by David Shenk
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*13 This treatise came to be known as the Innocent Morality, named after its purported (and not implausible) author, Pope Innocent III.
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*14 Thomas Jefferson tells a similar story: “When Dr. Franklin went to France on his revolutionary mission, his eminence as a philosopher, his venerable appearance, and the cause on which he was sent, rendered him extremely popular. For all ranks and conditions of men there, entered warmly into the American interest. He was therefore feasted and invited to all the court parties. At these he sometimes met the old Duchess of Bourbon, who being a chess player of about his force, they very generally played together. Happening once to put her king into prise, the Doctor took it. ‘Ah,’ says she, ‘we do not take kings so.’ ‘We do in America,’ says the Doctor.”
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*15 Of Jefferson, a friend wrote: “He was, in his youth, a very good chess-player. There were not among his associates, many who could get the better of him. I have heard him speak of ‘four hour games’ with Mr. Madison. Yet I have heard him say that when, on his arrival in Paris, he was introduced into a Chess Club, he was beaten at once, and that so rapidly and signally that he gave up all competition. He felt that there was no disputing such a palm with men who passed several hours of every evening in playing chess.”
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*16 “Fox and Geese” was another popular board game of the era, in which one player represents a flock of geese trying to restrict the movement of the other player’s lone fox. “Polititians” refers, simply, to chess and the way all chess players pretend to direct political (or military) action on the chessboard.
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*17 The official score was eight games to two, because Philidor had offered that any draw should count as a win for Stamma.
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*18 This was not a developing move because that Knight had previously been moved out of its starting position—it had already been developed. Rather than developing his other Knight, or a Bishop or a Pawn, Black moved the King’s Knight a second time.
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*19 “Steinitz has been known to grieve much when he has lost at chess,” wrote H. E. Bird in 1893. “At Dundee, for example, in 1866 after his defeat by De Vere his friends became alarmed at his woe and disappearance. Again, after his fall to Rosenthal in a game he should have won at the Criterion in 1883, news were brought that he was on a seat in St. James’ Park quite uncontrollable.”
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*20 Two separate incidents at a 1934 Alekhine-Bogolyubov match in Germany drew attention to Nimzowitsch’s questionable judgment. “One day when a high officer in a Nazi uniform entered the press room,” recalls veteran chess observer Hans Kmoch, “Nimzovich brusquely demanded to see his credentials. When the perplexed officer didn’t answer at once, Nimzovich asked him to leave. The other reporters, including myself, were horrified, expecting the Nazi to react violently after receiving such an order from a Jew. But, amazingly, nothing happened. The officer simply left.”During a separate match in Poland, Nimzowitsch attended a luncheon at the home of the notorious Reichminister Hans Frank (later dubbed the Butcher of Poland and eventually hanged at Nuremberg). “At the luncheon,” recalled Kmoch, “he [Nimzowitsch] demonstrated his usual persecution mania by complaining first about a dirty plate and then about a dirty knife. The Reichminister, seated directly opposite him, pretended not to hear.” Nimzowitsch also goaded the Reichminister with boasts of his diplomatic protection—probably not the smartest tactical decision by a Jew in the presence of a powerful, merciless Nazi.
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*21 While Freud himself apparently never considered the impact of chess on the human psyche, he did pointedly use chess as a metaphor for psychoanalysis. In each, he suggested, one can easily study the basics in a book, but “the gap left in the instructions can only be filled in by the zealous study of games fought out by master hands.”
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*22 Most cases of schizophrenia have a strong genetic component, but even among that population, the disease is thought to be often precipitated by environmental stress or emotional trauma. Other instances of schizophrenia may well be caused entirely by outside stress, with no genetic predisposition at all.
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*23 Ironically, Ströbeck’s school was later named after Germany’s most famous chess champion, the Jewish mathematician Emanuel Lasker, who had been forced to flee the country in 1933.
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*24 There are persistent claims that chess is mentioned in the Talmud, either as nardshir (sometime before the sixth century C.E.) or as iskundrée (third century C.E.). If either reference were substantiated as chess, this would make it the earliest known references to the game and would cement indeed the special relationship between chess and the Jews. But the arguments are far from convincing. In the eleventh century the Jewish scholar Rashi interpreted nardshir as chess. It is much more likely that the term referred to the backgammon precursor nard. More recently, several scholars have made the case that iskundrée must be chess, since it is portrayed in the Talmud as distracting ancient scholars from their studies. “This can only mean a game which is serious even in play—it can only be chess!” insists Alexander Kohut. While it is not impossible that Jews from the Talmudic age were acquainted with the game, the evidence is just not there.
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*25 One pithy illustration of the drastic differential in preparation is the Round One game between the American Samuel Reshevsky and the Soviet Vasily Smyslov. Reshevsky took ninety minutes to make his first twenty-two moves. Smyslov took eight minutes. The Russian team had exhaustively worked out an opening preparation that went that deeply into the game.
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†2 “We should note,” writes Russian historian Isaac M. Linder, “that chess has been found not only in excavations of princes’ citadels (Grodno, Drutsk, Volkovysk, and Novgorod), but also in excavations around cities (Vitebsk), in semi-dug-out living quarters, and in the courtyards of craftsmen and other simple people (Vyshgorod, Nikolo-Lenivets, Minsk).”
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*26 “Marx adored chess,” writes Daniel Johnson, “and—much to his wife Jenny’s exasperation—would disappear with his fellow émigrés for days at a time on chess binges. Despite devoting much time to chess, he never rose above mediocrity.” One story has Marx so agitated about a late-night chess loss to a friend that he stalked over to his opponent’s house early the next morning to demand a rematch.
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*27 “Grandmaster,” the most exalted title in chess, is a lifetime designation conferred on its best players by the world chess organization, the Fédération Internationale des Échecs (also known as FIDE), since 1950. One can earn the title in several different ways, the most common being the triumph over other grandmasters in a minimum of three official tournaments. In 1950, there were twenty-seven officially recognized grandmasters; in 2005, there were about 1,100.The more precise method for rating top players was the Élo system, developed in 1964 by the Hungarian-born American physics professor Árpád Élo. Élo ratings were rooted in a statistically based mathematical formula that gives a running game-to-game score to all competitive chess players, as if each player is playing in one long tournament throughout his or her entire career. Every player’s score is adjusted after each official game against another rated player. The amount of the adjustment is determined by the rating of the player’s opponent, along with the totality of prior wins and losses. A specific rating does not guarantee but usually closely corresponds to a FIDE title. Most players with a rating of 2500 or higher, for example, are grandmasters. Most players rated between 2400 and 2499 have the second-highest title, “international master.”When Élo first debuted his rating system in 1964, two players shared the highest rating of 2690, world champion Tigran Petrosian and Bobby Fischer.
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*28 Ironically, just as Fischer became an American hero, he and his mother came under FBI suspicion of being Soviet agents.
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*29 Kasparov demanded a rematch, which IBM rebuffed, preferring to bask in its victory. Deep Blue was permanently dismantled shortly afterward. Ever since, Kasparov has many times aimed to undermine the credibility of the Deep Blue team and the validity of the 1997 match. He spent much of a 1999 speech raising suspicions, concluding with a rhetorical flourish: “The reason I am telling you the story is not to wake up some old ghosts or to tell how badly IBM behaved. But I think that IBM committed a sort of crime against science, because by claiming the victory in the man-versus-machine contest, which was not accomplished, IBM dissuaded other companies from entering the competition.”
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FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, AUGUST 2007
Copyright © 2006 by David Shenk
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, an imprint of The Doubleday Broadway Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.anchorbooks.com
Map on Chapter 3 by Jackie Aher
Photos on Acknowledgments by Ian J. Cohn, copyright © 2005
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shenk, David, 1966–
The immortal game : a history of chess / David Shenk.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Chess—History. I. Title.
GV1317.S44 2006
794.109—dc22 2005056025
eISBN: 978-0-307-38766-0
v3.0