The Immortal Game Read online

  I have since fallen off, way off, and am confident that a violin in my hand today could easily be construed as a dangerous weapon. What happened? I stopped wanting it.

  Today, I am lucky enough to be acquainted with a number of extraordinary achievers in various fields. From them, I rarely get the impression that genius is something they were born with and occasionally watered. Rather, these are people who have found something they wanted to do very well, and subsequently spent thousands upon thousands of hours getting good. I had nothing like the necessary drive to achieve such excellence in chess. True, I probably also didn’t have nearly enough natural spatial aptitude. But the more important factor by far was lack of ambition. Recognizing that, my reengagement with the game eventually deflated; as my friend Kurt gradually became a reasonably serious competitor, playing chess most weekends in his local park, I slipped in the other direction, playing less and less. We still talked a lot about the game; but we played infrequently. It wasn’t so much that I minded losing; I just got tired of my own mediocrity, and realized that I preferred to stay up nights trying to write a better book about chess than studying to be a better player. For whatever reason, my drive was to understand the relentless drive of others to play masterful chess.

  At the competitive level, each player brings his or her own humanity to the table. Lionel Kieseritzky was an unpleasant sort of fellow—irritable, obtuse, and with a sharp tongue. Anderssen, by contrast, was a player’s player. He had no apparent interests outside of chess, and was well liked by all who knew him—“honest and honourable to the core,” remarked his frequent adversary Wilhelm Steinitz.

  Both were also true fighters—even in casual play. Move 10 from Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky’s casual game at the Grand Divan found Anderssen’s Bishop under attack. As a response, he didn’t exactly ignore the threat, but instead introduced his own charismatic counterthreat: moving his g Pawn up two squares, giving further protection to his Knight and threatening Kieseritzky’s Black Knight.

  10. g4

  (White Pawn to g4)

  It was a “casual” game, with no stakes (aside from ego and reputation), but that couldn’t keep the two players away from tripping into middlegame’s high-voltage zone: a multilayered dynamic of threats and counterthreats that is not easy to defuse and can at any time blow up in either player’s face. Such dynamic tension is not a guaranteed component of middlegame, but it is extremely common, and the lattice of active threats can quickly escalate to impossible-to-follow complexity. What emerges is the board-game version of that ever-repeated movie scene where the cop sneaks up on the thug, aims his gun, and says “freeze”—only to find that a moment later, hidden accomplices point their guns at the cop and say, “No—you freeze,” at which point more cops come out from hiding and point their guns at the new accomplices, and so on. With dozens of weapons cocked and aimed in every direction, no one knows whether to shoot first or try to de-escalate.

  Chess’s middlegame offers the same conundrum—having to choose whether to continue to escalate threats or start answering them. The very best players know from experience, intuition, and calculation how a particular multiple-threat board arrangement is best acted on. But in the most complex circumstances, it is not something that any individual could actually articulate.

  10….Nf6

  (Black Knight to f6)

  In his move 10, Kieseritzky escaped Anderssen’s Pawn threat, while introducing a threat to that same Pawn. Now Anderssen would have to decide whether to protect that Pawn or save his Bishop on b5.

  (Here, incidentally, is how the same board position was published in Kieseritzky’s journal La Régence in July 1851, one month after the Immortal Game took place. Note that the Bishops are represented by Fools—fous:)

  Now Anderssen did something downright creepy. He moved his Kingside Rook over one square to g1, establishing more support for his Pawn at g4.

  11. Rg1

  (White Rook to g1)

  Wanting the Rook in that position made good sense and was not surprising. What was shocking about this move was what Anderssen hadn’t done—namely, save his Bishop on b5. He let it go for no particular reason other than to further develop his other pieces. It was a sign of utter confidence, a signal that Anderssen had wrested control away from infinity and truly knew where this game was headed.

  Was he bluffing his confidence, or did he actually know what he was doing? It was impossible to tell. But a surprise Bishop sacrifice would unnerve virtually any player. It was the kind of Romantic bravado that endeared Anderssen to chess players all over the world, and that would ultimately bring him chess immortality.

  11….c×b5

  (Black Pawn takes Bishop at b5)

  Kieseritzky accepted Anderssen’s sacrifice, capturing the Bishop and sticking with his original plan, even if Anderssen seemed to be attempting to undermine it.

  “CHESS-PLAY IS A GOOD and witty exercise of the mind for some kind of men,” offered Oxford University clergyman and librarian Robert Burton in 1621. “But if it proceed from overmuch study, in such a case it may do more harm than good; it is a game too troublesome for some men’s brains.”

  This was no exaggeration. Chess has, throughout the ages, held the reputation for being a double-edged sword—strengthening some minds (in Benjamin Franklin’s words) while shackling others (in the parlance of Albert Einstein). A tiny minority of the most brilliant players have even apparently become unwound through their deep immersion in the game. A closer look at the tragedies of this small group reveals fundamental truths about both chess and the mind itself.

  In the late 1850s, Paul Morphy, a twenty-year-old law school graduate from New Orleans, emerged from obscurity first to defeat the top-ranked American players and then—miraculously—to do the same in Europe. His sweep of the great European champions was stunning—equivalent to a Saturday morning social tennis player suddenly entering and winning Wimbledon, the French Open, and the U.S. Open. The only leading player Morphy didn’t beat was the Englishman Howard Staunton—and that was because they never played; Staunton inelegantly ducked him for months.

  Just as stunning, though, was Morphy’s psychological descent. Returning to New Orleans at age twenty-six, he suddenly abandoned competition and all public play. He became reclusive and paranoid, and in his final years could be found walking the streets of the French Quarter, talking to invisible people. He told his mother and sister that enemies were out to get him. He died at age forty-seven, and was later dubbed “the Pride and Sorrow of Chess.”

  In his chess prime, Morphy seemed to intuit strategic principles of chess like no one else since the great Philidor. “He was the first successful exponent of positional play,” writes Anthony Saidy in The March of Chess Ideas. “Whereas the Romantic players made moves with specific concerns of attack and defense, Morphy as a matter of course made moves based on quite general aims. He developed and sought open lines for his pieces, knowing that the opportunity for attack would naturally appear.”

  Shortly after Morphy’s sudden exit, a young Austrian named Wilhelm Steinitz won the Viennese championship and moved forcefully onto the international chess scene. For about a decade, Steinitz played in the Romantic style of the era, eventually emerging as the greatest tactical player of his day. Then, in 1872, he completely refashioned his approach, following Philidor and Morphy into strategic, “positional” chess—but taking it far deeper with his painstaking, systematic analysis. The Scientific school was born. Steinitz “was not a poet but a thinker,” explains Saidy. “He approached the structure and dynamics of the game of chess as a geologist might analyze a stratum of earth.” Steinitz was the world’s best chess player for twenty years. In contrast to Adolf Anderssen and Samuel Rosenthal, he was no showman. His painstaking approach of trying to gain tiny advantages over time was dull to watch compared to those of the flashy tactical players. But over time, he changed the game profoundly.

  He was also apparently changed by it. Throughout his care
er Steinitz suffered from insomnia and could be extremely morose after a loss. “I have for years,” he told a friend, “been the victim of a nervous affection which often entails loss of memory and utterly incapacitated me for mental work.” As years went by, he veered into a much more serious state of psychosis. For a time, he was confined to a Moscow asylum. He insisted that he had played chess with God over an invisible telephone wire. (God lost.)

  If Morphy and Steinitz were unique in this respect, there would be nothing more to say. But their similar stories of increasing paranoia and delusion fit an unfortunate pattern—and one which has not gone unnoticed. In 1779 the accomplished French physician and philosopher Jacques Barbeau-Dubourg insisted in a letter to his friend Benjamin Franklin that chess “tires the spirit instead of rejuvenating it, [and] shrivels and hardens the soul.”

  “A nameless excrescence upon life,” H. G. Wells wrote of chess in 1898. “It annihilates a man.”

  Some chess haters will say anything, of course, and the true danger of chess obsession should not be confused with the healthy competitive intensity displayed by millions of people over the centuries. But neither can that small minority be ignored. As the game began to draw a large professional contingent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a string of chess victims became highly visible. The tally included:

  • Polish sensation Gustav Neumann, one of the five best chess players in the world before his mental illness forced him out of competition in 1872.

  • Top German competitor Johannes Minckwitz, who threw himself under a train in 1901.

  • Polish contender George Rotlewi, who was forced out of the game by “nervous illness” at age twenty-two, in 1911.

  • Polish master Akiba Rubinstein, who withdrew from serious chess play in 1932 because his pathological shyness had evolved into full-fledged paranoia; he spent the last thirty years of his life in a mental institution.

  • Mexico’s first-ever grandmaster Carlos Torre, a serious contender for the world championship who suffered a breakdown while touring the United States in 1926 (at age twenty-two); returning to the Yucatán, he lived the rest of his life in squalor, and never played chess again.

  • Latvian Aron Nimzowitsch, one of the twentieth century’s greatest chess theoreticians, whose contributions still stand decades later. Never truly incapacitated by mental illness, he nevertheless had eccentricities that veered toward the pathological, including wearing bedclothes to tournament halls, paranoid rants about being served meal portions smaller than others’, and a shocking penchant for actively taunting Nazi enforcers.*20

  • American Raymond Weinstein, who, at age nineteen, finished third behind Bobby Fischer and William Lombardy in the 1960–61 U.S. Championship and who soon thereafter developed severe schizophrenia and was permanently institutionalized on Ward’s Island in New York City.

  Finally, there is Bobby Fischer, who, like so many of the others, seemed as a young man to be merely eccentric and (entertainingly) aggressive. “I like the moment when I break a man’s ego,” he once said in a TV interview. In hindsight, he was shattering his own ego; his public career shows a man in steady, chess-fueled psychological decline. After winning the world championship in 1972, he withdrew from competition, refused to defend his title (eventually forfeiting it), and began to publicly rant against “Jews, secret Jews, [and] CIA rats who work for the Jews.” Fischer, whose mother is Jewish, depicted the Holocaust as “a money-making invention,” and accused the Jews of drinking Christian blood and peddling junk food to the world. In 1992 he became a fugitive from American justice after playing a lucrative, high-profile chess match in Yugoslavia in violation of U.S. economic sanctions. He called the United States a “brutal, evil dictatorship,” and moved to Asia. Shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks on America, Fischer celebrated. “This is all wonderful news,” he told Philippine radio. “I applaud the act….I want to see the U.S. wiped out.”

  It is impossible, of course, to definitively diagnose Fischer or any other individual based on sketchy glimpses of public behavior. But it is equally impossible to ignore or deny the pattern: a significant number of the world’s most accomplished chess masters have succumbed over time to delusional paranoia, violent feelings of persecution, and severe detachment from the real world—a combination that psychologists recognize as falling neatly into the category of schizophrenia.

  Schizophrenia—A psychotic disorder or disorders marked by some or all of these symptoms: delusions, hallucinations, disorganized and incoherent speech, severe emotional abnormalities, and withdrawal into an inner world.

  Vladimir Nabokov was fascinated by chess’s dark side. The Russian-born novelist and poet was deeply enmeshed in chess throughout his life—its aesthetics, its dynamic tension, its two-dimensionality, and its often profound effect on the human mind. He was passionate about constructing chess problems, and the game was thought to have deeply influenced his structural approach to writing. “Most of his novels,” offers Nabokov scholar Anna Dergatcheva, “are recognizably constructed in a way a chess player would design his world: multi-leveled structure, tricking the recipient with unexpected moves and elegant solutions of plot development.”

  His 1930 novel The Luzhin Defense, which explicitly revolves around the game, tracks the tortured mind of a sullen boy who grows up to be a chess grandmaster. Traumatic family events in his childhood encourage young Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin to retreat into the safer, two-dimensional world of the chessboard. There he finds great competitive success and some primitive emotional security, but no solace. His lifelong struggle for security inside geometric patterns comes to a climax in a chess tournament in Berlin, for which Luzhin has prepared an elaborate defense against his opponent’s signature opening. But his opponent shocks Luzhin by not using the special opening. Luzhin’s preparation proves a wasteful irrelevance, and he goes into psychological free fall. He stumbles through part of the big game and then, upon a scheduled adjournment, suffers a breakdown.

  He found himself in a smoky establishment where noisy phantoms were sitting. An attack was developing in every corner—and pushing aside tables, a bucket with a gold-necked glass Pawn sticking out of it and a drum that was being beaten by an arched, thick-maned chess Knight…. “Go home,” [someone] whispered…. Luzhin smiled. “Home,” he said softly. “So that’s the key to the combination.”

  Luzhin later ends his own life by jumping out of a bathroom window. The novel is oppressively dark, and Luzhin’s virtual entrapment in two-dimensional chess space feels almost like a cartoon—until one realizes that it is based in part on yet another real-life chess master: the German Count Curt von Bardeleben, who jumped out of a window to his death in 1924.

  The same year Luzhin was published, in 1930, Sigmund Freud’s biographer and protégé Ernest Jones offered an ambitious, provocative, and classically Freudian theory regarding what lay behind chess’s intensity and peril. “It is plain,” Jones wrote, “that the unconscious motive activating [chess] players is not the mere love of pugnacity characteristic of all competitive games, but the grimmer one of father murder.”*21 Thus, Jones unhesitatingly perceived a connection between chess and what Freud called the Oedipus complex—young boys’ jealous hostility toward their fathers and sexual attraction to their mothers. According to Freud, successful resolution of these early impulses is critical to adult mental health; an unresolved Oedipal dynamic will guarantee that these impulses continue, resulting in adult neurosis.

  Jones judged chess an irresistible outlet for Oedipal neurotics, in that the ultimate object of the game is to kill, or at least disable, the King—an obvious stand-in for the father. And what near-omnipotent figure aids in conquering the King/Father? “It will not surprise the psychoanalyst,” Jones wrote, “when he learns…that in attacking the father the most potent assistance is afforded by the mother (= Queen).”

  The unresolved neurotic, argued Jones, is drawn to chess’s violent family conflict and subsequently becomes boxed in b
y the game’s dynamic tension. “The exquisite purity and exactness of the right moves,” he said, “…[and] sense of overwhelming mastery on the one side matches that of inescapable helplessness on the other. It is doubtless this anal-sadistic feature that makes the game so well adapted to gratify at the same time both the homosexual and the antagonistic aspects of the father-son contest.”

  Other dedicated Freudians heartily concurred. In 1931 influential Swiss psychologist Oskar Pfister called chess a “compulsion-neurotic reaction.” In 1937 Isador Coriat, the prominent American disciple of Freud, wrote: “The sole object of the game for these individuals was to render the King (the father) helpless through checkmate, that is, castrate him. The winning of the game produced a feeling of intense pleasure, as a checkmate was unconsciously equated as a castration revenge.” In 1956 Reuben Fine’s dual experience as chess master and psychoanalyst led him to essentially the same notion. The game, he said, “certainly touches upon the conflicts surrounding aggression, homosexuality, masturbation and narcissism…. [The King] stands for the boy’s penis in the phallic stage, and hence rearouses the castration anxiety characteristic of that period.”

  (Take deep breath. Pour small glass of Scotch. Enjoy brief comic interlude.)

  From Seinfeld

  (George is playing chess with girlfriend.)

  George: Well, you got no place to go. I’ll tell you what your problem is: You brought your Queen out too fast. What do you think? She’s one of these feminists looking to get out of the house? No, the Queen is old fashioned. Likes to stay home. Cook. Take care of her man. Make sure he feels good.