The Immortal Game Read online

  • In 1550 Saint Teresa of Ávila used chess extensively in her text The Way of Perfection as a tool to explore the dynamics of prayer and contemplation.

  • In 1595 English courtier Sir Philip Sidney used the game to discuss the function of names.

  • Cervantes used it to discuss issues of inequity in Don Quixote in 1615.

  • The English playwright Thomas Middleton, in his 1624 play A Game at Chess, satirized the failed marriage negotiations between Prince Charles, the son of England’s James I, and Donna Maria, the sister of Philip IV of Spain.

  Physically, most chessboards were no larger than a couple of square feet, but inside the Elizabethan mind the game’s scope was vast. Surveying the chess scene in 1614, English writer Arthur Saul marveled at the “many morall mysteries that this Game secretly contayneth.”

  How could one game symbolize so many different entities, structures, relationships, notions? It largely came down to the fact that chess had been designed as a symbol to begin with. Out of the box, it came furnished with a wide variety of generic attributes that lent themselves to an even wider variety of metaphorical applications: chess was a battle between two groups, each stratified by social ranking, contesting for dominance over a finite piece of geography, interacting in a dynamic so complex it seemed to take on a life of its own, each army manipulated by a player, battling each other with wits rather than brawn, employing both tactics (short-term planning) and strategy (long-term planning), in a game that could never truly be mastered.

  It was a long list of attributes, any combination of which could help fuel particular metaphors. Anyone in need of a dynamic symbol to explore and convey elements of war, competition, hierarchy, political power, battle for resources, control by a higher power, meritocracy, the nature of thought, futility, abstract movement, complexity, or infinity had a choice vehicle standing by for metaphoric flight. (Such conditions would also keep chess perpetually relevant. In the twenty-first century, political cartoonists would still use chess to depict global struggles; business schools, law firms, technology consultants, and the U.S. Army would adopt the chess logo to convey an emphasis on strategic thinking; journalists would use it as shorthand for complex and unpredictable social dynamics—and so on.)

  Occasionally, the game itself sufficed as a powerful rhetorical device without needing to turn it into a metaphor. In his landmark Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1689, English philosopher John Locke used chess to help establish his epistemology of empiricism, arguing that each human mind begins as a blank slate and becomes informed principally by experience and the senses.*12

  From “Place relative to particular bodies”

  Thus a company of chess-men, standing on the same squares of the chess-board where we left them, we say they are all in the same place, or unmoved, though perhaps the chess-board hath been in the mean time carried out of one room into another; because we compared them only to the parts of the chess-board, which keep the same distance one with another.

  From “Place relative to a present purpose”

  …but when these very chess-men are put up in a bag, if any one should ask where the black King is, it would be proper to determine the place by the part of the room it was in, and not by the chess-board.

  In conjuring up the image of chessmen resting in a bag, Locke was reverting to a popular centuries-old metaphor that spoke to questions of moral and political equality. “The whole world is like a chess-board,” one thirteenth-century document had declared. “…The society of this chess-board are men of this world, who are all taken from a common bag…and when they have finished the game, just as they come out of one place and one bag, so they are put back in one place, without a distinction between the King and the poor Pawn.”*13

  The chess–life comparison was clear. On the board (i.e., in life), each chess piece (person) had his own particular standing. But after the game (upon death), all the pieces (people) would be thrown into the bag (the afterlife) and would be equal forevermore. The board–bag contrast was invoked often in medieval works—usually emphasizing that the King was just as likely as not to end up near the bottom of the bag after he died. It seemed intended at first as a conservative reinforcement of social order, in that it encouraged peasants not to seek to climb above their lower ranks during life and assured them that salvation and moral justice would be theirs in the afterlife. But the image could also be seen as—inadvertently—planting the seeds for the later revolutions of equality and democracy: if peasants and kings were equal in death, where was the legitimacy in the arbitrary rules that made them unequal in life?

  Such was perhaps the greatest paradox of chess over the many centuries: it was on the one hand an icon of the status quo, a favorite of rulers and of traditional moralists seeking to reinforce social obligations; and yet, at the very same time, it was also inherently an agent of change. Any tool that encourages new ways to think is inherently subversive because it challenges the intellectual status quo. Chess, as James Rowbothum suggested in 1562, couldn’t help but “make men circumspect not onelye in playing this game, but also comparing it to a publick gouernement.”

  Making men circumspect is exactly what metaphors do for us in every century. Through them, we see the world in new and different ways. We gain insight into ourselves and our relationships. We get access to new ideas and creative solutions to problems. We progress.

  THE IMMORTAL GAME

  Moves 4 and 5

  ON ANY GIVEN TURN, chess will usually offer a player many choices—very often too many—but one particular scenario is always beyond a player’s control. When in check, one must immediately escape it, if possible.

  So it was that Anderssen (White), in his move 4, had no choice but to move his White King one square to the right, the only relatively safe option. (There are only three legal moves here, and the other two quickly get White into even deeper trouble.)

  4. Kf1

  (White King to f1)

  With that move, Anderssen had now lost his ability to castle, and thus his King was stuck on his weakened Kingside, quite vulnerable to attack.

  He’d been there before, though. Anderssen and Kieseritzky had both seen this exact position before. Among the tens of millions of sequences possible in a three-and-a-half-move chess game, these two players had effortlessly tangoed into a most familiar arrangement. For that matter, so had thousands of others, going back at least as far as a published analysis of this position by the Spanish priest Ruy Lopez in 1561. In a game of almost limitless possibility, Anderssen and Kieseritzky seemed somehow to be playing their game from memory, or dictation. Why?

  The answer has to do with chess’s most elemental truth: that it is a game of knowledge and understanding as much as wits.

  After the explanation of chess’s near-infinite quality, an outside observer might find this hard to understand. With so much fluidity in the game—a near-infinite number of ways to win and a near-infinite number of ways to lose—a newcomer might reasonably assume (as I certainly did) that chess is mostly a game of quick thinking. Since a game is won or lost on a player’s ability to outmaneuver an opponent’s pieces, and since it is surely impossible to memorize or analyze even a tiny fraction of all the possible board configurations, one would naturally expect most games to go to the sharpest—or deepest—thinker, the player able to see the furthest ahead.

  Fortunately, the game turns out to be a lot more interesting than that. It is not limited to the moment-by-moment calculation and creativity of players, but subject also to a broader—and ever-growing—understanding of the game’s dynamic principles and distinct phases: opening, middlegame, endgame. Like rabbinic scholars poring over the Talmud, serious chess players are constantly interpreting and reinterpreting well-worn chess truths and rendering them into inventive new modes of play.

  First, they come to understand and respect the fundamentals. All seasoned players, for example, appreciate the critical importance of fighting right from the beginning fo
r control of the four center squares. Control of the center gives a player control over the most active part of the chessboard. Rooks, Bishops, and the Queen need passage through the center in order to be most effective. Knights are able to put pressure on many more squares at once from center positions. Losing complete control of the center can quickly lead to a drastic power imbalance where the opponent dominates much of the board and forces you into a cramped position with limited options. (And then the slaughter begins.)

  Early development of the back rank pieces—Knights, Bishops, Queen, and Rooks, roughly in that order—is also vital. A delay will inevitably yield board control to the opponent.

  These are strategic considerations—long-range, whole-game thinking, as opposed to tactical play, which is the shorter-range, move-by-move maneuvering with tricky combinations. Good chess requires both strategic and tactical thinking, particularly in the opening phase of the game, where a single clumsy move can leave a player so disadvantaged he is almost fated to lose. Consequently, there is no limit to the attention serious players give to the science of openings. They approach every game with enough knowledge to play competitively against a wide range of opening variations. But most also concentrate on a few favorites, so that they may sharpen their knowledge of at least some limited approaches to the game.

  4….b5

  (Black Queen’s Knight Pawn to b5)

  For his fourth move, Kieseritzky (Black) played another reasonably well-studied move of the day—Pawn to b5, offering it as a sacrifice to White’s Bishop. This so-called Bryan Countergambit (a countergambit is a gambit offered by Black)—named for the nineteenth-century American player Thomas Jefferson Bryan, who had extensively analyzed and advocated its use—was less familiar than the previous moves, but still no wild gamble on Kieseritzky’s part. In fact, it had been very productive for him in the past, helping him win important games in 1844 and 1847. The Bryan Countergambit aims to knock White’s Bishop off its controlling center square.

  Adventurous players like Bryan liked to comb over openings from the past and tinker with new possibilities, a chess ritual going back to the birth of the modern game, circa 1475, after which serious players had no choice but to reassess old ideas and habits in light of the game’s new chemistry. The path was forged by the wealthy Spaniard Luis Ramirez Lucena (pronounced Loo-THAY-na), the son of a diplomat working under Isabella and Ferdinand. In 1497 Lucena wrote E arte de axedrez (The art of chess), the first chess guide ever produced by a printing press and the first to include analysis of modern openings. (The book was dedicated to Isabella and Ferdinand’s son, Prince Juan.)

  Lucena had played chess throughout Europe and had witnessed firsthand the transition to the more agile and difficult game. In his book he carefully explained the new rules, and explored eleven sample openings from the new game—“all the best games I have seen played by players in Rome and all Italy, France and Spain, and which I have been able to understand myself.” By modern standards, his observations are judged painfully dim, but it was a start, and the new custom of intensive opening analysis endured. Lucena was followed by a somewhat more sophisticated work from the Portuguese apothecary Pedro Damiano in 1512, and an even wider-ranging treatise by the Spanish priest and chess legend Ruy Lopez in 1561. It was Lopez, in fact, who introduced the King’s Gambit.

  5. B×b5

  (White Bishop captures Black Pawn on b5)

  Now Anderssen accepted the Bryan Countergambit, taking Kieseritzky’s Pawn on b5. Why? In part it was for the gain in material—in accepting the gambit he captured a Pawn and was now even in that respect with Black. It was also Anderssen’s least bad option. Chess is rarely a game of ideal moves. Almost always, a player faces a series of difficult consequences whichever move he makes. In contemplating declining the gambit, Anderssen had to consider either the sacrifice of his Bishop (not desirable) or the retreat of the Bishop to a less advantageous square. In the latter case he also risked turning over the momentum to Black by allowing him to continue to develop his Queenside pawns.

  The Bryan Countergambit wouldn’t weather all that well in later years as it fell prey to sharper and more rigorous analysis. In the serious chess world, all opening sequences must withstand exhaustive scrutiny, as players probe for weaknesses. The most durable schemes then spawn ultraspecialized books—books that focus on a single opening variation. For example:

  Easy Guide to the Bb5 Sicilian, by Steffen Pedersen

  The Chigorin Queen’s Gambit, by Angus Dunnington

  The Fianchetto King’s Indian, by Colin McNab

  The Modern French Tarrasch, by Eduard Gufeld

  Nimzo-Indian Defence: Classical Variation, by Ivan Sokolov

  Petroff Defense, by Gyozo Forintos and Haag Ervin

  Play the Benko Gambit, by Vaidyanathan M. Ravikuma

  Play the Caro-Kann, by Egon Varnusz

  Play the Evans Gambit, by Tim Harding and Bernard Cafferty

  These are not books I rushed to buy. I wanted nothing to do with rehearsed openings. To me, studying them was like memorizing numbers in a phone book; it was mind-numbing and devoid of all meaning. I strongly preferred to plunge blindly into the chaotic thrill of an unrehearsed game and fend for myself. I wanted not to be a chess scholar but a chess player, enjoying the moment-to-moment challenges in each game.

  Then I started losing, and kept on losing—even to my friend Kurt, who started beating me consistently even though we had taken up the game at the same time. One crucial difference in our play was that Kurt, while not studying openings intensely, did at least have the discipline to stick to just a very few. That way he could closely monitor what worked and what didn’t. Kurt was establishing a repertoire in order to win more games. I was still playing on instinct, playing only in the moment.

  An impressive string of crushing defeats helped clarify my thinking, leading me eventually to understand that my aversion to openings and chess theory severely limited my potential as a player. Playing well requires study—period. There are more and less sophisticated ways to play the game, and those unwilling to face up to the reality of chess knowledge will be consigned forever to be ineffective, ignorant underachievers. (Understanding this hard truth didn’t amount to acting on it, but it was at least a good first step.)

  In this way chess serves as a useful microcosm of human progress. Civilization is built on learned lessons from past achievements and mistakes. In physics, mathematics, medicine, engineering, legal theory, and so on, success is defined as improving upon the knowledge of our forebears. A young physician of the twenty-first century does not begin her career with the same understanding of bone, blood, tumors, and hygiene as Hippocrates or Benjamin Rush or Louis Pasteur. Regardless of her own capacity, she is miles ahead of her predecessors. Her judgments are built on top of a mountain of past medical experience.

  Chess works the same way. One learns from past play; one does not start from scratch. Every notable game is entered into the historical record, studied by humans—and now computers—until it becomes an essential part of the foundation of knowledge that future games will be built on. In not wanting to study openings, I was the equivalent of an unenlightened medieval cleric ranting against intellectual discovery. Humbling, to be sure. But, to be honest, that still didn’t make me want to study opening theory.

  5….Nf6

  (Black Knight to f6)

  Kieseritzky followed his countergambit with another effort at controlling the center, this time bringing his Knight out to f6, which put pressure on two center squares—one of them occupied by an unprotected White Pawn. Now White would have to defend his Pawn, and would have to worry about the potentially imminent move of Black Knight to g4, which would set up the White King for a quick checkmate with the Queen moving to f2.

  Kieseritzky probably felt reasonably good about his position at this point. So far, this friendly game perfectly mirrored, move for move, a game from seven years earlier—a game he had won (against a different opponent). Then again, he also
knew that he was playing a master tactician, and that anything could happen. They were just getting started.

  II.

  MIDDLEGAME

  (Who We Are)

  Chess is a great, worldwide fact. Wherever a highway is found, there, we may be sure, a reason existed for a highway. And when we find that the explorer on his northward voyage, pausing a day in Iceland, may pass his time in keen encounters with the natives; that the trader in Kamtschatka and China, unable to speak a word with the people surrounding him, yet holds a long evening’s converse over the board which is polyglot…the game becomes authentic from its universality.

  —M. Conway, Atlantic Monthly, 1860

  ALONG WITH JUST ABOUT everyone else in the American colonies, Benjamin Franklin wanted to avoid war against King George III’s soldiers if at all possible. But in 1774, anyone could plainly see that armed conflict was coming on fast. Boston had just held its rebellious Tea Party, which was followed by five British imperial maneuvers that the colonists termed the Intolerable Acts. Under the command of General Thomas Gage, the British military was tightening its control over local government, legal procedures, and civil order—all of which, of course, only caused the colonists to chafe even more. Slowly but surely, both sides seemed headed toward a bloody and world-altering battle.