by David Shenk
Liz: Checkmate.
George: I don’t think we should see each other anymore.
(Next scene.)
Jerry: And you broke up with her because she beat you at chess? That’s pretty sick.
George: I don’t see how I could perform sexually in a situation after something like that. I was completely emasculated.
The Freudians, in their misguided fervor and impressive self-regard, established at least one important truth: chess taps into primal forces far beyond our immediate control. Clearly, something profound, thrilling, and even somewhat terrifying takes place on its mental stage. And the game’s close association with a particular variety of mental illness suggests that something potentially destructive may lurk beneath the surface for some players.
Most players distance themselves from the topic altogether. But several have bravely faced up to it, offering credible theories for the trouble. “As organizers and players,” says the University of Chicago’s Tim Redman, “we must admit that at times some very real character disturbances are manifested by our fellow players…. After all, what is a chess tournament? A chess tournament is, by definition, an activity in which you spend many hours each day, using your best intellectual and imaginative abilities to figure out how the other player is out to get you. [It is a] constant exercise of [the] ‘paranoid faculty.’”
Writer, psychiatrist, and serious chess player Charles Krauthammer attributes the trouble not to latent Oedipal impulses or paranoia but rather to chess’s celebrated abstraction. The same quality that makes the game such a useful thinking tool can also completely subvert thought, he suggests, if pushed to its near-infinite edge. The danger lies in what Krauthammer calls vertigo, the cognitive disarray one encounters when facing limitless depths, physical or virtual.
Not many chess players come close. “The amateur sees pieces and movement,” writes Krauthammer. “The expert, additionally, sees sixty-four squares with holes and lines and spheres of influence. The genius apprehends a unified field within which space and force and mass are interacting valences—a Bishop tears the board in half and a Pawn bends the space around it the way mass can reshape space in the Einsteinian universe.”
A third plausible route to chess madness is suggested by Austrian writer Stefan Zweig in his short story “The Royal Game.” Zweig writes of a prisoner held in solitary confinement who has access to only one book—a chess guide with analysis of 150 games. He teaches himself how to play, studies each of the games inside out, and then—much to his later regret—begins to play chess against himself in his own head. “It is an absurdity in logic to play against oneself,” he later concludes. “The fundamental attraction of chess lies, after all, in the fact that its strategy develops…in two different brains, that in this mental battle Black, ignorant of White’s immediate maneuvers, seeks constantly to guess and thwart them, while White, for his part, strives to penetrate Black’s secret purposes and to discern and parry them. If one person tries to be both Black and White you have the preposterous situation that one and the same brain at once knows something and yet does not know it; that, functioning as White’s partner, it can instantly obey a command to forget what, a moment earlier as Black’s partner, it desired and plotted. Such a cerebral duality really implies a complete cleavage of the conscious, a lighting up or dimming of the brain function at pleasure as with a switch.”
It is dizzying to even consider, but it does comport with the intense training of some obsessive players who find themselves constantly playing chess games inside their heads. The consequence of this unwinnable inner conflict is what Zweig calls “a self-produced schizophrenia.”*22 While such a condition, if possible, is obviously rare and probably only a danger to the very deepest chess thinkers, it also raises reasonable concern about what deep chess thinking does to the larger population of merely expert players. “In a long match,” world champion Boris Spassky once remarked, “a player goes very deep into himself, like a diver. Then very fast he comes up. Every time, win or lose, I am so depressed. I want to die.”
Such warnings are not to be taken lightly, and it behooves every chess parent, chess organizer, and chess instructor to be mindful of the game’s destructive power—to work on tapping into chess’s positive Benjamin Franklin forces while avoiding its corrosive Bobby Fischer forces.
THE IMMORTAL GAME
Moves 12–16
CHESS IS NOT ONLY a game of the mind, but also very much a mind game. Playing games against strangers on the Internet, I would frequently encounter remarks from opponents intended to intimidate me, or at least rattle me a little. If I took more than a few seconds to consider a move, I might get a text message of “You’re SLOW!” Barbs like this didn’t necessarily make me move sooner, but they certainly affected the quality of my concentration. Even when playing against old friends, there were occasional taunts and distractions—in both directions. It is an unavoidable part of the game.
Such off-the-board techniques go back as far as anyone cares to look. In his treatise published in 1497, the leading Spanish player Lucena revealed a few already well-known tricks:
• During day games, be sure to situate your opponent so that he/she faces the shining sun.
• At night, place a candle by your opponent’s right hand. (Most players move the pieces with their right hand; in a dark room, moving the hand between the candle and the eye draws much attention away from the board.)
• It is best if your opponent eats and drinks well. But for you, only a light meal and no wine.
Five hundred years later, most techniques of distraction, intimidation, and coercion are no less mundane, ranging from provocative clothing to noisy drink twizzling or slurping to expertly timed grunts and groans. Walking away from the board between moves can give off an air of overwhelming confidence that opponents find unnerving. Pretending that a clever trap is actually an unsure or mistaken move might help lure your opponent more easily into the desired position.
A thousand other less crude and often less conscious maneuvers can also sway the thinking and the resilience of an opponent. No one can ignore the psychological and physical dimensions of this very human game. What is ostensibly a contest of calculation and geometric cleverness turns out to be just as much about morale, stamina, charisma, and raw desire to win. Some players have less a motivation to claim victory than a powerful desire to see the other guy lose. “I like to make them squirm,” Bobby Fischer has said, articulating the motivation of the most severely competitive type of player. Few share Fischer’s bloodlust, but every player unavoidably brings the force of his or her own character to the chess table. Even the meekest, most scholarly contestant must contend not only with thirty-two inanimate pieces, but also with the intangible and often unpredictable “human element.”
Needless to say, the chess game between Anderssen and Kieseritzky included its psychological elements. For two highly sophisticated players, each move may have potentially complicated motives: Does he want me to think he’s doing this? Does he want me to react in that way?
Anderssen, having sacrificed his Bishop on b5, now continued his offensive march on the Kingside. Moving up his h Pawn—on the far right edge of the board—he developed a Pawn and directly attacked the Black Queen.
12. h4
(White Pawn to h4)
This was not a move that Kieseritzky likely saw coming. He would now lose another tempo in further Queen retreat.
12….Qg6
(Black Queen to g6)
This retreat was triply bad for Black. First, in a game where a single move can produce a mile of significance, a retreating move that has no tactical or strategic value is worse than a waste. It’s like coming to a sudden stop on a racetrack while all of the other runners race on.
Second, this particular retreat didn’t even move Black’s Queen to safety. After the move, she was still in grave danger of being boxed in.
Third, Anderssen was carrying out a rather dastardly plan in which his long-term goals meshed nicely with his
tactical threats against Kieseritzky’s Queen.
His squeeze continued:
13. h5
(White Pawn to h5)
Anderssen moved his h Pawn up yet one more square, again developing a Pawn and again attacking the Black Queen.
13….Qg5
(Black Queen to g5)
Black’s Queen was now forced into the only available safe square. Things have sunk pretty low when a player has not only no choice of which piece to move but also no choice about which square to move it to.
14. Qf3
(White Queen to f3)
Anderssen continued to apply pressure to Kieseritzky’s Queen, and also advanced his own position in a way not yet entirely transparent.
14….Ng8
(Black Knight returns to g8)
Another full-on retreat for Black (and a loss of a tempo), in this case moving the Knight to free up space for the retreating Queen. This was a new low for Black: having to waste an entire move in middlegame to a retreat back to a starting square. Few pieces had been exchanged, and Black was still a piece ahead, so it would have been silly to say that all was lost. But momentum seemed to be overwhelmingly on the side of White—even if it was still impossible to discern his precise plan.
15. B×f4
(White Bishop takes Pawn on f4)
Anderssen then advanced his Bishop, capturing the Black Pawn at f4 and further pressing his attack on Kieseritzky’s Queen.
15….Qf6
(Black Queen to f6)
Kieseritzky retreated to f6, and behold the change in momentum. One of the magical qualities of chess is its potential for a lightning-quick reversal of fortune. The complexity of the game often hides traps and opportunities so well that neither player is aware of the new paradigm until it stares at them from the board.
Suddenly, with the Black Queen moving to an adjacent square, an enormous opportunity had opened up. The Queen, now safe, menacingly threatened Anderssen’s b2 Pawn and his Queen’s Rook. Had Anderssen wasted a crushing attack on the Black Queen and inadvertently walked himself into a highly vulnerable position?
16. Nc3
(White Knight to c3)
Anderssen appeared to be concerned enough about the Queen threat that he developed his Knight as a block against the Queen—or so it would seem. (At this point, Anderssen was actually playing a very different game in his mind from what observers could see on the board.)
16….Bc5
(Black Bishop to c5)
Now it was Kieseritzky who was on the offensive, advancing his Bishop so that it directly attacked Anderssen’s King’s Rook, and also cutting off two of five retreat squares potentially available to the White King.
How would Anderssen answer this new threat?
IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY chess became a symbol of nationalistic pride for totalitarian regimes seeking to prove their moral and intellectual superiority.
The Nazis were fascinated with chess as a game of war, discipline, and purity. In the late 1930s they made a propaganda film in the chess-loving town of Ströbeck, in eastern Germany, showing off the chess-playing schoolchildren as ideal Aryan citizens.*23 A Nazified version of chess called Tak Tik (Tactics) replaced the traditional pieces with modern war implements—air force, soldiers, bombs, etc.
In 1941 the Germans scored a stunning propaganda coup, persuading the world chess champion Alexander Alekhine, a Russian by birth, to embrace the Nazi ideology and very publicly adapt it to chess. Chess play, according to Alekhine, was yet another window into the inherent moral and intellectual depravity of Jews. Jews played cowardly, empty chess, he argued, in contrast to the obviously superior Aryan courageousness. Indeed, Jews had nearly ruined the game. Under so much Jewish influence, Alekhine said, most of the first half of the twentieth century had been a “period of [chess] decadence” where too many players “relied not in victory but in not losing.”
Alekhine’s defenders like to point out that he offered up this nonsense under duress. Alexander Alexandrovich Alekhine had been born into an aristocratic Russian family. After slipping in and out of Soviet government favor, including one very close brush with a firing squad, he eventually fled the Soviet Union and settled in France. When the Germans captured France in 1940, Alekhine agreed to write about and play chess on their behalf in order to protect his family’s assets. Whatever the motive, Alekhine spewed the worst kind of racist invective. His essay “Aryan Chess and Jewish Chess” blasted Jews—including German Jew and former world champion Emanuel Lasker—as playing inferior, defensive chess. Coming from someone with so much authority in the game, the essay was analogous to “Jewry in Music,” the German composer Richard Wagner’s anti-Semitic diatribe from the previous century.
“Can we hope,” wrote Alekhine, “that after Lasker’s death—the second and probably the last world champion of Jewish descent—Aryan chess will finally find its path, after having been led astray by the influence of Jewish defensive thinking?” (Invoking the Lasker name was particularly depraved considering that Lasker’s sister would ultimately die in a Nazi concentration camp.)
As with every piece of successful propaganda, there were kernels of reality within Alekhine’s claim. First, Jews did have a long and special relationship with the game, and had made a disproportionate impact on it. The connection went back many centuries and was rooted in the very character and culture of Judaism. The Talmud, the central Jewish text of laws and ethics, was built on a culture of curiosity and verbal combativeness, in accordance with the idea that constant, animated discussion and relentless interpretation and reinterpretation of ideas would bring people closer and closer to the truth.*24 This sense of never-ending argument became a part of the core of Jewish character and drew many Jews to chess, which, in its highest form, also demanded endless examination and interpretation.
Abraham ibn Ezra, the Spanish poet who became one of the great medieval Jewish scholars, championed the game in the twelfth century, writing:
I will sing a song of battle
Planned in days long passed and over.
Men of skill and science set it
On a plain of eight divisions,
And designed in squares all chequered.
Two camps face each one the other,
And the Kings stand by for battle,
And ’twixt these two is the fighting.
Bent on war the face of each is,
Ever moving or encamping,
Yet no swords are drawn in warfare,
For a war of thoughts their war is.
Since then rabbis have incessantly debated the game’s virtue, some objecting that it took too much time away from scholarship but most praising chess and encouraging it among youth as a tool to focus the intellect. From century to century the game became increasingly interwoven with Jewish culture. In Germany, it became customary for Jews to play with special silver pieces on the Sabbath, putting aside their weekday wooden pieces. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a number of Jews became dominant players. World champion Wilhelm Steinitz, father of the Scientific school, who changed the game perhaps more than any other single individual and dominated it for decades in the late nineteenth century, was Jewish. His successor, Emanuel Lasker, world champion from 1894 to 1921, was the son of a cantor and the grandson of a rabbi. Lasker’s most persistent challenger during his long reign was the German Jew Siegbert Tarrasch. (Tarrasch and Lasker became such bitter rivals that in 1908 Tarrasch publicly declared that he would henceforth only speak three words to Lasker: “check and mate.” Alas, he got to speak to his rival only a few times after this declaration. But even without capturing the title, Tarrasch’s further clarification and expansion of Steinitz’s ideas made him the more influential player in the long run.) The Polish player Akiba Rubinstein, another major contender to Lasker’s title, was the product of a yeshiva, a Jewish religious school, as was the Latvian Aron Nimzowitsch—a chess revolutionary who was later credited with inspiring the Hypermodern school of chess theory and reinvig
orating play for the twentieth century.
The second kernel of truth that gave Alekhine the space to make his outrageous accusations was that Steinitz and his successors had indeed overwhelmed the thrilling Romantic school with a new style of play that was inherently cautious, plodding, and defensive. Compared to the swaggering Romantics, Scientific players were about as dull to watch as the name promised. Steinitz revealed that chess had an inherent logical structure (albeit an ultracomplex one) and that a careful player could prevail by respecting it. Like medical pioneers who took the time to actually count, measure, map out, and name all the bones, muscles, and tendons in the human body, the Scientific players laid chess bare. They proved that even the most far-reaching combinations could be thwarted by cautious positioning. The wise player no longer aimed to captivate an audience’s imagination with previously unheard-of combinations, but to induce small weaknesses in the opponent’s position and gradually exploit these weaknesses to gain an advantage, eventually achieving a position sufficient for a win. Chess was now less like a parlor trick and more like a mathematical proof.
But it was still more sophisticated than nineteenth-century Romantic play, and Alekhine knew it. After the tide turned against the Germans, Alekhine not only disavowed his six pro-Nazi essays, he also explicitly denied writing them, hoping to erase the permanent stain on his international reputation. Sadly, the truth was irrefutable: after his death in 1946 the original manuscripts were found in Alekhine’s own handwriting.