The Immortal Game (4 page)

In the entire ninth century there were just five
aliyat
, each succeeding the other as the strongest known player. The first two, Jabir al-Khufi and Rabrab, competed against one another in the presence of Caliph al-Ma’mun. The caliph was a serious player who insisted that his subordinates play him at their top strength. He was also humble enough to understand his deep limitations. “Strange,” he once remarked, “that I who rule the world from the Indus in the east to the Andalus in the west cannot manage thirty-two chessmen in a space of two cubits by two.”

A few years after al-Ma’mun’s death in 833, the strongest player yet emerged: the apparently unbeatable al-Adli. Possibly of Turkish descent, al-Adli dominated the game for much of his lifetime and also wrote chess’s first in-depth book of analysis,
Kitab ash-shatranj
(The book of chess), circa 840. In his book he defined the five classes of skill and introduced the very first chess problems. Most of these problems were lost forever with copies of his manuscript, but some survive—thanks to the many medieval Arabic books which quoted his.

One particular al-Adli problem is still highly accessible to any modern chess player, because it includes only Kings, Rooks, Knights, and Pawns—pieces that have exactly the same moves in modern chess as they did in ancient
shatranj
.

Originally from al-Adli’s
Book of Chess
(circa 840)

It is White’s turn, and the challenge is for White to checkmate
^*4
Black in just three of his own moves.

(Do what I did: Pause book. Gnash teeth. Sleep on it. Gnash further. Give up.)

Al-Adli’s solution, as is common in elegant chess problems, lies in the counterintuitive sacrifices that White must make to win in so few moves. Major sacrifices can puzzle players because so much of a chess player’s energy is ordinarily directed toward
protecting
his or her pieces. But that’s precisely what makes a sacrifice so beautiful to watch. Intuition and expectation is confounded, and an opponent’s reality flips upside down when he sees what has happened.

In modern chess notation, the solution is: 1. Nh5+ R×h5 2. R×g6+ K×g6 3. Re6++.

In plain English:

First, the White Knight moves two squares forward and one square to the right, settling on the last vertical column—called a file—and putting Black in check.

Black has what looks like not only an easy way out of this problem, but also a major gain: he can capture the White Knight with his Rook.

After Black takes this irresistible bait, White sets up what looks like another preposterous sacrifice: he moves one of his Rooks up the penultimate file to capture the Black Knight, again putting the Black King in check.

The Black King follows this by capturing the White Rook, once again escaping check.

But—surprise—White then moves his other Rook forward five squares. The Black King has no escape.
Checkmate
.

It was a classic chess problem: maddeningly obtuse and impossibly simple at the same time. “It should be understood,” Vladimir Nabokov would write many centuries later, “that competition in chess problems is not really between White and Black but between the composer and the hypothetical solver…so that a great part of a problem’s value is due to the number of ‘tries’—delusive opening moves, false scents, specious lines of play, astutely and lovingly prepared to lead the would-be solver astray.”

Some problems were more agonizing than others. One in particular, from the ninth-century master as-Suli, was apparently unsolvable. “There is no one on earth who has solved it unless he was taught it by me,” he wrote. Indeed, the problem was so impenetrable it came to be known as “as-Suli’s Diamond.” His solution, if ever published, was lost forever. After as-Suli’s death, his Diamond chess problem went unsolved for over a thousand years.

But that didn’t stop people from trying. The bedrock ethic for chess enthusiasts would forever be entwined with the ethic of the Muslim Renaissance. Knowledge, said the Prophet, “guideth us to happiness; it sustaineth us in misery; it is an ornament amongst friends, and an armour against enemies.”

THE IMMORTAL GAME
Move 2

I
N RETROSPECT, BRILLIANT ACHIEVEMENTS
often seem preordained. But they are, of course, impossible to schedule or predict. Improvisational musicians talk about the ethereal feeling they occasionally experience where everything suddenly seems to click into place and the music soars way beyond what they had even thought possible. The anticipation of the next magic moment can single-handedly drive a performer to keep playing night after night, year after year.

So it is with chess. Dedicated players who tread through hundreds and then thousands of games find that the vast majority of them, while often interesting, are not revelatory. But every once in a while, often when it is least expected, a pair of players stumble into a game of true grace and beauty, danger and cunning, temptation, treachery, and surprise after surprise after surprise.

This is precisely what happened to Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky at the Grand Divan on June 21, 1851: they sat down for a casual game and fell into a once-in-a-lifetime event. And that unexpectedness, that surprising brilliance and beauty, is precisely what makes the Immortal Game such a great game to dissect, move by move. Anyone, experienced chess player or not, can look at each move and watch the slow transformation from mere possibility and complete uncertainty to tentative exploration, provocation, risk, and finally triumph. Following the game carefully, one can not only learn the rudiments of the game and its phases, but more importantly can also see how chess comes to life. Through this game, one can imbibe the very spirit of the game.

But one has to be patient. The road to brilliance can for a long while appear exceedingly common. Move 2 for Anderssen (White) was to slide the King’s Bishop Pawn ahead two squares.

2. f4

(White King’s Bishop Pawn to f4)

Also known as the King’s Gambit, this was one of the most popular second moves in the mid-nineteenth century. A gambit, in chess, is an offer from one player to give up a piece (usually a Pawn) in return for some possible strategic or tactical advantage. (The word
gambit
, from the Italian
gambetto
, “a tripping up of the heels,” has been a part of the chess lexicon since 1561.)

The concept of the strategic opening, wherein the players scrupulously lay the groundwork for later phases of the game, goes back at least as far as the ninth-century grandmasters of
shatranj
, who gave colorful names to various opening sequences in their books of analysis:

• Pharaoh’s Stones (“Abu’l-Bain played it”)

• The Torrent (“Abu Shahara the elder used to begin with it”)

• The Sheik’s Opening (“Na’im used to begin with it”)

Today, the
Oxford Companion to Chess
lists 1,327 opening combinations, ranging from two to eleven moves long, some with evocative names like the Sicilian Variation, the Anti-Meran Gambit, and the Queen’s Indian Defense. They are a part of every serious chess player’s toolkit—“as necessary to the first-rate player,” declared the American transcendentalist minister and chess aficionado M. Conway in the
Atlantic Monthly
in 1860, “as are classifications to the naturalist. They are the venerable results of experience; and he who tries to excel without an acquaintance with them will find that it is much as if he should ignore the results of the past and put his hand into the fire to prove that fire would burn.”

These were words of sour, firsthand experience, no doubt. For myself, as I took up the game again, I preferred to put my hand straight into the fire. I
did try
to pay some attention to my chess-beginner books from the library. But I found overwhelmingly that my interest was in
playing
chess, not studying it, which to me meant diving straight into the game and sparring with my opponent piece for piece. The concept of strategic, long-range planning felt as foreign to me as it might feel to a puppy to be asked to control her bladder. I was a chess warrior! I moved pieces in surprising ways! Standard openings be damned—I tried to throw my opponent off guard. After a particularly strange move, I would congratulate myself for my bravery; then, not losing a moment, I would plan something even more surprising for the next move. If the whim struck, I sacrificed a Pawn—not for any particular strategic advantage, but just to make sure that we kept playing the game according to my terms.

For fun, I did try to understand the four Rosenthal Variations, the opening sequences named after my great-great-grandfather that were included in the
Oxford Companion
. But I couldn’t understand their logic at all. I hoped that one day it would just come to me.

2….e×f4

(Black King’s Pawn captures White Pawn on f4)

Sacrifice accepted. Kieseritzky (Black), in his response, elected to play the King’s Gambit Accepted by capturing the White Pawn. (When a player ignores this particular gambit and moves another piece instead, the opening is known as the King’s Gambit Declined.)

Already, Kieseritzky was up by one Pawn. A lost Pawn may not seem like much to the chess outsider, but later on in the game it can easily become the difference between night and day, crushing defeat and glorious victory—partly due to the Pawn’s ability to defend other pieces, and partly because of the Pawn’s potential to be promoted to Queen if it reaches the last rank. No serious player ever gives up a Pawn lightly.

On the other hand, because Black accepted the gambit and took the Pawn, White now had uncontested control of the center of the board. Such control is critical (I eventually learned) because it establishes which army will have the freest movement from one side of the board to the other. Kieseritzky undoubtedly knew he would have to fight back for the control he’d just willingly given up. At the moment, though, he thought the extra Pawn was worth the risk.