by David Shenk
22. Nc1 c3 In the heat of battle Kasparov goes overboard. He clearly missed the simple 22…. Rb2 23. Qd4 c3! 24. Q×e4 c2, winning. The answer for this oversight is one that I’ve experienced in my own games. You see a trap that your opponent has set for you. Being a crafty player yourself, you naturally show your own cunning by avoiding the trap. But had you looked closer at the “trap,” you would have seen that it actually works out in your favor. Kasparov saw Karpov’s trap and so blocked out a simple win! Now in order to win, Kasparov has to find a truly wonderful combination.
23. N×a2 c2
24. Qd4 c×d1Q+
25. K×d1 Ndc5
26. Q×d8 R×d8+
27. Kc2 Nf2 White resigns. Here Karpov happily watched his flag fall to save him from playing 28. Rg1 Bf5+ 29. Kb2 Nd1+ 30. Ka1 N×b3 mate, a gruesome finish. While Karpov never really made it out of the opening, it’s only Kasparov who has ever shown us how to handle him.
(Reprinted courtesy of CyberCafes and Yasser Seirawan. Copyright © 1993 and 2006 by CyberCafes, LLC. All Rights Reserved.)
Appendix III
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN’S “THE MORALS OF CHESS”
(First Published in Columbian Magazine, December 1786)
Playing at Chess, is the most ancient and the most universal game known among men; for its original is beyond the memory of history, and it has, for numberless ages, been the amusement of all the civilized nations of Asia, the Persians, the Indians, and the Chinese. Europe has had it above a thousand years; the Spaniards have spread it over their part of America, and it begins lately to make its appearance in these States. It is so interesting in itself, as not to need the view of gain to induce engaging in it; and thence it is never played for money. Those, therefore, who have leisure for such diversions, cannot find one that is more innocent; and the following piece, written with a view to correct (among a few young friends) some little improprieties in the practice of it, shews at the same time that it may, in its effects on the mind, be not merely innocent, but advantageous, to the vanquished as well as to the victor.
The Game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement. Several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired or strengthened by it, so as to become habits, ready on all occasions. For Life is a kind of Chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and ill events, that are, in some degree, the effects of prudence or the want of it. By playing at chess, then, we may learn,
I. Foresight, which looks a little into futurity, and considers the consequences that may attend an action; for it is continually occurring to the player, “If I move this piece, what will be the advantages of my new situation? What use can my adversary make of it to annoy me? What other moves can I make to support it, and to defend myself from his attacks?”
II. Circumspection, which surveys the whole chess-board, or scene of action, the relations of the several pieces and situations, the dangers they are respectively exposed to, the several possibilities of their aiding each other, the probabilities that the adversary may make this or that move, and attack this or the other piece; and what different means can be used to avoid his stroke, or turn its consequences against him.
III. Caution, not to make our moves too hastily. This habit is best acquired by observing strictly the laws of the game, such as, “If you touch a piece, you must move it somewhere; if you set it down, you must let it stand:” and it is therefore best that these rules should be observed, as the game thereby becomes more the image of human life, and particularly of war; in which, if you have incautiously put yourself into a bad and dangerous position, you cannot obtain your enemy’s leave to withdraw your troops, and place them more securely, but you must abide all the consequences of your rashness.
And, lastly, we learn by chess the habit of not being discouraged by present bad appearances in the state of our affairs, the habit of hoping for a favorable change, and that of persevering in the search of resources. The game is so full of events, there is such a variety of turns in it, the fortune of it is so subject to sudden vicissitudes, and one so frequently, after contemplation, discovers the means of extricating one’s self from a supposed insurmountable difficulty, that one is encouraged to continue the contest to the last, in hopes of victory by our own skill, or, at least, of giving a stale mate, by the negligence of our adversary. And whoever considers, what in chess he often sees instances of, that particular pieces of success are apt to produce presumption, and its consequent, inattention, by which more is afterwards lost than was gained by the preceding advantage, while misfortunes produce more care and attention, by which the loss may be recovered, will learn not to be too much discouraged by the present success of his adversary, nor to despair of final good fortune, upon every little check he receives in the pursuit of it,
That we may, therefore, be induced more frequently to chuse this beneficial amusement, in preference to others which are not attended with the same advantages, every circumstance which may increase the pleasures of it should be regarded; and every action or word that is unfair, disrespectful, or that in any way may give uneasiness, should be avoided, as contrary to the immediate intention of both the players, which is, to pass the time agreeably.
Therefore, firstly: If it is agreed to play according to the strict rules, then those rules are to be exactly observed by both parties; and should not be insisted on for one side, while deviated from by the other: for this is not equitable.
Secondly. If it is agreed not to observe the rules exactly, but one party demands indulgences, he should then be as willing to allow them to the other.
Thirdly. No false move should ever be made to extricate yourself out of a difficulty, or to gain an advantage. There can be no pleasure in playing with a person once detected in such unfair practices.
Fourthly. If your adversary is long in playing, you ought not to hurry him, or express any uneasiness at his delay. You should not sing, nor whistle, nor look at your watch, nor take up a book to read, nor make a tapping with your feet on the floor, or with your fingers on the table, nor do any thing that may disturb his attention. For all these things displease; and they do not shew your skill in playing, but your craftiness or rudeness.
Fifthly. You ought not to endeavour to amuse and deceive your adversary, by pretending to have made bad moves, and saying you have now lost the game, in order to make him secure and careless, and inattentive to your schemes; for this is fraud, and deceit, not skill in the game.
Sixthly. You must not, when you have gained a victory, use any triumphing or insulting expression, nor show too much pleasure; but endeavour to console your adversary, and make him less dissatisfied with himself by every kind and civil expression, that may be used with truth, such as, “You understand the game better than I, but you are a little inattentive;” or, “You had the best of the game, but something happened to divert your thoughts, and that turned it in my favour.”
Seventhly. If you are a spectator while others play, observe the most perfect silence: For if you give advice, you offend both parties; him, against whom you give it, because it may cause the loss of his game; him, in whose favour you give it, because, though it be good, and he follows it, he loses the pleasure he might have had, if you had permitted him to think till it occurred to himself. Even after a move or moves, you must not, by replacing the pieces, show how it might have been played better: for that displeases, and may occasion disputes or doubts about their true situation. All talking to the players, lessens or diverts their attention, and is therefore unpleasing: Nor should you give the least hint to either party, by any kind of noise or motion. If you do, you are unworthy to be a spectator. If you have a mind to exercise or show your judgement, do it in playing your own game when you have an opportunity, not in criticising, or meddling with, or counselling the play of others.
Lastly. If the game is not to be played rigorously according to the rules above mentioned, then
moderate your desire of victory over your adversary, and be pleased with one over yourself. Snatch not eagerly at every advantage offered by his unskillfulness or inattention; but point out to him kindly, that by such a move he places or leaves a piece in danger and unsupported; that by another he will put his King in a dangerous situation, &c. By this generous civility (so opposite to the unfairness above forbidden) you may, indeed, happen to lose the game to your opponent, but you will win what is better, his esteem, his respect, and his affection; together with the silent approbation and good will of impartial spectators.
SOURCES AND NOTES
In my research, I relied on hundreds of text and electronic sources, and scores of individuals. Three books stood out for their constant usefulness:
H. J. R. Murray. A History of Chess. Oxford University Press, 1913.
Richard Eales. Chess: The History of a Game. Facts on File, 1985.
David Hooper and Kenneth Whyld. The Oxford Companion to Chess. Second edition. Oxford University Press, 1992.
Sources for specific quotes and information in particular chapters are as follows:
EPIGRAPH
Caliph Ar-Radi was walking: Murray, History of Chess, p. 200.
PROLOGUE
When eleven-year-old Marcel Duchamp: Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (Henry Holt, 1996), is the definitive work on Marcel Duchamp. I also relied on Andrew Waterman’s essay “The Poetry of Chess,” in Burt Hochberg, The 64-Square Looking Glass (Times Books, 1993); Hans Ree, The Human Comedy of Chess (Russell Enterprises, 1999); and Ernst Strouhal, Acht X Acht (Springer, 1996).
“Chess holds its master”: The Einstein quote comes from the foreword to Johannes Hannak, Emanuel Lasker: Biographie eines Schachweltmeisters; mit einem Geleitwort von Albert Einstein (S. Engelhardt, 1952). Despite Einstein’s stated opposition to chess, he did play. One recorded game shows him handily defeating his famous physicist colleague Robert Oppenheimer. An animated version of the game can be viewed online at chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1261614.
INTRODUCTION
Large rocks, severed heads: The Baghdad battle scene and much of the context of that period come from Volumes 31 and 32 of The History of al-Tabari, originally written in the ninth century and published in English translation by the State University of New York Press. Gaston Wiet, Baghdad: Metropolis of the Abbasid Caliphate (University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), was also helpful, as was The Internet Medieval Sourcebook, an online resource edited by Paul Halsall at the Fordham University Center for Medieval Studies (ford ham.edu/halsall/sbook.htm).
“O Commander of the faithful”: This exchange is taken from Murray, History of Chess, p. 197.
The ancient Greeks had petteia and kubeia: Roland G. Austin, “Greek Board Games,” Antiquity, September 1940, pp. 257–71, is fascinating reading. The article is available online at http://web.archive.org/web/200410240145 29/gamesmuseum.uwaterloo.ca/Archive/Austin.
“Here is nothing less”: Alfred Kreymborg, “Chess Reclaims a Devotee,” in Hochberg, The 64-Square Looking Glass.
orthodox enemies to stamp it out: The list of religious figures who have tried to outlaw chess comes partly from Bill Wall’s “Religion and Chess,” online at geocities.com/siliconvalley/lab/7378/religion.htm.
Iraq’s current most powerful Islamic authority, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has completely forbidden chess. From his list of General Rules: “503. It is harãm [absolutely forbidden] to play chess, regardless of whether or not the play is with betting. It is also harãm to play chess through computerized instrument, if there are two players involved in it. Based on obligatory precaution, one must refrain from it, even if just the computer is the other player.” See sistani.org/html/eng/menu/2/books/2/inside/51.htm.
CHAPTER 1
“When Sissa had invented chess”: Murray, History of Chess, p. 211.
It is said that in ancient India: Murray, History of Chess, pp. 212, 213.
The annals of ancient poetry: Norman Reider, “Chess, Oedipus, and the Mater Dolorosa,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 40 (1959), pp. 320–33, contains a comprehensive summary of chess-origin myths.
Pythagoras, the ancient mathematician: Eales, Chess, p. 15.
The Greek warrior Palamedes: Victor A. Keats, Chess in Jewish History and Hebrew Literature (Magnes Press, 1995), pp. 132, 133.
the great medieval rebbe: Joseph Jacobs and A. Porter, “Chess,” Jewish Encyclopedia (1901–06), now online at jewishencyclopedia.com.
Myths, said Joseph Campbell: Campbell, “The Impact of Science on Myth,” Myths to Live By (Penguin, 1993).
One story portrays two successive Indian kings: Murray, History of Chess, p. 210.
One tale, known as “The Doubling of the Squares”: Murray, History of Chess, p. 218. “The calculation is undoubtedly of Indian origin,” Murray writes. “It would appear to have also been a favorite calculation among the Muslims…to illustrate the different systems of numeration.”
More on chess and math
There is some evidence that the actual chess moves were designed according to an ancient mathematical key code. The Chatrang-namak included a mythical tale of the invention of chatrang by a group of sixth-century Indian wise men as a provocation to their Persian rivals. Along with a hoard of gold, pearls, elephants, and camels sent as conditional tribute, the chatrang board and unarranged pieces were presented to King Nushirwan of Persia with no instructions on how to play. Instead, it came with this message:
SINCE YOU BEAR THE TITLE “KING OF KINGS” AND ARE KING OVER ALL US KINGS, IT IS [EXPECTED] THAT YOUR WISE MEN SHOULD BE WISER THAN OURS.
IF NOW YOU CANNOT DISCOVER THE INTERPRETATION OF THE CHATRANG, PAY US TRIBUTE AND REVENUE.
The king was given three days to comply.
For two days, there was an eerie silence, as the game seemed to stump everyone in his court. Finally, on the third and final day, a nobleman named Wajurgmitr figured it out in perfect detail. Not only that: he also played and defeated the Indian king’s ambassador in twelve straight games. “And there was great joy throughout the whole land.”
On the surface, chess in this story is clearly a substitute for war, a new method for settling disputes according to wits rather than brute force (perhaps because the Indians considered themselves militarily inferior but intellectually superior).
But it also suggested a second, hidden meaning. How could even the wisest of wise men possibly deduce the rules to a totally unfamiliar game without a single clue as to its sources or methods? That would be like asking someone to come up with street-by-street driving directions by studying a blank piece of paper instead of a road map. It simply wasn’t possible. According to the logic of the story, there had to be some sort of hidden clue allowing the puzzle to be solved.
This remained a riddle for chess historians until the 1970s, when three of them—Germany’s Reinhard Wieber, Yugoslavia’s Pavle Bidev, and Spain’s Ricardo Calvo—stumbled onto ancient references to an eight-by-eight “magic square” that also, inexplicably, contained chess pieces.
A widespread feature of ancient civilizations in Egypt, India, China, and elsewhere, the magic square is a matrix of numbers positioned in such a way that every row, every column, and every diagonal adds up to the same sum. They can be any size—three by three, four by four, five by five, and so on. An example:
The symmetry of such squares conveyed a mystical quality, and suggested a hidden, cosmic truth. For that reason they were immensely popular in a world that possessed few reliable facts about the universe. Magic squares were used widely to probe the unknowable and explore the relationships among numbers.
They also apparently had something to do with the creation of chess, a game that contains no numbers at all but turns out to contain an uncountable number of mathematical expressions.
In separate examinations of an eight-by-eight magic square from a medieval Arab text, Wieber, Bidev, and Calvo discovered that the ancient moves of chess fit eerily into it. “Increasingly, through mathe
matical investigation,” concluded Calvo, “it would appear as though the rules of chess are somehow miraculously present in this numerological arrangement. The inventor or inventors of chess must have used this preexistent numerological arrangement (the ‘genetic code of chess,’ as Prof. Bidev put it) before deciding how to institute the various moves of the different chess pieces upon the board.”
The moves of chess, in other words, appeared to be originally designed according to a particular number scheme, an old magic square. As fantastic as it seemed, this theory that chess had a master “genetic code” rooted in numerical mysticism also neatly solved the mystery of the King Nushirwan puzzle, where the Persians had been given no instructions on how to play the game. If the Persians in the story were able to uncover a hidden magic square that dictated a veiled mathematical superstructure of chess, then the story made perfect sense. Such a key code could enable someone to deduce the moves of each piece. It would be extremely difficult, but not impossible—precisely the dynamic suggested by the story. This explanation instantly transformed the Indian-Persian legend from a mystical tale into a plausible piece of history.
Sources: Ricardo Calvo, “Mystical Numerology in Egypt and Mesopotamia,” online at goddesschess.com/chessays/calvonumerology.htm. See also Pavle Bidev, “Geschichte der Entdeckung des Schachs im magischen Quadrat und des magischen Quadrat im Schach,” Schachwissentschaftliche Forschungen, January 5, 1975.