The Immortal Game Read online

THERE WAS NO CHESS at all in my childhood home or school life. Growing up in the 1970s, we played cards, checkers, Monopoly, Atari—games. To the extent that I ever thought about chess, which was very little, it seemed like an absurd amount of effort—much more exertion than the pleasure it would give back. “I hate it and avoid it because it is not play enough,” Montaigne complained about chess in the sixteenth century. “It is too grave and serious a diversion; and I am ashamed to lay out as much thought and study upon that as would serve to much better uses.” Replace “ashamed” with “too lazy,” and you have, in a nutshell, my attitude toward chess for my first seventeen years.

  Later, in high school, I developed a taste for more complexity, risk, confrontation. I fancied myself a young intellectual—told friends that I was a nonconformist. Still, chess didn’t enter my orbit until a friend insisted that I learn it during our senior year. That I did, and proceeded to play a score of games with him over a few weeks’ time. It must have made a powerful impression. I never got very good, but I did briefly surrender my mind to chess consciousness. To this day (twenty years distant), I have a clear memory of sitting in the back of a tourist bus on a spring school trip to Washington, D.C., my mind vaguely wandering through a chess game I’d recently played, and then strangely—involuntarily—imagining myself as a chess Knight and examining my possible moves: from where I sat in the bus, I could move up two rows and over one seat to the right or left, or up one row and over two seats…

  It was a creepy feeling, this sensation that chess could redefine how I saw the outside world. I stopped playing chess shortly thereafter, at least partly due to this strange event. (Imagine my sense of déjà vu twenty years later when I read from Marcel Duchamp’s letter to a friend: “Everything around me takes the shape of the Knight or the Queen….”) Without any family encouragement or group of chess friends, I dropped the game, found other things to do with my time, and didn’t happen to run across it again until my mid-thirties.

  Was I avoiding chess out of fear—or due to a lack of innate ability? Or was it simply that I had a full life and I never found myself in a chess-playing crowd? One thing seems certain: falling into chess is rarely a casual affair. Whether you’re five or thirty-five, the game tends to repel those who aren’t attracted to its particular brand of strenuous mental effort. Serious converts to the game usually have some powerful motivation—perhaps unknown to them—for investing in the game at a particular time in their lives.

  In the late summer of 2002, something—I wasn’t quite sure what—brought me back to the game. Was it the need for an emotional escape pod from 9/11 and the expectation of another New York attack? Was it a primal desire to forge a connection with my semifamous ancestor? Or was it just a simple need to carve out some leisure time with friends? Kurt, an old college pal who had also never really played before, proclaimed in solidarity that he, too, would take up the game. One small problem was that Kurt lived in Chicago and I lived in Brooklyn. We agreed to try a little experiment: every day at noon, we would convene online for a short, timed game.

  We were both pretty lousy, of course, though Kurt seemed consistently one beat quicker than I was; under time pressure, he could still make reasonably well-considered moves, while I frequently choked. It seemed obvious to me that Kurt’s well-oiled, methodical mind would soon leap past my neural cobwebs and we would no longer be well matched. My only hope was to seek some expert help. At the Brooklyn Public Library, I dove into some beginner guides by Bruce Pandolfini and others. I read about openings, tactics, and strategy, and learned to avoid some of the very dumbest moves.

  Many of the books and Web sites also featured guided tours through celebrated chess games from history. Like football teams studying films of old games, the astute player could potentially pick up a lot of strategic insight by following these legendary contests. “When one plays over a game by a fine technician,” declared chess author Anthony Saidy, “one receives a sense of rightness and the impression that the master has penetrated very deeply indeed into the workings of the chess pieces.”

  One contest in particular, from the mid-nineteenth century, immediately captured my imagination: the legendary Immortal Game, a game so surprising, so brilliant and full of life, that it drew the admiration of everyone from novices to the game’s greatest champions. After 150 years, the game continued to fascinate and amaze the global chess community.

  The Immortal Game grabbed me at first not for its blindingly brilliant moves—what did I know from great chess?—but for its human drama. This was supposed to be a forgettable practice game, a throwaway. No one, least of all the two players, had any idea that they were about to produce one of chess’s all-time gems, a game some would consider the most remarkable ever played.

  ADOLF ANDERSSEN VS. LIONEL KIESERITZKY

  JUNE 21, 1851

  LONDON

  1. e4*2

  (White King’s Pawn to e4)

  It began commonly enough. Adolf Anderssen, playing White, moved his King’s Pawn forward two squares. (White always moves first in chess, and in doing so carries an advantage that is roughly akin to serving in tennis. The first to move not only gets to decide on the early trajectory of a game; he also gets a head start in the development*3 of his pieces. In master-level chess, where the games are often so close that one single move makes all the difference, White’s tiny head start is often conclusive.)

  Lionel Kieseritzky responded with exactly the same move, mirroring White’s move by pushing his King’s Pawn forward two squares.

  1….e5

  (Black King’s Pawn to e5)

  The King’s Pawn opening—a very popular opener then and probably the most popular still—has both players jockeying right away for the center of the board, a strategic asset, and making room for the Queen and/or King’s Bishop to come out early. It was a quiet beginning for a casual game, held at Simpson’s Grand Divan Tavern, the smoky men’s club and chess café on the Strand boulevard in London.

  These were two of the greatest chess players in the world at the time, but very few people were likely watching this throwaway practice game—the real action was a mile away at the St. George’s Chess Club at Cavendish Square, where Anderssen, Kieseritzky, and fourteen other world-class players were competing in chess’s first-ever true international tournament.

  Kieseritzky, a former math teacher from Estonia, had traveled from Paris, where he dominated the chess scene at the Café de La Régence, giving lessons and playing games for five francs an hour. His specialty was defeating lesser players even after removing one or more of his pieces at the game’s start. (This is known as “giving odds.” Playing without one of your Knights, for example, is giving Knight odds.) In 1849 Kieseritzky had founded his own chess journal, naming it La Régence after his favorite haunt. In 1851 he traveled to London as one of the leading favorites to win the tournament.

  The German-born Anderssen, also a math professor, was known for both his expert play and his spirited chess problems, which in 1842 he had collected in a book called Aufgaben für Schachspieler (“Problems for Chessplayers”). Serious problemists and serious players know how very different their tasks are from one another—much like the highly distinct worlds of musical composition (Beethoven) and performance (Yo-Yo Ma). But Anderssen appeared to cross over effortlessly from one world to the other, becoming increasingly interested in chess play and, in 1848, forcing a leading player, Daniel Harrwitz, into a five-game-to-five-game draw. It was a startling accomplishment for a problemist not previously thought to possess world-class playing skills, and it earned Anderssen his London invitation. Still, in 1851 he was given little chance to do well among the London field of sixteen, the rest of the world’s top players arriving from St. Petersburg, Budapest, Berlin, Paris, and London itself for the three-round, seven-week tournament.

  This was a gathering of chess talent never before seen, and aficionados expected the games to be proportionately exciting—bold, counterintuitive, theory-busting. They anticipated
a caliber of chess that people would talk about for centuries to come. What no one could possibly have foreseen, as the tournament captured so much attention and raised so many expectations, was that the real triumph would occur down the street, away from all the lights and the gawkers.

  “ACQUIRE KNOWLEDGE,” the Prophet Muhammad commanded his followers. “…It guideth us to happiness; it sustaineth us in misery; it is an ornament amongst friends, and an armour against enemies.”

  Understanding is the essential weapon. Victory is obtained by the intellect…

  Chess and Islam were born about the same time—chess out of a regional need to understand complex new ideas, and Islam out of the Arabs’ desperate need for discipline, intelligence, and meaningful community. In the year 612, Muhammad ibn Abdullah, a prosperous merchant from Mecca deeply troubled by the splintered, selfish nature of Arab society, emerged as the Prophet Muhammad with divine instructions on how to unite and transform his people. He called his new belief system Islam, meaning “peace through surrender to God.” In its essence, Islam was a strict code of ethics requiring subservience to the community and compassion toward the poor. It quickly helped Arab tribes end their constant blood feuds and create an all-powerful super-tribe based not on family connection but on shared ideology and security. Islam made Arabia an instant superpower. Within two decades of Muhammad’s death in 632, the new Muslim Empire controlled Persia, Syria, Egypt, and pieces of North Africa.

  In Persia the Muslims encountered chatrang, the bloodless new war game which relied solely on players’ intellect. Chess and Islam complemented each other well: a new game of war, wits, and self-control serving a spirited new religious and social movement organized around the same values. “The [board] is placed between two friends of known friendship,” wrote ninth-century poet Ali ibn al-Jahm. “They recall the memories of war in an image of war, but without bloodshed. This attacks, that defends, and the struggle between them never languishes.”

  Lacking the ch and the ng sounds in their speech, Arab Muslims changed chatrang into shatranj, and quickly made the game their own. As if invented by Muhammad himself, the game seemed to speak directly to the new Muslim ideals—and found its way into the progressive rhetoric of the day. “The skilled player places his pieces in such a way as to discover consequences that the ignorant man never sees,” wrote the poet al-Katib. “…Thus he serves the Sultan’s interests, by showing how to foresee disaster.”

  Records show that shatranj quickly became woven into the fabric of the new Muslim culture. A list of prominent players of the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries includes caliphs, lawyers, immigrants, intellectuals, and even young girls. It’s also clear that the game soon transcended mere play for its Islamic adopters. “I keep you from your inheritance and from the royal crown so that, hindered by my arm, you remain a Pawn (baidaq) among the Pawns (bayadiq),” wrote the poet al-Farazdaq in the late seventh century. The caste implications of chess quickly captured the popular imagination, with the array of pieces seen as a microcosm not just of a fighting army but also more generally of human society, with its all-important monarch, its privileged nobility, and its expendable peasants. A chess set was not, in and of itself, social commentary, but with its crystal clear labeling of society’s constituent parts, it did strongly invite social commentary. Already the game was an indelible part of the Islamic landscape.

  Even with its broad resonance, though, chess was not immune to controversy. From the very first exposure to the game, there had been a serious and recurring question as to whether chess was allowable under Islamic law. The Koran—the sacred text of revelations received by Muhammad—did not mention chess by name, but did explicitly outlaw the use of both “images” and “lots.” The prohibition of images was aimed at eliminating any sort of idol worship, and was instituted broadly against any directly representational art or sculpture. Lots included gambling of any kind. Since chess play at the time quite often involved wagers—indeed, one ancient story from India portrayed young players betting their own fingers in games, cutting them off on the spot after a loss, cauterizing the wounds, and continuing to play—many first- and second-generation Muslims considered the game altogether tainted and plainly illegal. Others regarded chess as having no purpose other than recreation, and thus falling into the category of official disapproval (though not strict prohibition).

  A GUIDE TO SHATRANJ (ISLAMIC CHESS), CIRCA A.D. 700

  Ancient depiction of shatranj

  Other differences from modern chess

  • The board was not yet checkered.

  • Stalemating the opposing King resulted in a win for the player delivering stalemate. (In modern chess, stalemate results in a draw.)

  • Capturing all of the opponent’s pieces except the King also counted as a win, provided that one’s own King could not be left alone on the very next move.

  • There was no castling option (wherein the King essentially changes places with one of his Rooks—to be explained in detail in Chapter 3).

  But chess did have a purpose, a deadly serious one, according to many proponents at that time. It not only broadly sharpened the mind, but also specifically trained war strategists for battle. “There is nothing wrong in it,” proclaimed Muhammad’s second successor, the pious and austere Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab. “It has to do with war.”

  Eventually, a general consensus found the game acceptable in the Islamic world under certain conditions:

  no wagering

  no interference with religious duties

  no displays of anger or improper language

  no playing in public

  no representational pieces

  This last item came out of the Koran’s prohibition against images. It is said that Ali ibn Abu Talib, Muhammad’s cousin, son-in-law, and the fourth caliph (caliph means “deputy of the prophet”), passed by a game in progress one day and asked, disapprovingly, “What images are these upon which you are gazing so intently?” By Indian and Persian tradition, chess pieces had vividly represented the mechanics of war, depicting tiny soldiers, elephants, chariots, horses, and so on. Islamic law forced a complete reconception of chess’s aesthetics. Muslim craftsmen abstracted the explicit Persian figures into elegant, hand-carved, cylindrical or rectangular stones with subtle indentations, bumps, and curves to symbolize a throne or a tusk or a horse’s head.

  Ceramic chess set from twelfth-century Iran

  They created symbols, that is, of symbols. The severe abstraction made the game acceptable to most religious authorities.

  BY THE BEGINNING of the ninth century, the game had also spread farther westward, to the Byzantine capital of Constantinople. In 802 the new emperor Nicephorus employed chess terminology to convey a threat to Caliph Harun ar-Rashid at his Baghdad palace:

  The empress into whose place I have succeeded looked upon you as a Rook and herself as a mere Pawn; therefore she submitted to pay you a tribute more than the double of which she ought to have exacted from you. All this has been owing to female weakness and timidity. Now, however, I insist that you, immediately on reading this letter, repay to me all the sums of money you ever received from her. If you hesitate, the sword shall settle our accounts.

  In life, as in chess, a rash player can too easily become caught up in the excitement of a single bold move and thus be utterly blind to his opponent’s obvious and devastating response. The caliph, a chess player himself, did not repay or reverse the flow of the tribute. Instead, his army marched on and laid siege to Nicephorus’s army at Heracleia, forcing him to succumb to the same tribute arrangement as his predecessor.

  Caliph ar-Rashid, both a warrior and an intellectual, ushered in the first true Islamic Renaissance—which later became the impetus for the European Renaissance. Acting on the Prophet’s direct wishes, ar-Rashid made acquisition of knowledge a central Islamic mission. Centuries of books from all over the world were translated into Arabic, including the pantheon of Greek philosophy. Greek medical knowledge was incorporat
ed into the first true Islamic hospital. Islamic literature bloomed, sparking The Arabian Nights and other great works. In 832 ar-Rashid’s son, Caliph al-Ma’mun, completed the spectacular House of Wisdom in Baghdad, which quickly became one of the world’s great libraries. Important advances were made during this period in chemistry, astronomy, agriculture, architecture, and engineering. Mathematicians applied spherical trigonometry and the new science of algebra to all sorts of worldly observations, including a more precise calculation of time, latitude and longitude, the earth’s surface area and circumference, and the location of the stars.

  Both father and son were chess fanatics; both employed top chess players and personally competed against them. Chess to these early enthusiasts wasn’t just idle fancy, a means to pass the many leisurely hours on the throne. They also recognized a direct connection between chess and the intellectual vitality they were trying to nurture in their expanding empire. “A Muslim philosopher has maintained that the inventor of chess was a [believer] in the freedom of will,” wrote medieval Islamic historian al-Mas’udi (appropriating the earlier Indian legend), “while the inventor of nard was a fatalist who wished to show by this game that man can do nothing against fate.” In the history of intellectual progress, the embrace of free will over fate was a critical step. The realization, both personal and institutional, that people could help shape their own destiny helped lay the foundations of all modern science, philosophy, economic development, and democratic culture. Chess may have helped fertilize the concept, and certainly helped some people comprehend it.

  With such weighty associations, chess from the very beginning was intuitively understood by Muslims to be more than a game, and its most expert players to be engaged in more than simple recreation. Chess was a paradigm that you could legitimately spend your whole life studying. From the earliest centuries of the recorded history of the game, there is evidence of a small academic/professional class of players who studied openings, devised endgame problems, wrote about strategic approaches (now known as chess theory), and towered above all challengers. In the Islamic world, these top players were known as aliyat, the “highest of ranks,” the grandmasters. Aliyat were said to be able to see an astonishing ten moves ahead, much deeper than the second skill class, the mutaqaribat.