The Immortal Game Read online

  By coincidence, Philidor’s Pawn revolution came just as lasting egalitarian ideals were coming into play in the real world. John Locke had proposed that all men are created equal, with God-given “natural rights” of life, liberty, and property, and that governments should exist only “with the consent of the governed.” The American Revolution would soon be the living embodiment of these ideals. This chess–life concurrence could not have been lost on figures such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, avid chess player and author of the famous declaration “Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains.” Along with Voltaire, Rousseau frequented the Café de la Régence and called chess one of his “expedients.” In a self-deprecating remark that highlighted the distinction between chess intelligence and other types of intelligence, Rousseau said: “I became acquainted with M. de Légal, M. Husson, Philidor, and all the great chess players of the day, without making the least improvement in the game.”

  In his memoirs, Rousseau used chess to demonstrate his conviction of speaking truth to power. On one occasion, Rousseau bragged, he not only had the opportunity to play France’s Prince de Conti, but also displayed the courage to beat him: “Notwithstanding the signs and grimace of the chevalier and the spectators, which I feigned not to see,” he later wrote, “I won the two games we played. When they were ended, I said to him in a respectful but very grave manner: ‘My lord, I honor your serene highness too much not to beat you always at chess.’ This great prince, who had real wit, sense, and knowledge, and so was worthy not to be treated with mean adulation, felt in fact, at least I think so, that I was the only person present who treated him like a man, and I have every reason to believe he was not displeased with me for it.”

  Voltaire and Rousseau were not the only shining lights of the age that visited the Café de la Régence. The chess center also afforded a brief encounter between Benjamin Franklin and his chess hero Philidor. Arriving at the Régence one day in 1781 with a copy of Philidor’s book, Franklin was quickly ushered to the sacred table, where the author’s signature was procured. Afterward, finding Philidor otherwise engaged, Franklin quickly excused himself.

  “François!” exclaimed proprietor Jacques Labar. “You just autographed your book for the American Ambassador!”

  At which point, Philidor raised his head for the first time and remarked, “That’s funny, I never knew that he was a chess player.”

  THE IMMORTAL GAME

  Moves 6 and 7

  MANY SERIOUS CHESS PLAYERS talk about chess largely in artistic terms, comparing brilliant games to masterful paintings or great symphonies. But they do acknowledge one key difference. “It is a pity,” says Anthony Saidy, “that, unlike music or painting, chess requires of the viewer an initial period of instruction before revealing its aesthetic quality.”

  A pity indeed for all of us chess novices—since many of us long to at least appreciate superb chess even if we don’t have a realistic hope of ever attaining it.

  Fortunately, there is another route to true chess appreciation, separate from the rote memorization of openings, tactics, and strategies. It is to study the history of play—not just legendary encounters like the Immortal Game, but also how an array of many different well-played games fit within the various styles of play introduced over time: the evolution of chess play. Since chess is largely a game of knowledge built on past experience, there is a demonstrable arc to its progress, dating back to the beginning of the modern game, circa 1475. Each era learns from past eras, and develops a new level of sophistication.

  This idea of chess’s stylistic evolution was introduced to me by Nicholas Chatzilias, a young, Brooklyn-based chess instructor whom I met one day while looking into the New York–based program Chess-in-the-Schools. Over a sandwich near an elementary school in Sheepshead Bay, I shamelessly name-dropped my famous chess ancestor, Samuel Rosenthal, and immediately got a bright-eyed look in response. “You’re related to him?” he said. “I teach some of Rosenthal’s games in my chess club.”

  I asked how games over a century old could be useful in chess instruction today. Chatzilias explained how the games from different eras fit together like links in a chain. Studying a sequence of them in context, we can understand not only the collective knowledge of chess, but also how that knowledge coalesced over time. It’s the same reason we study the history of anything. Any knowledge is an accumulation of experience and can give off a harsh glare if suddenly imparted all at once as though it were divine revelation. Better to understand it as an organic entity, with a rich and glowing life history.

  Chatzilias suggested I pick up a copy of Anthony Saidy’s The March of Chess Ideas, which I did immediately. That book runs through the four great eras of chess play: Romantic, Scientific, Hypermodern, and the New Dynamism. Hoping to understand them all, I approached them in chronological order; for one simply cannot understand a later style without understanding its predecessors. The first period, Romantic play, stretched all the way from 1475 to the 1880s, and was characterized by swashbuckling attacks, clever combinations, and a relative lack of long-term planning. Romantic chess was almost all tactics (short-term maneuvering) and very little strategy (long-term planning). It was chess as hand-to-hand combat.

  I was glad to know about the Romantic school of chess, because it fit well with how I wanted to play—attack, trick, surprise, attack again. It turns out that Romantic chess is the style every novice player wants to play, because it is innocent fun and because we simply don’t know any better. It is also how great chess masters played for centuries—because they didn’t know any better. In a game that presented trillions upon trillions of possibilities, effective strategic planning was simply too difficult to intuit; instead, it took hundreds of years to evolve. Even after Philidor, in the mid-eighteenth century, had proven the virtue of his Pawn strategy, contributing the first real inkling of a more holistic, strategic approach to the game, the Romantic school continued on for more than another century. The great Romantic masters steadily cooked up more and more dastardly tactical tricks to try and outmaneuver one another.

  Looking back now, the Immortal Game stands as the pinnacle of Romanticism. It was one of its greatest monuments; its winner would forever be known as the Romantic school’s all-time great practitioner. Both Anderssen and Kieseritzky knew of Philidor’s legacy, of course. But like all great players of their era, they fundamentally ignored his major ideas and stuck to the Romantic style—good, quick, exciting, tactical chess, ingenious combinations and attacks.

  In his next-to-last opening move, Anderssen (White) developed his Knight to f3.

  6. Nf3

  (White Knight to f3)

  This packed a particular punch because it developed a piece, put pressure on two center squares, and attacked the Black Queen—all at the same time.

  The Knight attack forced the Black Queen to retreat to h6.

  6….Qh6

  (Black Queen to h6)

  Saving his Queen was a necessary move for Black, of course, but also a wasted one. Kieseritzky accomplished absolutely nothing else, and he hadn’t even completely removed his Queen from danger. He would soon be forced to save her again. Meanwhile, Anderssen was developing at a healthy pace, and with every move getting something else accomplished.

  On the other hand, Kieseritzky may have liked his position at this point, because if he could regain the offensive he had many provocative possible moves. He hoped it would soon be his turn to start vexing White.

  7. d3

  (White Queen’s Pawn to d3)

  White then moved to protect his Pawn on e4 by moving his Queen’s Pawn forward one square to d3. This was also a nice developing move, which allowed White’s Bishop to put some pressure on the Black Pawn on f4.

  7….Nh5

  (Black Knight to h5)

  Black responded with a decidedly nondeveloping move: Knight to h5.*18 Thus middlegame began. If the opening moves in each chess game are a coy dance, a limbering up, some tentative steps in the ring where one takes a
few pokes at one’s opponent to flush out his soft spots, the next phase of the game is something else altogether. The middlegame is full-on combat, thorny, dense, and unpredictable. “Play the opening like a book, the middle game like a magician, and the endgame like a machine,” Viennese player Rudolf Spielmann would later advise. Even the most experienced players, familiar with hundreds of opening combinations, do not know for sure where they are headed in the middlegame, and must rely on intuition when they get there. This is where mere billions of game possibilities become trillions upon trillions, and every player confronts distinct chess molecules that they have never seen before and will never see again.

  It is also the leap into the wide-eyed thrill of the game. Now so many pieces are in play that anything can happen. For master or novice, it is often a glorious place to be: no more waiting around on the beach; now you are smacking against high, crashing, erratic ocean waves. Is that a life raft headed your way, or a saw-toothed shark? For a short time during the middlegame it may be impossible to tell, and that’s much of the fun.

  (It may not last long. Soon the thrill may decay into emptiness and dread, with a gnawing feeling that your opponent has a much keener understanding of where the game is heading, and has probably already bested you. Yes, you can feel his cold shadow now, even if you can’t yet see it. You are falling inexorably into his invisible trap. Though it looks like the game is more or less even, you are actually already drawing your final few full breaths.)

  In a conventional twenty-first-century game, the players do not usually arrive at the middlegame until somewhere around move 10 or 12, and the arrival is most often signaled by both sides castling for safety. By then, most or all of the Bishops and Knights have been developed, and the hypercomplex interplay of threats and counterthreats can begin.

  Rigid definitions of chess’s stages cannot, of course, begin to capture all the spectacular variation and the creative possibility inherent in the game. They are nevertheless useful, pointing to some unavoidable realities. In a competitive chess game, development is crucial. Failing to develop one’s pieces as efficiently as possible in the opening moves is like neglecting to vaccinate young children. Death isn’t certain, but you can expect to face serious trouble. An undeveloped position quickly cedes board control to the opponent, and forces one to play a defensive game with fewer and fewer decent options.

  Looking back at the start of this particular middlegame, some modern experts would turn down their noses at Kieseritzky’s 7….Nh5, regarding it as reckless. In making this attacking move, Black was passing up the opportunity to consolidate his position—to develop his major pieces and protect his King by castling.

  That judgment, however, was only worthwhile in the context of twenty-first-century knowledge, which included an extensive catalogue of weaknesses and how they could be exploited. This body of knowledge made the modern chess expert far superior to past experts, but only because they stood on a mountain of understanding. In 1851, 7…. Nh5 was thought to be a strong attack move, threatening…Ng3+, which, if he achieved it, would end up winning a Rook and inflicting all sorts of damage.

  In the context of the time, this game was still wide open.

  TOWARD THE END OF the eighteenth century, the Café de la Régence chess den in Paris saw daily visits from an ambitious young lieutenant named Napoleon Bonaparte. “He played the openings badly,” reported British chess writer George Walker in 1840, “and was impatient if his adversary dwelt too long upon his move….Under defeat at chess, the great soldier was sore and irritable.”

  Napoleon never became a great chess player, but he played passionately his entire life, and took the game everywhere—to battles in Egypt, Russia, and across Europe, sparring constantly against his aides and top generals. “Even at the height of his great campaigns, when he was making mincemeat of the best generals in Europe,” offer British writers Mike Fox and Richard James, “he took time off to get thrashed by his own generals over the chessboard.” While his skill level did not improve much over time, his proportion of victories did: after he assumed supreme power, his underling opponents frequently found it inconvenient to win. Later, when Napoleon was powerless and exiled to the tiny island of St. Helena, he probably found the competition somewhat stiffer. In any case, he continued to play. The conqueror who had once controlled a large portion of the world was reduced to fighting the rest of his wars on sixty-four squares. (His isolation seemed even more pitiable when it was learned, more than a century later, that an elaborate escape plan had been delivered—but never quite revealed—to the exiled emperor. The plan’s instructions were embedded in an ivory chess set which was given to Napoleon, but the French officer ordered to disclose the hidden plans had died on the voyage. Napoleon played chess on the special board for the rest of his life without knowing its true significance.)

  Napoleon is regarded as one of history’s great military geniuses, able to outmaneuver his opponents with a combination of clever tactics and sound strategy. It is no real surprise to learn that this brilliance did not carry over to the conceptual geometry of the chessboard. But what about influence in the other direction? Did Napoleon’s countless hours over chess’s war board help him with his real-war planning? Napoleon apparently thought so. “He was even wont to say,” wrote Walker, “that he frequently struck out new features relatively to a campaign, first suggested by the occurrence of certain positions of the pieces on the chess-board.”

  This echoed other comments and legends over the game’s long span, chess having been a close companion to military commanders from the legendary Indian King Balhait, to Caliph Harun ar-Rashid in the eighth century, to the eleventh-century Norman king William the Conqueror (reported to have broken a chessboard over a French prince’s head after a frustrating game), to the fourteenth-century Turkmen Mongol conqueror Tamerlane (who once named a newly conquered town “Shahrukhiya,” after a potent chess move that simultaneously attacked an opponent’s King and Rook), to Frederick the Great of Prussia, to World War II’s George Patton, to Desert Storm’s Norman Schwarzkopf.

  How, though, could an abstract game with no connection to real weapons, real soldiers, or real terrain be of any use to commanders facing actual battle conditions?

  Obviously, a board game with thirty-two symbolic pieces is far removed from the unpredictable grit and gruesome blood salad of war. But that very removal, ironically, is what makes the game a highly relevant and constructive tool. We all take in a surprising amount of practical knowledge from abstraction: abstract reasoning, according to many experts, is what defines human intelligence. By removing ourselves from the morass of functional detail, we can isolate goals, tactics, strategies, patterns—meaning. “Truly practical men give their minds free play about a subject without asking too closely at every point for the advantage to be gained,” wrote John Dewey in his 1910 landmark book How We Think. “Exclusive preoccupation with matters of use and application so narrows the horizon as in the long run to defeat itself….Power in action requires some largeness and imaginativeness of vision.”

  So it is with military chiefs charting a course of battle. Reducing an expansive, chaotic battlefield to a handful of symbolic elements gives generals “free play” in war—an opportunity to explore notions of pacing, mobilization, positioning, and surprise, without having to worry about the immediate practical application. In the same way that a painter might sit for an hour in front of a Monet for inspiration, even though she intends to paint a different subject in a completely different style, chess is an ideal reflection pool for war planners. It inspires in them Dewey’s “largeness and imaginativeness of vision.”

  For all of his countless hours of chess concentration, Napoleon may not have been able to show much progress on the chessboard, but he was probably correct in thinking that he’d had a much more significant payoff on his larger battlefields. High-ranking war commanders, after all, are not the sort of people who like to waste time.

  The chess–war connection would co
ntinue straight into the twenty-first century, with researchers exploiting the game in new ways. In South Australia, analysts from the national Defence Science and Technology Organisation devised an exhaustive computer analysis of chess games in which they examined three key variables:

  material (number of pieces per player)

  tempo (number of moves allowed a player each turn)

  search depth (number of moves ahead)

  How would a chess game be affected if these fundamentals were slightly altered? What would happen, for example, if one player had more material but the other side was allowed to make two quick moves in a row? Or if one player could make multiple moves versus the opponent’s ability to analyze five moves ahead instead of three? The researchers also wanted to know how the game would be affected if they took away some of the information, making certain pieces invisible to the opponent in some games. “There’s all sorts of anecdotal evidence that there are certain factors in warfare that are [more] important,” explained Greg Colbert, a mathematician on the Australian team. “But even today there’s debate over what really counts. How important is stealth over tempo, or tempo over numerical strength? That’s what we wanted to find out.”