The Immortal Game (7 page)

One particular use of symbolic metaphor is to help us navigate complexity by reducing it to simpler, more manageable concepts. Chess is a powerful reducing agent. It can reduce a whole battlefield or city or planet down to sixty-four squares. And yet, within that simplistic frame, chess retains its active quality; like a snow globe, it shrinks things down, but retains its dynamic essence.

M
ORALITY AND POLITICS
were not the only things being transformed in medieval Europe. Influential medieval poets were also busy inventing the notion of romantic love, and using chess to convey it.

Strange as it might seem, the Western conception of romance did not much exist before the twelfth century. So-called courtly love was an invention of medieval poets who at first imagined it—rather narrowly by today’s standards—as a knight’s unrequited crush on a noblewoman who was unable to return the affection. Gradually, the romantic ideal evolved to become more of a mutual matter, and to spread beyond the ruling class.

Many epic romantic poems from the late twelfth century onward struggled to adequately articulate this new ideal of overt intimacy and to reconcile such expression with other social obligations. Indeed, the game of chess began to come in handy as a courting ritual. Young men and women played each other as an excuse for romantic intimacy—this in an age where physical privacy was otherwise almost nonexistent.

Chess became ubiquitous in romantic medieval poetry. In the Carolingian romance
Huon de Bordeaux
, the strikingly titled
Les échecs amoureux
(The chess of love), Jacques de Longuyon’s
Voeux du paon
, Chaucer’s
Book of the Duchess
, and many others, chess served to advance romantic plots and to symbolically depict feudal figures and rules.

Players, meanwhile, tinkered with the game—and in some cases contaminated it outright. The changes should not have been such a surprise considering the surrounding social turbulence. A five-hundred-year-old Persian/Islamic game was now stumbling into a very different world—or, more accurately, an array of different worlds. In contrast with the relatively unified Islamic Empire, Europe was a collection of separated fragments with different languages, customs, political realities, and thick cultural and physical barriers. The Continent was slowly being brought together into a more unified spiritual-political hegemony under increasingly powerful kings and the Church, and it was sharing more ideas and culture through the development of cities and universities; but it remained relatively balkanized until the Renaissance in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Thus chess, now with many different names, was also essentially many different local games—called
assizes
. It was as if the game had been shot out of Arabia like a shotgun shell, scattering similar but distinct fragments all across the Continent. The so-called
Lombard assize
allowed the King an extended leap over other pieces, as well as permitted the King and Queen to move together for their first move. England had two separate sets of rules for a short game and long game. In Germany, four of the eight Pawns were allowed the double-square initial move. Iceland accelerated changes in the endgame and placed enormous emphasis on the
higher
and
lower
forms of checkmate. “It took time for a happy improvement discovered perhaps in Spain to reach Germany, England or Iceland,” writes Murray, “and all the modifications did not commend themselves to players in other countries.”

Eventually, the game would take on a pan-European character. But for the first few centuries, citizens of the Middle Ages seemed to be more enamored of the game’s social carriage than its intellectual ferocity. A review of problem sets and games from these early centuries in Europe shows that competition was not fierce. There were no grandmasters, no provocative analysis, no organized competitions. “The general standard of play,” says Richard Eales, “was not high.” The fragmented, struggling Europe needed the game’s iconography, its metaphoric power, and its infectious playfulness—but not its grueling rigor. Real life was wearing and grueling enough.

In this transitional period, chess in some areas took on a very strange temporary association with, of all things, dice. While dice was being starkly contrasted with chess in sermons, it was also mingling with chess play in some European play as a new rescue from what many considered the game’s unbearable sluggishness. “The wearingness which players experienced from the long duration of the game when played right through [is the reason] dice have been brought into chess, so that it can be played more quickly,” a player from the Castile region of Spain explained in 1283.

Even with the many assizes, this was still essentially the same game as
shatranj
, with the Pawns’ initial two-square move not yet universally accepted, and the Bishop and Queen severely constrained. The weak pieces made it a much slower game than modern chess.

The slow pace had suited Muslims just fine, but from a European point of view, says Harold Murray, “the game was long in coming to a point, and the tactics of the prolonged opening play were by no means easy to discover.” To speed up the game, alternative versions had emerged wherein one die would be thrown before each move to determine which piece would be played:

If it landed on “1,” the player would move a Pawn.

If on “2,” a Knight.

If on “3,” a Bishop.

If on “4,” a Rook.

If on “5,” the Queen.

If on “6,” the King.

From the standpoint of the moralists who saw chess and dice as opposites, this was a perplexing development: fate had been invited into humanity’s great symbolic arena of skill and free will. Essentially, it pitted chess in a cultural battle against itself. Dice, declared Murray, “ruins the real entity of chess.”

Like Europe itself, the game was crying out for consolidation.

THE IMMORTAL GAME
Move 3

S
ITUATED ON
L
ONDON’S ANCIENT
aristocratic boulevard known as The Strand, Simpson’s Grand Divan was a distinguished center of drinking, dining, and leisure in the mid-nineteenth century. Men with some time to spare would gather here to smoke cigars, read the newspaper, talk politics, and play chess. For one shilling and sixpence (equivalent to nine U.S. dollars today), a patron would be furnished with coffee, a cigar, and unlimited access to a chess table. Howard Staunton, the great English champion who helped popularize the game and was organizing the 1851 international tournament, had actually learned how to play chess in the Divan years earlier. So it was a very natural place for two would-be competitors, Anderssen and Kieseritzky, to meet for practice play on one of their days off from formal competition.

Move 3 was, of course, still far too early in the game for any onlooker to detect anything extraordinary. This, so far, was thoroughly typical nineteenth-century chess. Having moved two Pawns and opened up space for the development of his major pieces, Anderssen now began to develop them, first by moving his King’s Bishop out three diagonal squares.

3. Bc4

(White King’s Bishop to c4)

This move strengthened White’s hold on the center of the board and put pressure on Black’s inherently weak f 7 Pawn—weak because the only piece defending it is the King. (Anderssen’s early moves suggested that White might be planning a Kingside
^*7
attack.)

3….Qh4+

(Black Queen to h4; check to the White King)

Kieseritzky (Black) responded with his own attack, taking advantage of a glaring breach in the defenses of the White King. He swept his Queen all the way out to the edge of the board and put White in check.

This wasn’t checkmate, or anything close. The utility of this particular early check is that it forces White to move his King, thereby eliminating his ability to castle.
^*8
White’s King was now permanently relegated to the center, easier prey for a later attack.

Anderssen, the underdog, had now lost a Pawn
and
the ability to castle. Had he already stumbled?

On the other hand, with his aggressive Queen move, Kieseritzky had also opened up an important vulnerability of his own by exposing his Queen to attack, which could soon force him to use valuable moves to retreat or reposition her. In chess, getting caught in a retreat can be a very dangerous thing. It risks turning over all momentum and control to one’s opponent. The best-laid plans, along with assorted hopes and curiosities, can quickly disappear into a how-did-I-get-here? cloud of disconnected Pawns, pinned Knights, and a helpless, unprotected King.

Both players had already begun offensive maneuvers and also taken some calculated risks. It would take many more moves to see who had made the better gamble.

I
N THE FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH
centuries, a cluster of charismatic and powerful queens emerged in Europe: Catherine of Aragon, Isabella of Castile, Mary Tudor, Elizabeth I, Catherine de Médicis of France, Queen Jeanne d’Albret of Navarre, and Mary, Queen of Scots.

By no coincidence, chess players all across the Continent discovered during the very same period that their game had been transformed. Gone were the regional assizes with assorted rules and pieces of varying strengths; gone was the corruption of dice; gone was the agonizing sluggishness. Now there was a new, faster, more universal game, with three significant rule changes:

• Each Pawn could now move either one or two squares in its first move.
^*9

• Bishops could now move any number of unobstructed squares diagonally.

• An exceptionally powerful Queen was now endowed with the combined powers of the Rooks and the newly strengthened Bishops, able to move any number of unobstructed squares in any direction: diagonally, vertically, or horizontally.

If Otto I’s Queen Adelaide had likely been the original inspiration for changing the piece from Minister to Queen in the tenth century, the substantial boost in the Queen’s power appears to have been inspired by Isabella, who for decades in the latter half of the fifteenth century reigned over the Castile and León regions of Spain in an extraordinary cosovereignty arrangement with her husband, King Ferdinand. Both rulers were avid chess players. One legend has it that Ferdinand was himself right in the middle of a chess game when Christopher Columbus approached the court with his plan to sail west in search of the Indies; at that moment, victory came to Ferdinand on the chess-board, putting him in such a good mood that he quickly approved Columbus’s request.

Isabella was the personification of new female power, equally admired and feared. She helped unite Spain, reorganized the kingdom’s finances, and instigated the Spanish Inquisition. It simply cannot have been happenstance, argues historian Marilyn Yalom, that in the same country at the exact same time several influential chess authors proposed a new chess Queen with unprecedented powers on the board. “A militant Queen more powerful than her husband had arisen in Castile; why not on the chessboard as well?” Yalom writes in her book
Birth of the Chess Queen
. “This may have been the thinking of those players from Valencia who endowed the chess Queen with her extended range of motion. Perhaps they even hoped to win favor from the Queen by promoting the chess Queen. Yet it is just as likely that those Valencian players
unconsciously
redesigned the Queen on the model of the all-powerful Isabella.”

Such was the dynamic, symbiotic relationship between chess and its adopted continent—game and society reflected and influenced one another, like a painted portrait and its subject. The new, faster, more intellectually challenging chess echoed not just the rise of female power, but also a culture in transformation. A renaissance was taking place. Europe was slowly becoming a more frenetic, curious society.

It was the age of humanism, the printing press, Leonardo da Vinci, and Erasmus. “This Century, like a golden age,” declared Italian philosopher Marsilio Ficino in 1492, “has restored to light the liberal arts, which were almost extinct: grammar, poetry, rhetoric, painting, sculpture, architecture, music…has joined wisdom with eloquence, and prudence with the military art…. [and] invented the instruments for printing books.” Echoing these changes, the new chess was a much quicker game, giving it a higher-octane feel and making it an emblem of the emerging age of knowledge. Whether by accident or design, the Renaissance itself was reflected in the new, more engaging format of the game, which quickly became the universal standard. Modern chess was born.

Just looking at static pieces on the board, the enormity of the shift would have been impossible for a casual observer to appreciate. The chessboard, after all, was exactly the same. The pieces were exactly the same. Their arrangement was exactly the same. Looking at the board through a snapshot, there was no indication that anything at all had changed. But in animated motion and in the mind’s eye of the player, it was a different matter. Seasoned players realized all too well that with the tweaking of a few pieces’ powers of motion, it was an entirely new game. It was much faster and more aggressive in that the Queen and the Bishops could now move into threatening positions within just a few moves. (One opening sequence emerged which allowed Black to checkmate White in two moves.)
^*10
And it was vastly more complex because at any given time, each player had many more move choices—and had to anticipate more responses from the opponent. Suddenly, there were vastly more possibilities of play from the very start. Now the game was not only fast, it was also nearly infinite.

Nearly infinite?
There’s a suspicious phrase, to be sure. How could something be
nearly
infinite? It’s like calling a tumor
almost
malignant. But such is the deceptive power of geometric progression, a method of numerical increase that leaps forward not by addition (10 + 10 + 10 =30) but by multiplication (10 × 10 × 10 = 1,000). Geometric progression is one of the foundational principles of all mathematics, helping to advance understanding of everything in nature that grows or spreads, from human population to financial investments to nuclear fission. Its manifestation in chess, which can be easily explained but is not ordinarily intuited, is one of the particulars that make the game so fascinating to mathematicians—and so intriguing to players.

It all starts out so simply: In the first move, White is limited to twenty options:

Each Pawn can move either one or two squares on its first move. 8 x 2 = 16 possible moves.

Each Knight is restricted to two possible first moves. 2 x 2 = 4 moves.

(The Rooks, Bishops, King, and Queen are all blocked and have no chance of moving on the first move.)

Black has the same twenty possible moves with his first response.

But with chess, the number of legal moves is only a small part of the equation. Because while there are only forty possible first moves per pair of players, there are actually
400
possible board positions inherent in those moves. That’s because for every one of White’s twenty moves, Black’s response can lead to twenty separate positions. If White moves his Pawn to a3: Black can move Pawn to a6, or Pawn to a5, or Pawn to b6, or Pawn to b5, or Pawn to c6, or Pawn to c5, or Pawn to d6, or Pawn to d5, or Pawn to e6, or Pawn to e5, or Pawn to f6, or Pawn to f5, or Pawn to g6, or Pawn to g5, or Pawn to h6, or Pawn to h5, or Knight to a6, or Knight to c6, or Knight to f6, or Knight to h6.

If White moves his Pawn to a4, Black can move Pawn to a6 or Pawn to a5…

If White moves his Pawn to b3, Black can move Pawn to a6 or Pawn to a5…

—and so on up to 400 distinct positions. To the outsider, the distinctions among all of these early board positions may seem negligible, but the seasoned chess player knows from hard-won (or rather hard-
lost
) experience that every such variation is critically distinct, that the dynamics of the game depend entirely on the exact position of the pieces. Just as an infinitesimal change in the interaction of H
₂
O molecules will change their structure from water to ice, the movement of any Pawn just one square forward can drastically alter the course of a hard-fought chess game.

Think of it as chess chemistry: each player moving just once can yield any one of 400 distinct chess “molecules,” each with its own special properties.

In the second move, the number of possible chess molecules shoots up almost past belief: for every one of those 400 positions, there are as many as 27 options that each player has for a second move. It’s not quite so simple a calculation as with the first move, but the total number of distinct board positions after the second complete move (two moves per player) is—you’ll have to trust the number crunchers on this—71,852. After just two moves each, the power of geometric progression is already bearing down hard on both players. Already, it is nearly impossible for any human to track all the possible chess molecules.

After three moves each, the players have settled on one of approximately nine million possible board positions.

Four moves each raises it to more than 315 billion.

The game has barely started and already we’re into the hundreds of billions of game sets. From there, it’s not so difficult to imagine how easily the number of discrete board positions spirals into the stratosphere as the game winds on. The total number of unique chess games is not literally an infinite number, but in practical terms, the difference is indistinguishable. It is truly beyond comprehension—“barely thinkable,” as one expert puts it—and beyond human or machine capacity to play through them all. The estimated total, in scientific notation, is 10
¹²⁰
.

With all the zeros laid out, that’s
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000
games.

(In conversational English, it is a thousand trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion games.)

By way of comparison, the total number of electrons in the universe is, as best as physicists can determine, 10
⁷⁹
. A chessboard, bizarre as it sounds, is pregnant with vastly more possibility.

Thus the unsettling term
near-infinite
is not inappropriate. Of course there’s no such thing in the literal sense (perhaps a physicist or mathematician will correct me on this point), but in subjective human reality, the phrase fits. In the same way that a near-death experience purports to give a taste of death without the victim actually dying, chess’s expanse skims close enough to infinity for players to peer over the ledge and envision the fall.

W
ITH THE
new uniform rules, quicker pace, and near-infinite possibility, chess in the sixteenth century not only reclaimed much of its earlier intellectual character. It also gained an even wider social currency. On separate paths, the game and the metaphorical tool each became so entrenched in the culture that “chess” seemed to take on two distinct identities. Among an emerging class of fervent players, it was a supremely hard-fought contest that required intense study and that taxed and stretched minds as never before. For many others, it was an increasingly useful social and symbolic device, diverting idleness, brokering romance, settling feuds, and even aiding diplomacy.

It came in handy, for example, in the tense atmosphere of the English throne room in the early months of 1565. The young Protestant queen, Elizabeth I, who had ruled for six years, was rightly worried about the ambition of her Catholic cousin Mary, Queen of Scots. Indeed, Mary had already asserted her right to the English throne, and many agreed. Owing to the voiding of the marriage between Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, and her mother, Anne Boleyn, some considered Mary’s claim (through her mother, Henry’s older sister) the stronger one.