The Immortal Game (11 page)

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.

T
OWARD 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 continue 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.”

It was an effort to systematically gain from chess the type of insights into war that human generals had been extracting intuitively for centuries. And it appeared to pay off. One conclusion by the Australians was that a combination of deep searching and increased tempo easily overwhelmed an opposing force with significantly greater material. (Interestingly, this would also turn out to be true for the Immortal Game.) Some of the telling data happened to come in just as the United States was planning its 2003 invasion of Iraq, researchers recalled. “We watched with great interest the dialogue between General [Tommy] Franks, who wanted to use more material, and [Secretary of Defense] Donald Rumsfeld, who wanted a fast tempo and lighter units,” Australian researcher Jason Schulz said. “In the end, there was a compromise. But a relatively fast tempo did really gain a very decisive, rapid advantage in Iraq.”

N
APOLEON’S CONQUESTS
eventually fizzled, his short-lived empire shriveled, and he died in exile in 1821. Meanwhile, his old chess haunt, the Café de la Régence, continued to bustle as Europe began to enjoy the real fruits of the Industrial Revolution. The broad shift from agricultural to factory work in the nineteenth century initially left workers with no additional leisure time; conditions were gruesome and hours were all-consuming. Eventually, though, regulations and the labor movement forced factories to adopt more humane hours, creating a large new class of people with some leisure time; chess and other activities were there to fill in the gap. While the game still attracted the aristocracy, it also reached deeply into the growing European middle class.

The expansion was especially evident in England. From 1824 to 1828, the British public became fascinated with a five-game, four-year contest between the Edinburgh Chess Club and the London Chess Club (Edinburgh won). That event fed interest in accessible and inexpensive books such as William Lewis’s
Chess for Beginners
(1835) and George Walker’s
Chess Made Easy
(1836). Thereafter, regular chess columns sprung up in European and American newspapers, and the game began to creep into not just erudite but also popular literature. “Kitty, can you play chess?” Alice asks at the start of Lewis Carroll’s
Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There
(his second
Alice
book). “Now don’t smile, my dear, I’m asking it seriously. Because, when we were playing just now, you watched just as if you understood it: and when I said ‘Check!’ you purred! Well, it
was
a nice check, Kitty, and really I might have won if it hadn’t been for that nasty Knight, that came wriggling down among my pieces.”

Chess was moving swiftly beyond the chattering classes now, deep into the madding crowd. “The din of voices shakes the roof as we enter,” George Walker reported of his 1840 visit to the Café de la Régence.

Can this be chess?—the game of philosophers—the wrestling of the strong-minded—the recreation of pensive solitude—thus practised amid a roar like that of the Regent’s Park beast-show at feeding time! Laughter, whistling, singing, screaming, spitting, spouting, and shouting,—tappings, rappings, drummings, and hummings, disport in their glory around us. Have we not made a blunder, and dropped into the asylum of Charenton?

Walker was in the right place. And though other chess cafés weren’t quite as pulsating as the Régence, high-quality chess could now be found in Berlin, Warsaw, Vienna, Moscow, Rome, London, and elsewhere. Travel and long-distance communication were cheaper and easier than ever, and the international chess community now mingled regularly. Leading players from all over Europe established closer contact with one another with every passing decade, constantly testing and refining their most ambitious ideas. The better the communication, the farther and faster chess theory was able to advance. In this respect, chess mirrored social and industrial progress: ideas and cultures colliding, blending, improving.

In the mid-nineteenth century, a number of top players, among them Austrian masters Ernst Falkbeer and Wilhelm Steinitz, emigrated to London, helping to transform that city into a full-fledged rival to Paris as the chess capital of the world. All of this inspired
Illustrated London News
chess columnist Howard Staunton in 1851 to organize the world’s first true international tournament in London—timed to coincide with a major international fair in the same city.

In this era of play, stamina was vital. With no time controls in place—they would come into use about a decade later—a single game could easily last ten hours or more. Championship chess play therefore required a fertile mix of intellectual prowess, personal charisma, and outright staying power. “Comfort is not particularly high,” Adolf Anderssen wrote in a letter from the 1851 tournament. “Chairs and tables are small and low; all free space next to the players was occupied by a [recording assistant]. In short there was not a single place where you could rest your weary head during the hard fight. For the English player, more comfort is not required. He sits straight as a poker on his chair, keeps his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, and does not move until he for an hour has [surveyed] the chessboard. His opponent has sighed hundreds of times when the Englishman eventually moves his piece.”

Perhaps stamina came naturally to my ancestor Samuel Rosenthal, raised as he was in an impoverished Jewish ghetto in the thick forests of northeast Poland. Jews had lived in Poland at least as far back as the fourteenth century, under varying degrees of persecution. Chess had been around at least three hundred years before that, brought back from a Crusade by Polish knights. In 1103 the knight Pierzchala is said to have checkmated the Duke of Mazovia with a Rook, earning a new estate and a Rook-laden crest. (To this day, chessboards, Knights, and Rooks appear on dozens of ancient family crests across Europe.) In 1564 a mock-epic poem,
Chess,
parodied the style of Homer and Virgil in detailing a heroic chess battle with a “wooden army.” The six-hundred-line poem reveals, among other things, how well steeped the Polish literate class was in the game.

Sandwiched between Germany, Prussia, Hungary, Slovakia, Lithuania, and Russia, Poland succumbed many times over the centuries to foreign rule. Napoleon “liberated” Poland in 1806 but lost it to the Russians in 1813. Poles chafed constantly under the Russian yoke throughout the nineteenth century. In 1863, when Rosenthal was twenty-six, a major Polish revolt against Russian rule left the Jews squeezed even tighter than usual. By this time, Rosenthal had moved 150 miles southwest to Warsaw (also under Russian control), where he studied law and played a lot of chess at the popular cafe Pod Dzwonnica? (“Under the Bell Tower”). He joined the popular uprising of 1863, was persecuted after its failure, and left Poland the following year. Joining many others fleeing through Germany to France (following the path of earlier Polish émigrés, including Frédéric Chopin), he settled in Paris and quickly became a fixture at the most famous chess café of all.