The Immortal Game (14 page)

Others have since concurred. “Just as biologists need model organisms to explore genetics,” writes the University of Waterloo’s Neil Charness, “so too do cognitive scientists need model task environments to study adaptive cognitive mechanisms. Chess playing provides a rich task environment that taps many cognitive processes, ranging from perception, to memory, to problem solving.” In a 1992 study, Charness exhaustively reviewed chess’s impact on the field. The list of contributions was overwhelming. Among other areas, chess had shone light on the superiority of internal over external motivation; on the role of emotions in problem solving; on which parts of the brain are activated in spatial thought; on the physical maturation of brain components; and on the effects of aging on problem solving, memory, and perception.

One observation seemed to stand out. Cognitive chess research punctured the long-standing myth of the chess prodigy, the born genius—and in doing so, it contributed to one of the great ongoing discussions of our time:
How great minds are formed
. “One of the important points that chess research has made since its inception,” concludes Charness, “is that chess experts are made, not born.”

We’ve all heard the story in one version or another: A young child wanders into view of some chess play in progress, watches silently through a few games, and then asks or is invited to play. It’s all in good fun, the adults happy to take a break from mind-stretching play and to encourage the child’s tiptoe into the world of grownup games. Then the puppy-dog glances and condescending quips suddenly vanish as the child neophyte effortlessly checkmates the adult. Eyes widen.
What the—? That must have been a lark
. The board is quickly reset to the starting position, and the child repeats the feat. The parents, not even aware that their child knew the rules of chess, are stunned. Their darling but otherwise unremarkable child apparently has some sort of extraordinary talent. Their child is
gifted
.

Indeed, something special is going on, but not quite what meets the eye. Like related myths about musical prodigies, math prodigies, and seemingly inborn athletic talents like Tiger Woods or Lance Armstrong, the chess genius myth has been around for ages. It is a common feature in biographies of chess legends like François-André Philidor, Paul Morphy, Bobby Fischer, Garry Kasparov, and Josh Waitzkin, the real-life inspiration for the popular movie
Searching for Bobby Fischer
. As it is popularly understood, these true prodigies are rare and inexplicable—they are, depending on your belief system, either God-given miracles or exquisite accidents of biology. In reality, though, young chess luminaries like Fischer and Waitzkin fit nicely into a much larger spectrum of young chess players—many of whom show promise and keen interest at a very early age and from early on are carefully nurtured, trained into greatness. “He has become a fine player at a very young age,” chessville.com columnist Tom Rose writes about Norwegian wunderkind Magnus Carlsen. “But is that because of exceptional innate talent for chess?”

Maybe not! Imagine yourself in young Magnus’s place. You play in your first tournament aged eight, do well, and get noticed by [a grandmaster] who decides to help teach you. Immediately you believe that you are special, that you have “talent,” that you can really shine. This encourages you to work very hard at this game that gets you such agreeable attention…. [M]ore tournament success and more media attention [encourage] you to work even harder. At first you work at it for 2 or 3 hours a day. By the time you are ten years old it is more like 4 or 5 hours a day….With that kind of early start and support, wouldn’t almost any of us have been a much better player than we are now?

As Rose suggests—and as studies prove—the phenomenon is much less miraculous and much more interesting than commonly portrayed. There’s no question that intelligence and other aptitudes are partly inherited, and that these aptitudes can include specific skills like abstract thinking and perhaps even traits like ambition. But looking closely at genius-level achievement, psychologists have also established that there is an overwhelming correlation between mentoring and practice. The available evidence suggests that nurturing factors can give children an extraordinarily strong incentive to develop certain skills quickly and deeply. “Evidence for the contribution of talent over and above practice has proved extremely elusive,” writes University College of London psychology professor David R. Shanks. In contrast, he says, “evidence is now emerging that exceptional performance in memory, chess, music, sports and other arenas can be fully accounted for on the basis of an age-old adage: practice makes perfect.”

Shanks cites a number of studies that all point in the same direction. In one study, researchers used anonymous surveys to categorize classical music students into one of three different groups according to skill level: (1) superb, (2) highly proficient, and (3) adequate. Then they asked the students how much they had practiced in the past and how much they currently practiced. The responses were remarkably consistent and showed a high correlation with skill level. Cumulatively, the very best players had each practiced roughly ten thousand hours in their lifetimes. The next-best group had each practiced about eight thousand hours; the least proficient group hovered around five thousand hours of cumulative practice. Similar numbers have turned up in studies on chess masters, athletes, writers, and scientists.

None of this means, of course, that these achievers aren’t extraordinary. Quite the contrary. The likelihood that so-called gifted players actually acquire much of their gift on their own adds, rather than subtracts, from the marvel. Bobby Fischer, perhaps the most famous chess prodigy of all time, was far from a chess genius out of the box. After toying with the game for a year, he attended a simultaneous display in 1951, at age seven, and lost very quickly to an expert player. Afterward, Fischer joined a club and studied with ferocity. Six years and thousands of chess hours later, he had a spectacular “breakthrough” at age thirteen and was pronounced a boy wonder.

Perhaps the best-known example of mentored genius comes from Budapest, Hungary. There, in the late 1960s, psychologist Laszlo Polgar embarked on an unusual experiment in order to prove that any healthy baby can be nurtured into a genius: he publicly declared that he would do this with his own children, who were not yet born. He and his wife forged a plan to school their children at home and focus them intensely on a few favorite disciplines—among them chess. From a very early age, the three Polgar daughters, Zsuzsa, Zsófia, and Judit, studied chess for an average of eight to ten hours every day—perhaps a total of some 20,000 hours from age eight to eighteen.

Lo and behold, they all became chess “geniuses.” In 1991, at age twenty-one, Zsuzsa (who later Westernized her name to Susan) became the first woman in history to earn a grandmaster title through qualifying tournaments. The second child, Zsófia, also became a world-class player. Judit, the youngest, became at age fifteen the youngest grandmaster in history (a record previously held by Bobby Fischer), and was considered a strong candidate to eventually become world chess champion. “I remember late one night when Susan was analysing with a trainer, a strong IM [International Master],” recalls computer chess guru Frederic Friedel, a close friend of the Polgar family who visited them often at their home in Budapest. “They reached an endgame and could not figure out how to play it. ‘There is some trick here,’ said the IM. So they woke up Judit and carried the girl into the training room. Judit, still half asleep, showed them the win and was put back into her bed.”

Whether one is seeking the smartest chess move or trying to unlock an age-old scientific riddle, very often the most intelligent move a person can make is to acknowledge ignorance and seek assistance. What people casually refer to as “talent” turns out to be among the most complex subjects known to humankind. Scientists in the twenty-first century are still struggling to understand it. They have already learned enough to know that superb ability in chess or any other realm cannot be ascribed to some simple quirk of biology. Hopefully, with the help of a wide variety of tools, we will soon come to a reasonably coherent answer, and we will spread that answer far and wide in hopes of creating a better and more able world.

THE IMMORTAL GAME
Moves 10 and 11

S
O MUCH OF “TALENT,”
of course, is in the ambition to succeed. It didn’t take me very long, after I started playing chess again in midlife, to realize that I wouldn’t go very far. Among other obstacles, I simply didn’t want it badly enough.

I knew the difference. Early on in life, I was something of a wonder at the violin. At the earliest possible age I was awarded prestigious “superior” ratings for three consecutive years in national competition, and thus earned a prestigious solo performance spot in an honors concert. To a stranger listening to me play in those years, or looking at my gilded and framed certificates, my musicality might have appeared to be an unambiguous “talent”—until one learned the backstory: how, when I first took up the instrument in fourth grade, I practiced it with a ferocious intensity—easily eclipsing every other student in the school and setting a new practice record for my suburban school system. Where exactly I derived this compulsion to get up early in the morning and practice ninety ear-screeching minutes—while my poor father tried to eat breakfast and read the newspaper in peace—I don’t know. I just wanted to do well at it, and that compulsion was self-reinforcing. My parents were naturally encouraging, and my music teacher Mrs. Schneider was ecstatic. She sat me at the front of the orchestra and treated me as one of her favorites for the next five years of our working together. She treated me like a young genius.

I have since fallen off, way off, and am confident that a violin in my hand today could easily be construed as a dangerous weapon. What happened? I stopped wanting it.

Today, I am lucky enough to be acquainted with a number of extraordinary achievers in various fields. From them, I rarely get the impression that genius is something they were born with and occasionally watered. Rather, these are people who have found something they wanted to do very well, and subsequently spent thousands upon thousands of hours getting good. I had nothing like the necessary drive to achieve such excellence in chess. True, I probably also didn’t have nearly enough natural spatial aptitude. But the more important factor by far was lack of ambition. Recognizing that, my reengagement with the game eventually deflated; as my friend Kurt gradually became a reasonably serious competitor, playing chess most weekends in his local park, I slipped in the other direction, playing less and less. We still talked a lot about the game; but we played infrequently. It wasn’t so much that I minded losing; I just got tired of my own mediocrity, and realized that I preferred to stay up nights trying to write a better book about chess than studying to be a better player. For whatever reason, my drive was to understand the relentless drive of others to play masterful chess.

At the competitive level, each player brings his or her own humanity to the table. Lionel Kieseritzky was an unpleasant sort of fellow—irritable, obtuse, and with a sharp tongue. Anderssen, by contrast, was a player’s player. He had no apparent interests outside of chess, and was well liked by all who knew him—“honest and honourable to the core,” remarked his frequent adversary Wilhelm Steinitz.

Both were also true fighters—even in casual play. Move 10 from Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky’s casual game at the Grand Divan found Anderssen’s Bishop under attack. As a response, he didn’t exactly ignore the threat, but instead introduced his own charismatic counterthreat: moving his g Pawn up two squares, giving further protection to his Knight and threatening Kieseritzky’s Black Knight.

10. g4

(White Pawn to g4)

It was a “casual” game, with no stakes (aside from ego and reputation), but that couldn’t keep the two players away from tripping into middlegame’s high-voltage zone: a multilayered dynamic of threats and counterthreats that is not easy to defuse and can at any time blow up in either player’s face. Such dynamic tension is not a guaranteed component of middlegame, but it is extremely common, and the lattice of active threats can quickly escalate to impossible-to-follow complexity. What emerges is the board-game version of that ever-repeated movie scene where the cop sneaks up on the thug, aims his gun, and says “freeze”—only to find that a moment later, hidden accomplices point their guns at the cop and say, “No—you freeze,” at which point more cops come out from hiding and point their guns at the new accomplices, and so on. With dozens of weapons cocked and aimed in every direction, no one knows whether to shoot first or try to de-escalate.

Chess’s middlegame offers the same conundrum—having to choose whether to continue to escalate threats or start answering them. The very best players know from experience, intuition, and calculation how a particular multiple-threat board arrangement is best acted on. But in the most complex circumstances, it is not something that any individual could actually articulate.

10….Nf6

(Black Knight to f6)

In his move 10, Kieseritzky escaped Anderssen’s Pawn threat, while introducing a threat to that same Pawn. Now Anderssen would have to decide whether to protect that Pawn or save his Bishop on b5.

(Here, incidentally, is how the same board position was published in Kieseritzky’s journal
La Régence
in July 1851, one month after the Immortal Game took place. Note that the Bishops are represented by Fools—
fous
:)

Now Anderssen did something downright creepy. He moved his Kingside Rook over one square to g1, establishing more support for his Pawn at g4.

11. Rg1

(White Rook to g1)

Wanting the Rook in that position made good sense and was not surprising. What was shocking about this move was what Anderssen hadn’t done—namely, save his Bishop on b5. He let it go for no particular reason other than to further develop his other pieces. It was a sign of utter confidence, a signal that Anderssen had wrested control away from infinity and truly knew where this game was headed.

Was he bluffing his confidence, or did he actually know what he was doing? It was impossible to tell. But a surprise Bishop sacrifice would unnerve virtually any player. It was the kind of Romantic bravado that endeared Anderssen to chess players all over the world, and that would ultimately bring him chess immortality.

11….c×b5

(Black Pawn takes Bishop at b5)

Kieseritzky accepted Anderssen’s sacrifice, capturing the Bishop and sticking with his original plan, even if Anderssen seemed to be attempting to undermine it.