The Immortal Game

by David Shenk

  It was an effort to systematically gain from chess the type of insights into war that human generals had been extracting intuitively for centuries. And it appeared to pay off. One conclusion by the Australians was that a combination of deep searching and increased tempo easily overwhelmed an opposing force with significantly greater material. (Interestingly, this would also turn out to be true for the Immortal Game.) Some of the telling data happened to come in just as the United States was planning its 2003 invasion of Iraq, researchers recalled. “We watched with great interest the dialogue between General [Tommy] Franks, who wanted to use more material, and [Secretary of Defense] Donald Rumsfeld, who wanted a fast tempo and lighter units,” Australian researcher Jason Schulz said. “In the end, there was a compromise. But a relatively fast tempo did really gain a very decisive, rapid advantage in Iraq.”

  NAPOLEON’S CONQUESTS eventually fizzled, his short-lived empire shriveled, and he died in exile in 1821. Meanwhile, his old chess haunt, the Café de la Régence, continued to bustle as Europe began to enjoy the real fruits of the Industrial Revolution. The broad shift from agricultural to factory work in the nineteenth century initially left workers with no additional leisure time; conditions were gruesome and hours were all-consuming. Eventually, though, regulations and the labor movement forced factories to adopt more humane hours, creating a large new class of people with some leisure time; chess and other activities were there to fill in the gap. While the game still attracted the aristocracy, it also reached deeply into the growing European middle class.

  The expansion was especially evident in England. From 1824 to 1828, the British public became fascinated with a five-game, four-year contest between the Edinburgh Chess Club and the London Chess Club (Edinburgh won). That event fed interest in accessible and inexpensive books such as William Lewis’s Chess for Beginners (1835) and George Walker’s Chess Made Easy (1836). Thereafter, regular chess columns sprung up in European and American newspapers, and the game began to creep into not just erudite but also popular literature. “Kitty, can you play chess?” Alice asks at the start of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (his second Alice book). “Now don’t smile, my dear, I’m asking it seriously. Because, when we were playing just now, you watched just as if you understood it: and when I said ‘Check!’ you purred! Well, it was a nice check, Kitty, and really I might have won if it hadn’t been for that nasty Knight, that came wriggling down among my pieces.”

  Chess was moving swiftly beyond the chattering classes now, deep into the madding crowd. “The din of voices shakes the roof as we enter,” George Walker reported of his 1840 visit to the Café de la Régence.

  Can this be chess?—the game of philosophers—the wrestling of the strong-minded—the recreation of pensive solitude—thus practised amid a roar like that of the Regent’s Park beast-show at feeding time! Laughter, whistling, singing, screaming, spitting, spouting, and shouting,—tappings, rappings, drummings, and hummings, disport in their glory around us. Have we not made a blunder, and dropped into the asylum of Charenton?

  Walker was in the right place. And though other chess cafés weren’t quite as pulsating as the Régence, high-quality chess could now be found in Berlin, Warsaw, Vienna, Moscow, Rome, London, and elsewhere. Travel and long-distance communication were cheaper and easier than ever, and the international chess community now mingled regularly. Leading players from all over Europe established closer contact with one another with every passing decade, constantly testing and refining their most ambitious ideas. The better the communication, the farther and faster chess theory was able to advance. In this respect, chess mirrored social and industrial progress: ideas and cultures colliding, blending, improving.

  In the mid-nineteenth century, a number of top players, among them Austrian masters Ernst Falkbeer and Wilhelm Steinitz, emigrated to London, helping to transform that city into a full-fledged rival to Paris as the chess capital of the world. All of this inspired Illustrated London News chess columnist Howard Staunton in 1851 to organize the world’s first true international tournament in London—timed to coincide with a major international fair in the same city.

  In this era of play, stamina was vital. With no time controls in place—they would come into use about a decade later—a single game could easily last ten hours or more. Championship chess play therefore required a fertile mix of intellectual prowess, personal charisma, and outright staying power. “Comfort is not particularly high,” Adolf Anderssen wrote in a letter from the 1851 tournament. “Chairs and tables are small and low; all free space next to the players was occupied by a [recording assistant]. In short there was not a single place where you could rest your weary head during the hard fight. For the English player, more comfort is not required. He sits straight as a poker on his chair, keeps his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, and does not move until he for an hour has [surveyed] the chessboard. His opponent has sighed hundreds of times when the Englishman eventually moves his piece.”

  Perhaps stamina came naturally to my ancestor Samuel Rosenthal, raised as he was in an impoverished Jewish ghetto in the thick forests of northeast Poland. Jews had lived in Poland at least as far back as the fourteenth century, under varying degrees of persecution. Chess had been around at least three hundred years before that, brought back from a Crusade by Polish knights. In 1103 the knight Pierzchala is said to have checkmated the Duke of Mazovia with a Rook, earning a new estate and a Rook-laden crest. (To this day, chessboards, Knights, and Rooks appear on dozens of ancient family crests across Europe.) In 1564 a mock-epic poem, Chess, parodied the style of Homer and Virgil in detailing a heroic chess battle with a “wooden army.” The six-hundred-line poem reveals, among other things, how well steeped the Polish literate class was in the game.

  Sandwiched between Germany, Prussia, Hungary, Slovakia, Lithuania, and Russia, Poland succumbed many times over the centuries to foreign rule. Napoleon “liberated” Poland in 1806 but lost it to the Russians in 1813. Poles chafed constantly under the Russian yoke throughout the nineteenth century. In 1863, when Rosenthal was twenty-six, a major Polish revolt against Russian rule left the Jews squeezed even tighter than usual. By this time, Rosenthal had moved 150 miles southwest to Warsaw (also under Russian control), where he studied law and played a lot of chess at the popular cafe Pod Dzwonnica? (“Under the Bell Tower”). He joined the popular uprising of 1863, was persecuted after its failure, and left Poland the following year. Joining many others fleeing through Germany to France (following the path of earlier Polish émigrés, including Frédéric Chopin), he settled in Paris and quickly became a fixture at the most famous chess café of all.

  It wasn’t long before he had taken over the place. Rosenthal’s young competitors in Warsaw had been among the very sharpest in Europe, and he brought to Paris a stamina and consistency that immediately overwhelmed most of his native French competitors. He won the Régence’s championship in 1865 and repeated his triumph in 1866 and 1867. As the new dean of French chess, he began drawing invitations to the leading international tournaments. He represented Paris in Baden-Baden in 1870, in Bonn in 1877, and in London in 1883, where he twice defeated the great champion Wilhelm Steinitz.*19 In 1884–85, Rosenthal led a Paris team against Vienna in a two-game correspondence match that lasted twenty months. (For his effort, Rosenthal was presented with a spectacular engraved gold pocket watch—the watch that entered our family lore.) In 1887 he was awarded, by the Spanish queen regent, the Charles III Order for his contributions to chess.

  With his public displays, café and tournament wins, magazine columns, and private tutoring, Rosenthal was said by Wilhelm Steinitz to be one of the few chess players in the nineteenth century who made a nice living from chess. It didn’t hurt that he mentored some of the leading public figures in France—Prime Minister Pierre Tirard, the society portraitist Raimundo de Madrazo, and the powerful French banking family Pereire. His star pupil was Prince Napoleon, a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. The relations
hip brought into striking contrast the young immigrant and the chess-obsessed emperor: two serious chess players, habitués of the very same chess café (if decades apart). One astonished the world with his military prowess but could not—try as he might—duplicate that success on the chessboard. The other made chess his only battlefield, forcefully embracing the military metaphor.

  Perhaps with Bonaparte in mind, Rosenthal pushed the chess–war comparison to its limit. He wrote:

  Both soldiers and players, regardless of their talent, must know a certain theory and certain principles. Indeed, his theory resembles ours. Isn’t it true that it teaches him to conduct his troops on a battlefield, according to established rules, to reassemble at the opportune moment, to have them converge at a determined point, in the briefest span of time? Shouldn’t he try to make the others attack him there where he is the strongest, to change fronts when the opponent attacks him at his vulnerable point, to manage his soldiers’ lives for the ultimate moment?…

  I could make an infinite number of comparisons, for the two are sisters: the path one follows, the method one uses to succeed in chess, are absolutely identical to those that the greatest commanders recommend.

  Was Samuel Rosenthal one of chess’s “greatest commanders”? Yes and no. Though for three decades he was considered about the best player in France (he “reigned supreme as the leader of Parisian chess,” reported the Chicago Tribune after his death) and was considered one of the top two dozen players in the world, and though he managed to beat legendary players like world champion Wilhelm Steinitz, Russian champion Mikhail Tchigorin, Polish sensation Simon Winawer, and even Adolf Anderssen in a number of individual games, he never won a major international tournament and was never considered a real contender for the world championship. He captivated the French public, but could not make a permanent mark in chess history. Today he is remembered only by historians and by players who study past masters. A number of his games are included in noted books of analysis, and his own book of analysis on the London tournament of 1900, Traité des échecs et recueil des parties jouées au tournoi i international de 1900 (a brittle, yellowed author’s copy of which was passed down to his youngest granddaughter—my grandmother—and then to me) has been judged by competitive players to be remarkably insightful.

  Perhaps just as important as his play was his insistence that chess and war are “sisters.” His words frankly do not carry the same eloquence as those of Benjamin Franklin, but in his own way Rosenthal did advance a critical point about chess’s social consequence. He was echoing not just Franklin, who had described chess as battle without bloodshed, but many other observers over the years, including twelfth-century Jewish scholar Abraham ibn Ezra, who wrote of the game:

  All slaughter each other

  Wasting with great wrath each other

  …with yet no bloodshed.

  As useful as chess may have been to war commanders throughout the ages, it perhaps has been far more useful in bringing the discipline of war to the rest of us. Chess, along with other ancient competitive sports, helped to introduce the concept of nonviolent rivalry. It helped us—and helps us still—crystallize the concept of war without bloodshed. Chess, a game of war, teaches peace.

  Civilization today would be lost without the option of bloodless war. The free market depends on it. All politics and diplomacy rest on it. Science, academia, and mediated culture all thrive because of it. The institutions that today give support to our complex and rich world of ideas are sustained first and foremost by brutal, yet bloodless, competition. This is a legacy of chess—not just that it helped train warriors in their art but, more importantly, that it helped transport that same all-out competitive spirit into a peaceful sphere. “For Life is a kind of Chess,” declared Benjamin Franklin, “in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with.”

  THE IMMORTAL GAME

  Moves 8 and 9

  THE ROMANTICS LOVED TO ATTACK, and their games were thrilling to watch. In due course, their style would be made obsolete. Other inventive players would come along and devise more whole-game, strategic styles that would suffocate the impatient, merely tactical player. But until then, the best players in the world played what they knew.

  In this game, Kieseritzky (Black) was setting up for a devastating attack on Anderssen’s Kingside. His Queen was already in position. He’d already taken one of Anderssen’s Pawns on that side, and he had disabled Anderssen’s ability to castle. Finally, in move 7, he had put his Knight on h5, threatening Knight to g3 in the next move, which would simultaneously check White’s King and attack his Rook. Kieseritzky knew what he was doing. He’d done this before.

  Anderssen, of course, had no choice but to respond.

  8. Nh4

  (White Knight to h4)

  By moving his Knight to h4, Anderssen was able to blunt the attack. If Black now moved Knight to g3, White could safely capture with his Pawn on h2 without exposing his Rook on h1 to capture by the Black Queen.

  But White’s smart defense couldn’t yet blunt Black’s offense. He had another attacking move in store.

  8….Qg5

  (Black Queen to g5)

  Kieseritzky moved his Queen to g5, simultaneously threatening Anderssen’s Bishop and his Knight. Attacking two pieces at once is called a fork, and is highly desirable for obvious reasons. It is often inevitable that the opponent is going to lose one piece or the other.

  9. Nf5

  (White Knight to f5)

  But Anderssen had the perfect defense. In an almost uncanny turn, his only real move here—maneuvering his Knight to the f 5 square, not only simultaneously protected both the threatened Knight and the threatened Bishop, but was also an attacking move that he had planned for some time. The f 5 square is known as a very strong place for the White Knight, for obvious reasons: it puts the Knight one move away from a possible check.

  It looked like dumb luck, but this sort of good fortune happens routinely to players who carefully plan their moves. A move that effectively combines necessary defense with desirable offense is commonly referred to as “gaining a tempo.” The player has gained in one single move what might have ordinarily taken two or more moves to accomplish. The concept of tempo is one of the most important in chess.

  Anderssen had already gained several tempi in this game, while Kieseritzky had lost a few. That said, Kieseritzky might still have felt pretty good about his position. The simple fact was that the White Kingside was in a shambles. If Black could find the time to develop some more pressure on the Kingside, he’d be in a strong position to win.

  9….c6

  (Black Pawn to c6)

  Kieseritzky then issued another threat to Anderssen’s Bishop by pushing his c Pawn one square forward. He believed he was gaining a tempo here, forcing Anderssen into a defensive posture while making a simple developing move himself. In the next move, Anderssen’s response would indicate whether he agreed that he had just lost some of his momentum.

  AS MUCH AS FOR HIS playing skills, Samuel Rosenthal was admired for his teaching, his writing, and his showmanship. “Sitting on his chair, blindfolded and motionless,” recalled an adoring obituary, “he appeared petrified in his extraordinary thinness. Only his stirring lips would indicate his next move.” Even without the blindfold, Rosenthal put on phenomenal public displays, as captured here in an 1891 Paris drawing by the French artist Louis Tinayre.

  Samuel Rosenthal, the author’s great-great-grandfather, in a simultaneous display in Paris, 1891

  Such demonstrations electrified the public, but were no longer the otherworldly oddity that they had been a century earlier in Philidor’s time. A number of chess masters now took part in blindfold games—so many, in fact, that as a group they attracted the attention of a young French psychologist named Alfred Binet, who was curious to understand the cognition behind them. How on earth did these players juggle memory and analysis so well? In the 1890s, as part of what would ultimately emerge as a car
eer-long dedication to the definition and measurement of human intelligence, Binet was trying to understand the dynamics of memory. He became fascinated by blindfold chess players and their awesome displays of visual memory. Exactly how did they do it?

  The conventional wisdom at the time, endorsed by Binet, was that strong visual memory was based in photographic-type recall. It appeared that great chess players somehow had a highly advanced ability to form mental pictures of chess pieces and boards and to preserve those pictures in their minds. They had, Binet theorized, an extraordinary “inner mirror,” which would forever reflect back to them, move by move, every successive configuration of the board. This notion was supported by more than two thousand years of memory literature and science that depicted memory as being visually based. The ancient Greeks, with no printing press and no pen and ink, had developed the art of mnemonics—mental tricks that relied on visualization to remember large amounts of detail. Typically, a mnemonist would “deposit” difficult-to-remember information into imagined compartments, seats, or rooms.

  Now Binet wanted to determine how such memory tricks actually worked. Inspired by the work of the British anthropologist Francis Galton, he had developed a passion for exploring the healthy working mind, as opposed to the pathology of mental illness. The blindfold chess study was one of his first as assistant director of the Laboratory of Physiological Psychology at the Sorbonne. His subjects included the accomplished chess masters Stanislaus Sittenfeld, Alphonse Goetz, Siegbert Tarrasch, and the dean of French chess, Samuel Rosenthal. In Binet’s laboratory, they were questioned intensively about what they “saw” when they played chess blindfolded. The results were surprising and instructive. Binet was humbled to find that his “inner mirror” theory did not pan out. Astounding chess memories, he learned, did not resemble a collection of photographic snapshots. They were much more abstract than that, more geometric, and more meaningful.