The Immortal Game (25 page)

Chess
years old

For fun, he invited guesses about the age of each familiar game. Then he filled in the blanks with the real answers.

Gameboy
15
years old

Monopoly
75
years old

Baseball
150
years old

Chess
1,400
years old

“So chess is much, much older than all these other games. Why do you think people have been playing chess for so long? What’s so good about it?”

Hands shot up.

“Because it’s fun!”

“It is fun,” Mr. Nicholas agreed. “It’s lots of fun. It’s my favorite game. I’ve been playing chess for twenty-five years and I’m going to continue to play it my whole life. Can you tell me some of the things you already know about chess?”

Everyone, it seemed, had something to offer.

“You have to think before you move the pieces.”

“You can’t play without the King.”

“You have to take turns.”

“There’s a Queen.”

“There’s a Knight—it looks like a horse.”

“It can take a whole day to move just one piece.”

It can take a whole day to move just one piece
. The line caught me by surprise and stuck in my head. It seemed to me that its implications were enormous for any eight-year-old to consider. If a player could spend all day pondering all of her options and trying to choose the smartest move, if a simple board game could draw that much energy and time, if thinking could be that complicated and consequential, then thinking carefully must be just about the most important activity a person could do for herself. Before even learning how to play, these kids had already tapped into one of chess’s essential truths.

After working through some more history, the names and moves of each piece, and an introduction to chess notation, the fun could finally begin. Opening his large plastic poster tube, Mr. Nicholas unfurled a giant vertical demonstration chessboard and hung it in front of the blackboard. Every eight-year-old eye opened a little bit wider. From far away, the board looked like a simple flat piece of paper with a green-and-white checkered pattern painted on. Up close, though, one could see that it had small slots cut into the bottom of each square to hold the flat felt demonstration pieces. One by one, the kids got to practice putting pieces on the board, responding to Mr. Nicholas’s coordinates. Naomi placed a Pawn on h4. Alicia put a Knight on f6. Thomas put a Queen on a3.

Giggles and murmurs ebbed and flowed as each student stood up to study the board and eventually place his or her piece. The group became especially keyed up when someone made a mistake. Mr. Nicholas had to shush them a few times, and was once compelled to play his trump card. “The faster we can get through a lesson,” he said, “the sooner we get to play.”

Decorum was essential, and not just because it moved the lesson along more smoothly, but also because it was an important aspect of the lesson itself. The millennium-old tradition of chivalrous chess play was a crucial part of the attraction for Chatzilias and other instructors. It helped introduce the dynamic of tough but friendly competition at a very early age, and dovetailed with one of the school’s essential missions. In a sense, all schooling in the United States was an elaborate training session for the free-market, democratic, meritocratic, modern, bloodless warfare that would dominate their adult lives.

Mr. Nicholas offered a much simpler expression of this idea to his second graders. “We’re going to shake hands before we play,” he said, “and shake hands after we play.”

Within a few weeks the second graders were indeed shaking hands and playing chess—sort of. Once a week they would break into pairs, set up the pieces, and move them around the board. But these were eight-year-olds—the play was not always conventional. Bishops would sometimes glide straight up and down the board; Pawns would sometimes stride diagonally without the necessary capture. Checks were sometimes ignored, or illegally resolved. Many of the young players seemed to make a move almost as fast as they could think of one.

It was a healthy start, predictable, and even uplifting. But this was not the thrilling majesty of chess. Watching Chatzilias explain
check
over and over again, I felt a little sorry for him. He and his older brother Alexis, an even more competitive player, had spent their teens and twenties immersed in chess games and problems, studying past masters, becoming more and more nuanced, battling one another over and over. (“I’ve never beaten him—not once,” he said. “That is still my goal in chess.”) Now he was “Mr. Nicholas,” his days filled with shushing kids and correcting illegal Knight moves. It felt a little bit like watching a skilled Impressionist teach paint-by-numbers.

At least that was how
I
felt as I watched him on our first few days together—Chatzilias himself didn’t show any disappointment or regret. To the contrary, I could tell he felt blessed to introduce very young children to his cherished game. But I asked him if he didn’t also sometimes feel a little smothered, or just plain bored, spending all his time in such an elementary chess mode.

He raised his eyebrows and smiled. “You haven’t seen my older kids play yet. You haven’t seen my chess club.”

C
HESS CLUB
was by invitation only. Every Friday afternoon, right after school, thirty of the most ambitious players from Mr. Nicholas’s third, fourth, and fifth grade classes ambled into the large teacher’s lounge on the first floor to focus on the fine points of the game. After a few minutes of snack time and some school-is-finally-over unwinding, the kids got ready to concentrate deeply for the rest of the afternoon.

Chatzilias set up his hanging demonstration board, just as he had in each classroom during the school day. But this time he immediately arranged the pieces into a complex chess molecule, consulting a chess history book for the precise arrangement.

“Mate in twenty-two moves,” he said with an arch smile.

This sounded like a joke. Difficult chess problems typically require the problem solver to arrange checkmate in one or a handful of moves. Finding a mate in twenty-two moves seemed far beyond a manageable problem. Certainly this was not a challenge that a ten-year-old, even an ambitious one, could solve on the spur of the moment.

In fact, though, the challenge was authentic, much easier than it first appeared, and well suited to this group. It turned out that after the first few creative moves, White simply had to establish a simple pattern of moves that would push the Black King into a corner and, on move 22, checkmate him. Working together, after a few misses, the kids got it. There was no sign of obsession or anger or antisocial impulsiveness. These were kids being kids in the most uplifting sense possible, working together in innocence and fun on a difficult project.

Chatzilias was working in the context of the huge volume of modern chess knowledge and a panoply of styles. Over the previous half century, chess masters had advanced the game with one more great evolutionary step. Developed over several decades and known as Synthesis or New Dynamism, this style—or amalgamation of styles—was an effort to integrate the highly effective but seemingly contradictory advances from the previous decades—to bring together Steinitz’s Scientific approach with the Hypermodernists’ contrarianism and adventurous spirit. They did this by adopting a philosophy of organic play—“whatever happens,” American grandmaster Reuben Fine would say, “flows naturally out of the position.” Well versed in the broad varieties of play, a master of synthesis could be ready for anything with a full quiver of arrows.

But Chatzilias didn’t spend much time on broad theory. He preferred to get into problem solving. His second challenge this afternoon was the evocatively titled Frankenstein-Dracula Variation, a favorite of his and his brother’s. The name came from the hair-raising and bloodthirsty nature of the position that both players would find themselves in after just a few moves. Chatzilias set up the problem and put it to the group. 1. e4 c5 2. Nc3 Nf6 3. Bc4—and then Black lunges for the e Pawn with his Knight (3….N×e4!). Now White is tempted to take the Black Knight with 4. N×e4, but that would be falling into Black’s trap. Black would follow with 4…. d5, forking White’s Bishop and Knight and securing an excellent stronghold in the center. So White instead moves 4. Qh5, threatening mate in one move. What is Black’s only effective response? The most enthusiastic students were bunched up close near the board, and as ideas occurred a hand would shoot up and a voice would shout—“Pawn g6?”

Mr. Nicholas smiled. “No—that doesn’t work, because Queen e5, check, and pin of the King and Rook.” He demonstrated by quickly moving pieces across the large board for everyone to see. He paused to make sure everyone understood what he had just done, then moved the pieces back to the original position.

Everyone seemed to keep up but me. I sat about halfway back in the long room, at first just drinking in the happy energy of ten- and eleven-year-olds. Then I tried to follow Mr. Nicholas’s moves on the board, but couldn’t quite stay with it. Not everyone in the room was shouting out clever ideas on how to solve each problem, but enough of them were that I had trouble following it all. In contrast to the earlier second grade classroom lessons, Mr. Nicholas now moved the pieces rapidly, and skipped all the romantic mythology (“the Knight’s job is to protect the castle”). Instead, he talked in dense chess notation. The kids seemed to follow it with the same intuition and boundless energy of a summer swim game. I felt old and distant, too arthritic to move quickly around the water.

Emotionally, at least, I was very much present. There was no way to avoid becoming swept up in this club’s effervescent optimism and warmth: the dedication of young children to such a serious enterprise, the camaraderie between passionate teacher and ambitious students. It was overwhelming and infectious. Something profound was taking place in this large room, and it was impossible not to be moved by it.

These kids spoke the language. It seemed to come natural to them. They were serious and full of energy. They were focused and ready to solve problems. When they paired up and started to play, about thirty minutes into the afterschool session, they somehow managed to be serious chess competitors and exuberant kids at the same time. At Mr. Nicholas’s insistence, they recorded all the moves of each game on a sheet of paper for future analysis. The room was quiet, but not somber.

Seeing all this, I finally got it—what chess and other hyper-stimulating thinking tools could do for these kids, and for all of us. We face in our modern, splintered world not only a crisis in education, but more pointedly a crisis of understanding—of thought and of willingness to engage in thought. We live in an age where the intellectual challenges are unprecedented; just to be an effective consumer one has to be able to navigate a hundred half-truths and advertising tricks every day. Ironically, in our information age, truth is harder to come by because it is so surrounded by facts, slick presentations, and tools of distraction.

One common response to our splintered, postmodern, slippery-truth age is not to think but to instead fall back on a fixed set of beliefs, a strict ideology. In consequence, we have—inside the United States and worldwide—a growing schism between enlightened, skeptical, thinking individuals and close-minded, fundamentalist ideologues. We are also literally in a war that is rooted in these differences. We must fight a real war with real weapons, of course. But we must also address the underlying schism. The single greatest danger to ourselves and future generations is to stop thinking, and it behooves us to do anything we can to encourage spinning, skeptical minds. To do this, we will need powerful thought tools like chess that help our minds expand, grow comfortable with abstraction, and learn to navigate complex systems.

As Mr. Nicholas walked from table to table quietly asking individual kids about certain moves, I realized that I was suddenly looking at chess in a whole new way. Through the eyes of these kids, I could see that one could learn the game without surrendering to the oppressive weight of its limitlessness. Being serious at chess didn’t require abandoning the fun; it didn’t require solitary neuroticism; it didn’t even require putting up with the coldness and nastiness of aggressive adult players. Like a young chef learning only the basics of simmer and sauté, one could apply oneself to the elementary principles and thrive in that challenge, even knowing that there were—and would always be—entire levels of play beyond one’s ability. I could be serious about chess on my own terms, approaching the study of it as a joyful exploration rather than a chore.

“Suddenly I see it all,” I actually wrote in my notes. “I could learn to love chess.”

CODA

A
MYSTERY THAT WILL
quite likely never be solved can nonetheless still be a rich vein of inquiry. In Europe every few years, a small group of chess historians from all over the world gathers together to hash over the perpetual obscurities of the game’s origins and other ancient questions. In November 2003 I was invited to attend their Berlin conference. For two days, we met in a large room in Berlin’s Kunstbibliothek (Art Library), directly across the street from the aging Philharmonie concert hall. There were lectures on Philidor and Chinese chess pieces, and remembrances of recently deceased chess historians Ricardo Calvo and Kenneth Whyld. I muddled through a presentation of my own, which I called “Patzers and Progress: Chess as a Thought-Tool Through the Ages.” Some heads nodded in appreciation; others shook gently at a few sloppy historical errors. Near the conference’s end, there was a fascinating presentation on zugzwang, the paradoxical endgame phenomenon wherein the player moving can only worsen his position. Zugzwang is to be avoided at all costs, because once entered, the game is lost. The demonstration came from Yuri Averbakh, the legendary Russian grandmaster and expert in ancient chess problems who, at this group’s 1993 conference in Amsterdam, had announced that he had finally solved as-Suli’s thousand-year-old Diamond chess problem.

On my way back home from Berlin, I made two stops. The first was in Ströbeck, the tiny German “Chess Village” where the game has been a defining feature for many centuries. Legend has it that a prince was exiled to the Ströbeck prison tower in 1011; there he taught his guards chess, who subsequently taught the rest of the town and all passersby. Since then, Ströbeck has been a monument to chess’s endurance, a Mecca for serious players and a model for chess instruction in and out of the classroom. Of my countless chess losses in the course of researching this book, none was as fun as being swiftly taken apart by the leonine Josef Cacek, Ströbeck’s former mayor and the founder of its rich chess museum.

My second stop was at Simpson’s on the Strand, the still-thriving upscale pub and restaurant in London that had hosted the Immortal Game a century and a half before. Simpson’s had long since ceased to be a serious chess haunt, but it held on to many artifacts from its glory days. The stairwell to its basement pub was crowded with chess drawings, boards, pieces, cartoons, and score sheets. For anyone who cares about the game, walking down these stairs is like a trip back in time to chess’s golden age. I don’t know that there’s any place on earth where one can get a more resonant sense of what chess meant to the culture of nineteenth-century Europe.

It was also a place of unexpected personal revelation. At the very bottom of the staircase, I looked up to see a vivid sketch from 1886 of the sixteen world’s greatest chess players attending a tournament in London. In the very center, looking over my right shoulder, was the first close-up image I had ever seen of my grandmother’s grandfather, Samuel Rosenthal.

He seemed to be staring into infinity.