The Immortal Game Read online

  In the entire ninth century there were just five aliyat, each succeeding the other as the strongest known player. The first two, Jabir al-Khufi and Rabrab, competed against one another in the presence of Caliph al-Ma’mun. The caliph was a serious player who insisted that his subordinates play him at their top strength. He was also humble enough to understand his deep limitations. “Strange,” he once remarked, “that I who rule the world from the Indus in the east to the Andalus in the west cannot manage thirty-two chessmen in a space of two cubits by two.”

  A few years after al-Ma’mun’s death in 833, the strongest player yet emerged: the apparently unbeatable al-Adli. Possibly of Turkish descent, al-Adli dominated the game for much of his lifetime and also wrote chess’s first in-depth book of analysis, Kitab ash-shatranj (The book of chess), circa 840. In his book he defined the five classes of skill and introduced the very first chess problems. Most of these problems were lost forever with copies of his manuscript, but some survive—thanks to the many medieval Arabic books which quoted his.

  One particular al-Adli problem is still highly accessible to any modern chess player, because it includes only Kings, Rooks, Knights, and Pawns—pieces that have exactly the same moves in modern chess as they did in ancient shatranj.

  Originally from al-Adli’s Book of Chess (circa 840)

  It is White’s turn, and the challenge is for White to checkmate*4 Black in just three of his own moves.

  (Do what I did: Pause book. Gnash teeth. Sleep on it. Gnash further. Give up.)

  Al-Adli’s solution, as is common in elegant chess problems, lies in the counterintuitive sacrifices that White must make to win in so few moves. Major sacrifices can puzzle players because so much of a chess player’s energy is ordinarily directed toward protecting his or her pieces. But that’s precisely what makes a sacrifice so beautiful to watch. Intuition and expectation is confounded, and an opponent’s reality flips upside down when he sees what has happened.

  In modern chess notation, the solution is: 1. Nh5+ R×h5 2. R×g6+ K×g6 3. Re6++.

  In plain English:

  First, the White Knight moves two squares forward and one square to the right, settling on the last vertical column—called a file—and putting Black in check.

  Black has what looks like not only an easy way out of this problem, but also a major gain: he can capture the White Knight with his Rook.

  After Black takes this irresistible bait, White sets up what looks like another preposterous sacrifice: he moves one of his Rooks up the penultimate file to capture the Black Knight, again putting the Black King in check.

  The Black King follows this by capturing the White Rook, once again escaping check.

  But—surprise—White then moves his other Rook forward five squares. The Black King has no escape. Checkmate.

  It was a classic chess problem: maddeningly obtuse and impossibly simple at the same time. “It should be understood,” Vladimir Nabokov would write many centuries later, “that competition in chess problems is not really between White and Black but between the composer and the hypothetical solver…so that a great part of a problem’s value is due to the number of ‘tries’—delusive opening moves, false scents, specious lines of play, astutely and lovingly prepared to lead the would-be solver astray.”

  Some problems were more agonizing than others. One in particular, from the ninth-century master as-Suli, was apparently unsolvable. “There is no one on earth who has solved it unless he was taught it by me,” he wrote. Indeed, the problem was so impenetrable it came to be known as “as-Suli’s Diamond.” His solution, if ever published, was lost forever. After as-Suli’s death, his Diamond chess problem went unsolved for over a thousand years.

  But that didn’t stop people from trying. The bedrock ethic for chess enthusiasts would forever be entwined with the ethic of the Muslim Renaissance. Knowledge, said the Prophet, “guideth us to happiness; it sustaineth us in misery; it is an ornament amongst friends, and an armour against enemies.”

  THE IMMORTAL GAME

  Move 2

  IN RETROSPECT, BRILLIANT ACHIEVEMENTS often seem preordained. But they are, of course, impossible to schedule or predict. Improvisational musicians talk about the ethereal feeling they occasionally experience where everything suddenly seems to click into place and the music soars way beyond what they had even thought possible. The anticipation of the next magic moment can single-handedly drive a performer to keep playing night after night, year after year.

  So it is with chess. Dedicated players who tread through hundreds and then thousands of games find that the vast majority of them, while often interesting, are not revelatory. But every once in a while, often when it is least expected, a pair of players stumble into a game of true grace and beauty, danger and cunning, temptation, treachery, and surprise after surprise after surprise.

  This is precisely what happened to Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky at the Grand Divan on June 21, 1851: they sat down for a casual game and fell into a once-in-a-lifetime event. And that unexpectedness, that surprising brilliance and beauty, is precisely what makes the Immortal Game such a great game to dissect, move by move. Anyone, experienced chess player or not, can look at each move and watch the slow transformation from mere possibility and complete uncertainty to tentative exploration, provocation, risk, and finally triumph. Following the game carefully, one can not only learn the rudiments of the game and its phases, but more importantly can also see how chess comes to life. Through this game, one can imbibe the very spirit of the game.

  But one has to be patient. The road to brilliance can for a long while appear exceedingly common. Move 2 for Anderssen (White) was to slide the King’s Bishop Pawn ahead two squares.

  2. f4

  (White King’s Bishop Pawn to f4)

  Also known as the King’s Gambit, this was one of the most popular second moves in the mid-nineteenth century. A gambit, in chess, is an offer from one player to give up a piece (usually a Pawn) in return for some possible strategic or tactical advantage. (The word gambit, from the Italian gambetto, “a tripping up of the heels,” has been a part of the chess lexicon since 1561.)

  The concept of the strategic opening, wherein the players scrupulously lay the groundwork for later phases of the game, goes back at least as far as the ninth-century grandmasters of shatranj, who gave colorful names to various opening sequences in their books of analysis:

  • Pharaoh’s Stones (“Abu’l-Bain played it”)

  • The Torrent (“Abu Shahara the elder used to begin with it”)

  • The Sheik’s Opening (“Na’im used to begin with it”)

  Today, the Oxford Companion to Chess lists 1,327 opening combinations, ranging from two to eleven moves long, some with evocative names like the Sicilian Variation, the Anti-Meran Gambit, and the Queen’s Indian Defense. They are a part of every serious chess player’s toolkit—“as necessary to the first-rate player,” declared the American transcendentalist minister and chess aficionado M. Conway in the Atlantic Monthly in 1860, “as are classifications to the naturalist. They are the venerable results of experience; and he who tries to excel without an acquaintance with them will find that it is much as if he should ignore the results of the past and put his hand into the fire to prove that fire would burn.”

  These were words of sour, firsthand experience, no doubt. For myself, as I took up the game again, I preferred to put my hand straight into the fire. I did try to pay some attention to my chess-beginner books from the library. But I found overwhelmingly that my interest was in playing chess, not studying it, which to me meant diving straight into the game and sparring with my opponent piece for piece. The concept of strategic, long-range planning felt as foreign to me as it might feel to a puppy to be asked to control her bladder. I was a chess warrior! I moved pieces in surprising ways! Standard openings be damned—I tried to throw my opponent off guard. After a particularly strange move, I would congratulate myself for my bravery; then, not losing a moment, I would plan so
mething even more surprising for the next move. If the whim struck, I sacrificed a Pawn—not for any particular strategic advantage, but just to make sure that we kept playing the game according to my terms.

  For fun, I did try to understand the four Rosenthal Variations, the opening sequences named after my great-great-grandfather that were included in the Oxford Companion. But I couldn’t understand their logic at all. I hoped that one day it would just come to me.

  2….e×f4

  (Black King’s Pawn captures White Pawn on f4)

  Sacrifice accepted. Kieseritzky (Black), in his response, elected to play the King’s Gambit Accepted by capturing the White Pawn. (When a player ignores this particular gambit and moves another piece instead, the opening is known as the King’s Gambit Declined.)

  Already, Kieseritzky was up by one Pawn. A lost Pawn may not seem like much to the chess outsider, but later on in the game it can easily become the difference between night and day, crushing defeat and glorious victory—partly due to the Pawn’s ability to defend other pieces, and partly because of the Pawn’s potential to be promoted to Queen if it reaches the last rank. No serious player ever gives up a Pawn lightly.

  On the other hand, because Black accepted the gambit and took the Pawn, White now had uncontested control of the center of the board. Such control is critical (I eventually learned) because it establishes which army will have the freest movement from one side of the board to the other. Kieseritzky undoubtedly knew he would have to fight back for the control he’d just willingly given up. At the moment, though, he thought the extra Pawn was worth the risk.

  DESPITE APPEARANCES TO THE CONTRARY, the rolling, uneven dunes on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis, about fifty miles west of the Scottish mainland, are not ancient burial mounds. They’re natural formations, configured over thousands of years by the shifting water table and the terrific sea winds howling off the Atlantic.

  But the dunes do have their powerful secrets, as an unsuspecting island peasant learned one day in the spring of 1831. At the base of a fifteen-foot sandbank near the south shore of the Bay of Uig, the interior was somehow exposed, and with it a nearly seven-hundred-year-old crypt. Our unwitting archaeologist stumbled into an ancient and cramped drystone room, six feet or so long and shaped like a beehive, with ashes strewn on the floor. The tiny room was filled, impossibly, with dozens of shrunken people: tiny lifelike statuettes, three to four and a half inches high, some stained beet-red and the rest left a natural off-white. The long hair, contoured faces, and proportionate bodies were eerily vivid, even animated, with wide-eyed, expectant expressions, battle-ready stances, and a full complement of medieval combat equipment and apparel. Hand-carved from walrus tusk and whale teeth, they wore tiny crowns, mitres, and helmets; held miniature swords, shields, spears, and bishop’s crosiers; some rode warhorses.

  They were chess pieces, a total of seventy-eight figurines comprising four not-quite-complete sets:

  eight Kings (complete)

  eight Queens (complete)

  sixteen Bishops (complete)

  fifteen Knights (one missing)

  twelve Warders (as Rooks, four missing)

  nineteen Pawns (forty-five missing)

  No one living at the time had ever seen anything like them. The ornamentation had a medieval gothic quality that lent the pieces an ancient and even mythic aura. Experts pronounced them Scandinavian, probably mid-twelfth century, probably carved near the Norwegian capital Trondheim some seven hundred miles away by sea, where a drawing of a strikingly similar chess Queen was later discovered. Norway was a long way off, but the link did make historical sense. The Isle of Lewis had been politically subject to the Kingdom of Norway up to 1266, and the local bishop held allegiance to the powerful Archbishop of Trondheim.

  These weren’t nearly the oldest chessmen discovered—1150 put them somewhere in the middle of the chess chronology. But their abundance, origins, artistry, and superb condition made them among the most important cache of ancient pieces yet found. The modestly endowed Society of Antiquaries of Scotland tried immediately to buy them for display in Edinburgh, but before they could raise the funds, bigger fish swam in. A wealthy Scottish collector somehow plundered eleven of them for his private collection, and the British Museum in London bought the rest—sixty-seven pieces for eighty guineas (equivalent to £3,000 or roughly U.S. $5,000 in today’s currency).

  The museum immediately recognized not only the pieces’ unique importance in the history of chess, but more importantly their profoundly palpable connection to life in the Middle Ages. “There are not in the museum any objects so interesting to a native Antiquary as the objects now offered to the trustees,” wrote the museum’s keeper of antiquities, Edward Hawkins, as he presented the pieces for the first time. The Lewis Chessmen were a priceless link to the past, and would become a signature draw at the museum.

  There they now sit, sealed in a new glass crypt in the British Museum’s Gallery 42. Anyone can visit them.

  King

  Bishop

  Knight

  The Lewis Chessmen

  “When you look at them,” suggests curator Irving Finkel, “kneel down or crouch in such a way that you can look through the glass straight into their faces and look them in the eye. You will see human beings across the passage of time. They have a remarkable quality. They speak to you.”

  WHAT DO they say? The story of how chess migrated from the Golden Gate Palace in Baghdad to the remote Isle of Lewis, and how the pieces morphed from abstracted Persian-Indian war figurines to evocative European Christian war figurines, is an epic that underscores the enormous transfer of culture and knowledge in the Middle Ages from the East to the West. It also heralds an important shift in chess’s role as a thought tool. In medieval Europe, chess was used less to convey abstract ideas and more as a mirror for individuals to examine their own roles in society. As Europe developed a new code of social morality, chess helped society understand its new identity.

  The depth of chess’s role in the Middle Ages is not necessarily a story that was destined to be told. But for the perseverance of a single British scholar, much of the detail would likely have remained indefinitely buried under the sandbank of time. Fortunately, such doggedness was second nature to Harold Murray, thanks to the peculiar circumstances of his youth. In 1879, when Murray was eleven, his father, James Murray, a self-educated son of a Scottish tailor with a passion for language, began what would become easily the most exhaustive and most revered publishing project in the history of his own native English: the Oxford English Dictionary, which aimed to parse out the precise meaning, origin, and historical trajectory of every English word in general use. Harold, James’s eldest son, was one of the most prolific contributors to the OED’s first edition, cataloguing an astounding 27,000 quotations. By the time Harold graduated with honors from Oxford University’s Balliol College, he closely shared his father’s intense historical curiosity, attachment to precision, and zeal for the unearthing of origins. He also inherited the family passion for languages: James Murray was fluent in twenty-five; Harold knew at least twelve, including Icelandic, Old Middle German, Early Anglo-Saxon, Medieval Latin, and Sanskrit.

  On top of all this, Harold had a special love for numbers, games, and puzzles, an appetite for anything that would challenge the mind. He displayed unusual powers of concentration. In school he excelled at mathematics. This potent combination of interests paved an inevitable road to chess and to its elaborate history. Harold picked up the game at age twenty, playing with his younger siblings and cousins. From the start, he studied tried-and-true strategies, and was the kind of player who stuck to a handful of opening moves that felt comfortable and worked. “I have seen no reason to abandon a style of play which is generally successful against the players I meet,” he wrote. He made rich chess friendships, won more than his share of games, and even sometimes played blindfolded or against several people at once.

  After leaving Oxford to teach at preparato
ry schools, Murray broadened his commitment to the game as a school club coach. But the best way to make his personal mark on chess, he realized, was through a massive excavation of its history. No book had rigorously sought to establish the true origins of the game, trace the early history, and then bring it up to the present. The challenge of writing the definitive history of chess, spanning 1,300 years and dozens of languages, was monumental. Even with all the resources at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, tracking a thousand-year-old chess migration across continents and religions and cultures was like trying to find and track a bird without any homing device. But for the trained son of James Murray, it was suitably proportional, a fitting family task. Harold Murray set out in 1897 “to investigate…the invention of chess; and to trace the development of the modern European game from the first appearance of its ancestor.” This impossible job would consume much of his energy for the next sixteen years, and become his life’s one great work.

  One of Murray’s first chores was to learn Arabic and immerse himself in the early days of Islam. He documented how the Muslims took to chess, wrestled with its legality and propriety, and plugged it into their intellectual and territorial ambitions. Then he traced the Islamic geographic expansion, and chess’s.