The Immortal Game (16 page)

Liz: Checkmate.

George: I don’t think we should see each other anymore.

(Next scene.)

Jerry: And you broke up with her because she beat you at chess? That’s pretty sick.

George: I don’t see how I could perform sexually in a situation after something like that. I was completely emasculated.

The Freudians, in their misguided fervor and impressive self-regard, established at least one important truth: chess taps into primal forces far beyond our immediate control. Clearly, something profound, thrilling, and even somewhat terrifying takes place on its mental stage. And the game’s close association with a particular variety of mental illness suggests that something potentially destructive may lurk beneath the surface for some players.

Most players distance themselves from the topic altogether. But several have bravely faced up to it, offering credible theories for the trouble. “As organizers and players,” says the University of Chicago’s Tim Redman, “we must admit that at times some very real character disturbances are manifested by our fellow players…. After all, what is a chess tournament? A chess tournament is, by definition, an activity in which you spend many hours each day, using your best intellectual and imaginative abilities to figure out how the other player is out to get you. [It is a] constant exercise of [the] ‘paranoid faculty.’”

Writer, psychiatrist, and serious chess player Charles Krauthammer attributes the trouble not to latent Oedipal impulses or paranoia but rather to chess’s celebrated abstraction. The same quality that makes the game such a useful thinking tool can also completely subvert thought, he suggests, if pushed to its near-infinite edge. The danger lies in what Krauthammer calls vertigo, the cognitive disarray one encounters when facing limitless depths, physical or virtual.

Not many chess players come close. “The
amateur
sees pieces and movement,” writes Krauthammer. “The
expert
, additionally, sees sixty-four squares with holes and lines and spheres of influence. The
genius
apprehends a unified field within which space and force and mass are interacting valences—a Bishop tears the board in half and a Pawn bends the space around it the way mass can reshape space in the Einsteinian universe.”

A third plausible route to chess madness is suggested by Austrian writer Stefan Zweig in his short story “The Royal Game.” Zweig writes of a prisoner held in solitary confinement who has access to only one book—a chess guide with analysis of 150 games. He teaches himself how to play, studies each of the games inside out, and then—much to his later regret—begins to play chess against himself in his own head. “It is an absurdity in logic to play against oneself,” he later concludes. “The fundamental attraction of chess lies, after all, in the fact that its strategy develops…in two different brains, that in this mental battle Black, ignorant of White’s immediate maneuvers, seeks constantly to guess and thwart them, while White, for his part, strives to penetrate Black’s secret purposes and to discern and parry them. If one person tries to be both Black and White you have the preposterous situation that one and the same brain at once knows something and yet does not know it; that, functioning as White’s partner, it can instantly obey a command to forget what, a moment earlier as Black’s partner, it desired and plotted. Such a cerebral duality really implies a complete cleavage of the conscious, a lighting up or dimming of the brain function at pleasure as with a switch.”

It is dizzying to even consider, but it does comport with the intense training of some obsessive players who find themselves constantly playing chess games inside their heads. The consequence of this unwinnable inner conflict is what Zweig calls “a self-produced schizophrenia.”
^*22
While such a condition, if possible, is obviously rare and probably only a danger to the very deepest chess thinkers, it also raises reasonable concern about what deep chess thinking does to the larger population of merely expert players. “In a long match,” world champion Boris Spassky once remarked, “a player goes very deep into himself, like a diver. Then very fast he comes up. Every time, win or lose, I am so depressed. I want to die.”

Such warnings are not to be taken lightly, and it behooves every chess parent, chess organizer, and chess instructor to be mindful of the game’s destructive power—to work on tapping into chess’s positive Benjamin Franklin forces while avoiding its corrosive Bobby Fischer forces.

THE IMMORTAL GAME
Moves 12–16

C
HESS IS NOT ONLY
a game of the mind, but also very much a mind game. Playing games against strangers on the Internet, I would frequently encounter remarks from opponents intended to intimidate me, or at least rattle me a little. If I took more than a few seconds to consider a move, I might get a text message of “You’re SLOW!” Barbs like this didn’t necessarily make me move sooner, but they certainly affected the quality of my concentration. Even when playing against old friends, there were occasional taunts and distractions—in both directions. It is an unavoidable part of the game.

Such off-the-board techniques go back as far as anyone cares to look. In his treatise published in 1497, the leading Spanish player Lucena revealed a few already well-known tricks:

• During day games, be sure to situate your opponent so that he/she faces the shining sun.

• At night, place a candle by your opponent’s right hand. (Most players move the pieces with their right hand; in a dark room, moving the hand between the candle and the eye draws much attention away from the board.)

• It is best if your opponent eats and drinks well. But for you, only a light meal and
no wine
.

Five hundred years later, most techniques of distraction, intimidation, and coercion are no less mundane, ranging from provocative clothing to noisy drink twizzling or slurping to expertly timed grunts and groans. Walking away from the board between moves can give off an air of overwhelming confidence that opponents find unnerving. Pretending that a clever trap is actually an unsure or mistaken move might help lure your opponent more easily into the desired position.

A thousand other less crude and often less conscious maneuvers can also sway the thinking and the resilience of an opponent. No one can ignore the psychological and physical dimensions of this very human game. What is ostensibly a contest of calculation and geometric cleverness turns out to be just as much about morale, stamina, charisma, and raw desire to win. Some players have less a motivation to claim victory than a powerful desire to see the other guy lose. “I like to make them squirm,” Bobby Fischer has said, articulating the motivation of the most severely competitive type of player. Few share Fischer’s bloodlust, but every player unavoidably brings the force of his or her own character to the chess table. Even the meekest, most scholarly contestant must contend not only with thirty-two inanimate pieces, but also with the intangible and often unpredictable “human element.”

Needless to say, the chess game between Anderssen and Kieseritzky included its psychological elements. For two highly sophisticated players, each move may have potentially complicated motives: Does he want me to think he’s doing this? Does he want me to react in that way?

Anderssen, having sacrificed his Bishop on b5, now continued his offensive march on the Kingside. Moving up his h Pawn—on the far right edge of the board—he developed a Pawn
and
directly attacked the Black Queen.

12. h4

(White Pawn to h4)

This was not a move that Kieseritzky likely saw coming. He would now lose another tempo in further Queen retreat.

12….Qg6

(Black Queen to g6)

This retreat was triply bad for Black. First, in a game where a single move can produce a mile of significance, a retreating move that has no tactical or strategic value is worse than a waste. It’s like coming to a sudden stop on a racetrack while all of the other runners race on.

Second, this particular retreat didn’t even move Black’s Queen to safety. After the move, she was still in grave danger of being boxed in.

Third, Anderssen was carrying out a rather dastardly plan in which his long-term goals meshed nicely with his tactical threats against Kieseritzky’s Queen.

His squeeze continued:

13. h5

(White Pawn to h5)

Anderssen moved his h Pawn up yet one more square, again developing a Pawn and again attacking the Black Queen.

13….Qg5

(Black Queen to g5)

Black’s Queen was now forced into the only available safe square. Things have sunk pretty low when a player has not only no choice of which piece to move but also no choice about which square to move it to.

14. Qf3

(White Queen to f3)

Anderssen continued to apply pressure to Kieseritzky’s Queen, and also advanced his own position in a way not yet entirely transparent.

14….Ng8

(Black Knight returns to g8)