered by thousands back in Moscow, to be wealthy, to have heads of state ringing up, to be judged kindly by history. It is easy to overlook a weak square or an open diagonal eight moves ahead when a man is worrying whether or not he will be king.

  Now Kasparov smelled blood and found his rhythm. After playing badly, he had a chance to score a point against Karpov. The world champion found little ways to increase his advantage. He took possession of key squares and diagonals. This was not a game in Kasparov’s surrealist style, with startling sacrifices leading to refracted advantages. The way was clear, and Kasparov was playing like a machine, perhaps more like Bobby Fischer than quintessential Kasparov. A modest player could follow the punishing and relentless advance of his pieces. Karpov was getting squeezed, as players like to say, and he was in bad time trouble. All match he had been getting into time trouble. Earlier in his career, Karpov had been known for his fast play at the board, but in the last few years he had needed more time to think and had often been in a rush to make his last moves before the time control. When a player has to make eight or nine moves in a minute, it is terrifying for him, but also thrilling. Some players become time-trouble junkies. They crave the rush of fear, the thrill that only comes when big decisions have to be made very rapidly. Some players use time trouble for inspiration, even grow to rely upon it, but that is a form of Russian roulette. Often, with just a beat or two to go on the clock, God does not tap a grandmaster on the shoulder with the right move, and his instantaneous move is a humiliating blunder.