Counterplay: An Anthropologist at the Chessboard

Counterplay

The publisher gratefu lly acknowledges the generous support of the General Endowment Fund of the Un iversity of California Press Foundation

Counterplay An Anthropologist at the Chessboard

Robert Desjarlai s

Q3 U N I V E R SIT Y O F CA L I F O R N IA P R E S S

Berkeley

Los Angeles

London

University of California Press, one of the most distin­ guished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www .ucpress.edu. Maurice Ashley quotation from "THE FIRST BLACK CHESS GRANDMASTER," by Melissa Ewey, July

1999,

Ebony,

reproduced with the permission of Maurice

Ashley. Excerpts from THE DEFENSE by Vladimir Nabokov©

1990 by

Vintage, reproduced by permission

of the publisher and The Wylie Agency (UK) Ltd. Excerpt from THE LUNEBERG VARIATIONS by Paolo Maurensig. Translation copyright© 1997 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Reprinted by per­ mission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Excerpt from NEUROMANCER by William Gibson, copyright ©

1984 by William Gibson. Used by permission of Ace

Books, an imprint of The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Excerpt from KNIGHT'S GAMBIT by William Faulkner©

1949,

Random House, New York. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England ©

201 r by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Desjarlais, Robert R. Counterplay: an anthropologist at the chessboard I Robert Desjarlais. p.

em.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN

r.

978-o-520-26739-8

(cloth: alk. paper)

2.

Chess-Philosophy.

Chess players-Psychology.

3· Anthropology-Philosophy. GVI3l4·7·D47 20II 794.r-dc22

I. Title.

20!0026534

Manufactured in the United States of America

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consumer waste, recycled, de-inked fiber. FSC recycled certified and processed chlorine free. It is acid free, Ecologo certified, and manufactured by BioGas energy.

The essence of chess is thinki ng' about the essence of chess. -David Bronstein

Chess is life or death. The pieces a re a live, but what actually happens on the chessboard is about 1 percent of the game.It goes on i n the heads of the opponents, at a l most a psychic level, and that's what m a kes it so absolutely i ntense. -Maurice Ashley

.. . and everything d isappeared save the chess position itself, complex, pu ngent, cha rged with extraordinary possibil ities. -Vladimir Nabokov,

The Defense

C ontents

I.

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I

2 . Notes on a Swindle 3 · Psych - O ut

55

4 · Svesh n i kov Intrigues 5 · Son of Sorrow 6. A mbivalence 7· Cyberchess

Appendix

1.

82

I03 I26

IJZ

8 . 24/7 on the I C C Endgame

26

184

203

Note on Chess A n notation

Appendix 2. " L i fe is touch- move " Notes

225

Glossary

239

Ack nowledgments I ndex

247

24 5

217

213

CHAPTER I

Blitzkrieg Bop You know, comrade Pach m a n , I don't enjoy being a M i n i ster, I would rather play chess l ike you, or make a revolution i n Venezuela. -Che Guevara

Khan's got a bi shop a i med at my ki ngside. He's sta ring at the guts of my position , look ing for weaknesses. He wants to slice my pawns open to get at my king. I watch as his eyes scan the board . He sees how his queen c a n t a k e action . He g r a b s t h a t potent piece , sl ides it three squa res forward , swings h i s a r m t o the side o f the board, a n d hits the chess clock , stopping h i s timer and sta rting my own . It's m y move. There are two m inutes left o n m y clock. I take seconds to decide on a good response. Khan's on the attack . I 've got to get some counterplay going, some active m aneuvering to keep his i n itiative at bay. I d rop my k n ight onto a square i n the m iddle of the board. The move looks good, but I 'm not sure. I hit my clock. It's back to K h a n , his eyes trained on the board . We 're play i ng five - m i nute blitz games on a d a mp su mmer n ight a t a chess club that convenes Monday eve n i ngs on the ground floor of a Presby­ teri an church i n the crowded suburban city of Yonkers, New York. We 're tossing pins and skewers, forks and double attacks . We've been at it a good hour now, each of us w i n n i n g and losing playfu l ly cutthroat ga mes, but I 'm starting to fade. I ' m trying to hold on, but it's not easy playing K h a n . He has a sharp eye for tactics. He's i n fi n itely resou rcefu l and thinks and moves fast. I feel l i ke a middle-aged j ogger trying to keep pace with a track star. The position is fraught with possibil ity, but neither of us has the time to consider it closely. We're down to a few seconds each. A fierce tension heats the board; somethi ng's going to bre a k . Khan snares my king i n a

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deadly mating net. I try some desperado move s , sacri ficing my k n ight for two paw ns; but Khan sees th rough my tricks, and my pieces lie scattered about. No choice but to resign . I stop the clock s . " D a m n ," I say. " I thought I 'd get o u t of that." Khan smiles as he gathers up the pieces. It's late, close to midn ight. O ther club members were here earl ier tonight, play i n g rounds of a tou rna ment, but they 've all gone home. We switch colors and arrange our pieces . Khan resets the digital clock. " Ready ? " he asks. " Yeah." K h a n taps the clock. I make the fi rst move of a new game.

CO G N I T I V E J U N K I E S

I first met Khan in November 2002, at the same chess club, when he was n i netee n . Since then we've played hund reds of blitz ga mes together. When he worked at a restau rant in my tow n , he would d rop by my place during his lunch brea k . We would play for a n hour or more , raci n g pieces a round on a cloth board at my k itchen table, until he had to return to work . The games were a gleeful respite from our d a i ly labors. Once the clocks start, I find myself trying to fol low his imaginative, quick-witted play while plod­ ding th rough my more methodical move s . A bright g u y with a movie-star-ha ndsome face, F u r q a n Ta nwi r-or K h a n, as his friends know hi m-grew up in a work ing-class neighborhood in Yonkers . By his late teens he had severed ties with his parents. Without fa mily support to fa l l back on, he has gotten along in life through his re­ sourcefulness, his smarts, and his good nature. I sometimes wonder if this is reflected i n his approach to chess: he's wi ldly creative at the board ; he ta kes a lot of chances , some of which fai l ; and he plays best, by his own admission, when he's faced with a losing position. " My strength lies i n creativity," Khan once said . "I'll sa lvage someth ing, and I find that when I 'm down, I'll tend to play a lot better, for whatever reason . I think la rgely for me a survival instinct kicks in, and in a sense it becomes al most easier. You don't have the choice to create any more because you're forced to find the right moves, and if that pressure is not on you, it's much more di fficult to find the same moves." Khan enters a lot of tourna ments, where he's out for the big-money prizes. He a lso l i kes to play quick games, day or n ight. He has a n abid i n g love for t h e ga me. Chess gets a hold on some people, l i ke a virus or a drug. Just as the chemical properties of heroin d i rectly and i m medi ately a ffect the central

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nervous system, so chess can lock i nto certain pathways of the mind , and it doesn't easily let go . " Playing chess got to be a problem," w rites C h a rlie McCormick i n one of his poems, publi shed on h i s blog: Because I would play To the exclusion of everything else, I nclud ing eating and sleeping. I quickly d iscovered Chess was my one rea l add iction, That it would get i n the way Of all the other areas of my l i fe I f! let it.1

This has been going on for centuries now: A person's body, thoughts , consciousness become wrapped up i n the ideas of the game. " It hath not done with me when I have done w ith it," l a ments the anonymous author of "A Letter from a M i n ister to H i s Friend Concern ing the G a me of Chess," penned i n England i n r68o. " I t hath followed me i nto my Study, into my Pulpit; when I have been Praying, or Preach ing, I have (in my thoughts) been playing at Chess; then have I had it as were a Chess-board before my eyes; and I have been thinking how I m ight have obtai ned stratagems of my Antagonist, or make such motions to his d i sadva ntage; n ay, I have heard of one who was playing at Chess in h i s thoughts (as appear'd by his words) when he lay a dying." M a rcel D ucha mp, the French artist, was s i m i l a rly sm itten . "My atten­ tion i s so completely absorbed by chess," he w rote i n a letter in r9r9. " I play day and night, a n d noth ing interests m e more than finding the right move . . . . I l i ke pa inting less and less." Duch a mp gave up painting a lto­ gether to concentrate on chess , for he found chess to be a purer, more compel l i n g med ium for a rtistic creativity. The story goes that when he m a rried i n r927 he spent much of his honeymoon i n Nice at a chess club. One week into the marri age he stayed up late study ing chess problems. The next morn ing he awoke to find that his wife had glued the pieces to the board. They divorced weeks later. "Duchamp needed a good game of chess l i ke a baby needs a bottle," his good friend Henri- Pierre Roche w rote in r94 r . He wasn't the only one. Many comm itted chess players a re cogn itive junkies. They need thei r d a i ly fi x of tactics and strategy.

C H E S S O R DEAT H

I felt the same way a while back, the yea r Khan and I fi rst met. I am a n anthropologist b y trade-a sociocultural a nth ropologist, t o be precise. By

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tra i n i ng and incli nation, I am interested in getting a read on the soc i a l , cul­ tura l , and experiential d i mensions of people's lives around the world i n a n effort t o understand better what it m e a n s t o be huma n . M a ny even ings a n d weekends these days, however, I can be found seated before a chessboard , look ing for good moves. I 've got the fever. I returned to playing seriously i n the summer of 2002, a fter a twenty­ yea r break from competitive chess . I had played as a teenager while grow­ ing up in a residential town in western Massachusetts. Chess was one of my m a i n interests i n l i fe . "A l l I want to do, ever, is play chess," Bobby Fischer once said. 2 That idea made perfect sense to me then. I homed in on the game's strategic nua nces and competitive chal lenge s . During my h igh school years I woke up early to study the masterworks of Fischer and A natoly K a rpov, the best players of that era . I snuck a pocket chess set i nto my classes to mull over game position s . I felt at home at the board, less so a nywhere else. Chess formations patterned my thoughts . Some days, after look ing at a board all d ay, my chess-crazed mind would construe game positions-a k n ight here , a rook there-out of the arrangements of people and fu rn iture i n a room. Like other young people captivated by the game , I enterta i ned the notion of devoting my l i fe to it and becoming a professional chess player. But since I wasn't especi ally ta lented , and si nce the m i l l town s and fa rmlands of western Mass. were by no means a hotbed of chess praxis, there was l ittle logic i n doing so, and I ,pl ayed competitive chess only i n frequently in college . When I left for graduate school i n C a l i fornia i n 1985, I sold a l l of my once- cherished chess books at a used bookstore. O ver the next twenty years I played casual games with friends now and then or aga i nst a progra m on a computer. I had other priorities; chess was only a n occasion a l , fleeting diversion. I also knew that even a half­ serious fl i rtation with the game could chew up valuable time. One d ay, while perusing a bookstore in Manhattan in the mid-199os, I came across a collection of the games of G a r ry K a spa rov, then the world cha mpion and w idely rega rded as one of the greatest players of all time. The d i agrams of the chess positions found on every page-pictures of dynamic forces i n tension, the product of richly creative ideas-h it me hard. The i ntense pleasures I had known as a teen but long ago effaced su rged through my nervous system . I thought about buying the book, to work through i n my spare time, but it was dangerous, addictive stuff. I put the three-hund red­ page n a rcotic back on its shelf. On a Saturd ay in June 2002 I found myself walking th rough the streets below Washington Square Pa rk, i n New York. I happened upon one of the

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5

chess shops on T hompson Street, where a nyone c a n play for a dol l a r an hour. I had been there once or twice before. I decided to try a few games and soon rea l i zed how much I enjoyed the act of t h i n k i n g about my next moves and responding to my opponent's ideas . Why can't I take up the

game again? I thought when leaving three hours l ater. I was i n the middle of writing a book on the death and fu neral rites of Nep a l 's Yol mo people, a n eth n i c a l ly Tibetan Budd hist society. This was my second book proj ect i n quick succession , and I was ti red of writi ng, ti red of the anthropological profession , and ti red of thinking about death all the time. A few d ays prior to my visit to M a n hattan I had pulled my car i n to a parking space by my home i n Bronx v i l l e , New York, a fter r u n n i n g some errands. A s I stepped out of the car I 'd fou nd myself t h i n k i ng, That 's a

great parking job. If I could have a death like that, as neat and fluid and comfortable as the way my car slipped into that spot, then that would be a good death. The perversity of this logic struck me, and I stood silent i n the park irig lot, c a r keys i n h a n d . Time to take a break, I thought, from the seductive aesthetics of death. Two days after playing chess in M a nhattan I d rove up north a ways to the national office of the Un ited States Chess Federation, then in New Wi ndsor, New York, and purchased a yea r 's membersh ip, a chess set, and a handfu l of books that would reintroduce me to the game. I quickly found that the game, at the highest levels, d i ffered from what it was when I was i n my teens. It was more dynamic, more aggressive , with a complex revo ­ lution of thought emergent i n its recent h i story. It was rife with energy, imbalances, precision, flush with lines of thought waiting to be glea ned. I was hooked aga i n . " S o you're making a comeback," quipped t h e d i rector of t h e fi rst tour­ n a ment I played in, when I told him that these would be my first rated games in twenty years. " Yeah, right," I replied. Sitting at the board was at fi rst l i ke dusting off old memories. Gradually I got a fi ner feel for m atters . I contin ued to pore over chess after retu rning to teaching i n September. I attended chess clubs three nights a week and competed in tou rnaments . I came home from work each day and i m mersed myself in the rich , bou nded world of chess. My bookshelves were soon l i ned with twenty, then thi rty, then fi fty books on d iverse aspects of the game. Attending professional anth ropology meetings became a chore; I wou ld find ways to sneak back to my hotel room to study Capablanca's rook endgames. Chess had become i n fi n itely more i n teresting than keeping up with the schola rly resea rch i n my field. There was much to lea r n . It was a l l so new, so exciting and intrigu ing.

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I felt as if I were sepa rating from my spouse of fi fteen yea rs, anth ropology, and reigniting a passion for my h igh school sweetheart. I had gone native. Or, to lift a term from the soci a l sciences, there was a keen shift i n the illusio that motivated my efforts i n l i fe . The concept of illusio comes from French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu . 3 A Latin word , illusio i nvolves the interest that a person holds in a particu l a r field in l i fe­ be it scholarly work or religion or footbal l-or in l i fe in genera l . It's the i nvestment people make i n the activities that give meaning to their l ives , their comm itment t o the m . Devoted cliff cli mbers , d o g show attendees, Buddhist monks, religious fundamentalists, novelists-each of these engage with their own illusio, their own " i nterests , expectation s , demands, hopes, and i nvestments."4 Bourdieu draws on the fact that the word illusio relates etymologically to the Latin word ludus, "game," i n spea king of the ways in which people a re i nvested i n a number of social games over the course of their l ives. " I l lusio," he suggests , "is the fact of being caught up i n and by the game, of believing the game is ' worth the candle,' or, more si mply, that playing i s worth the effort." To the outside observer, uni nvolved and u n i nvested i n the social ga me being played , it can appea r arbitrary and i n significant. Bourdieu makes this point i n commenting on the social airs of early n i neteenth-century Pa ris, where the members of court society were engrossed in a culture of status and propriety. " W hen you read , in S a i nt- S i mon, about the qua rrel of hats (who should bow fi rst) , i f you were not born i n a court society, i f you do not possess the habitus of a person of the court, i f the structu res of the · ga me a re not also i n your m i nd, the qua rrel w i l l seem futile and ridiculous to you ." For those caught up i n the spel l of a certa i n illusio, by contrast, the soci a l game they 're playing i s an i mportant one; it can give rich mea ning to thei r l ives-even to the point of becoming "possessed by the ga me." As Bourdieu puts it, " T he game presents itself to someone caught up in it, absorbed i n it, as a tran scendent u n iverse, i mposing its own ends and norms uncondition a l ly." That's how I thought of professional anth ropology for some twenty yea rs. But by 2002 I had become di si l lusioned w ith the academic routines and status rites that came with the profession; I was coming to see it as a shal low ga me of note-taking and hat-tipping. W hen I started to play chess aga i n that sum mer, a new i nterest took shape for me, with a force and i ntensity comparable to a rel igious conversion. Chess emerged as the m a i n illusio i n my l i fe , much as it has for countless chess buffs. I became absorbed in chess, preoccupied by it, and took it seriously-so much so that I was w i l l ing to submit to a soci a l death i n the anthropological profession .

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A N A N T H R O P O L O G Y O F PA S SI O N

Chess rem a i ned a priority for m e over t h e next few yea rs. At t h e same time, what spa rked my interest i n anthropology i n the fi rst place-a desire, chiefly, to understand what people a re up to i n their lives-led me to reflect on the person a l and social di mensions of the game. My efforts in chess came to be motivated by two chief a i m s . I wanted to learn how to play bet­ ter, so I could appreciate the game's depths and compete at a consistently high level of expertise; and I wa nted to ga i n a better sense of the rea l ities of chess i n the ea rly twenty- fi rst centu ry. I also sought an angle on why so many chess pl ayers are so passionate about the game. A few years back I attended the graduation at Sarah Lawrence College, where I 've taught since I994 · A fter the com mencement ceremonies ended, fa m i ly, friends, and facu lty were m i l l i ng about the main ca mpus lawn, congratu lating the new graduates. I ran into a former student of mine as I made my way through the crowd . He had graduated two years before but had retu rned to ca mpus to see a friend receive his diploma. " By the way, I 've kept in touch with Shahnaz since I 've left here," he said, referring to another former teacher. " She tells me that you've been spend ing a lot of time playing chess." " Yes, that's true. I 've been playing seriously for a while now." "Why?" " What's that ? "

"Why?" Ta ken a b a c k b y h i s b l u n t question, I muttered t h a t I found t h e game fa scinati ng, but my answer was vague and unconvincing. The man soon wal ked away, no doubt wondering what had become of his former teacher, who a few years before had been expounding on cultural relativism and non -Western med ical systems. The more I gave thought to the question , the more it intrigued me. Why play chess at all? Why take up a game-if game is the best word for it-that can be so exhausting, so demanding, so madden ingly frustrating? Why spend summer weekends holed up in a n a i rless hotel convention center, shoulder to shoulder with si m i l a rly single- m i nded chess enthu siasts, star­ ing for hours on end at an array of wooden pieces on a stretch of cloi:h ? W hy devote one's energies to a time-i ntensive pursuit that is l ittle valued or understood i n one's own society? How i s it that, i n a world rife with social i nequities, violence, economic upheava l , and fast-paced transforma­ tion, people a re drawn to chess-playing? The anth ropologist i n me got to thinking: W hy not conduct fieldwork at the chessboard and train an

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anth ropological lens on the cu ltures and motives of chess players ? Why not hang out with the locals and learn what they 're up to? " Pa rticipant observation" is the m a i n resea rch method that anthropolo­ gists rely on when trying to learn about a particular way of l i fe th rough ethnographic resea rch . They participate i n the everyday activities of the people whose l ives they a re attempting to understand, while making obser­ vations about thei r rhy me and reason . As a participant observer, I did whai: other chess players do: I frequented chess clubs, pl ayed i n tourna ments and inform a l ly with friends, read chess books, ana lyzed positions with the help of computer progra ms, took lesson s , developed a reperto i re of open i ngs, sacri ficed rooks and blu ndered away queens, lost sleep after tough games, and played countless blitz games with friends and on the I nternet. I pl ayed a lot of chess , but I also gave thought to what it means to focus on the game i n a serious , com mitted way. I also spoke with a nu mber of chess players, at both the a m ateur and the professional level, about their experiences of the game. My guiding idea was that by underta king such inqu i ries, I could put myself i n a position to portray the l i feworlds of some chess players accu­ rately-much the way anthropologists have attempted to understand and convey i n writing why, say, I l longot people of the Ph i l ippines used to go on head-hunting expedition s , or how globa l i zation has shaped the ethnic identities of peoples i n Per u . I ndeed , only through writing this book did I come to appreci ate anew what anth ropology can offer the modern world . Considering chess through an anthropological lens m a kes good sense. A nthropology has been a holistic discipline from its i nception i n the nine­ teenth centu ry, with anthropologists attending to the diverse and inter­ related d i mensions of human ity, from the biophysical and l i nguistic to the m ateri a l and sociocultural. I n study ing the chess-playing world, adopting such a holistic focus helped me to tease out the interconnecting forces­ soc i a l, psychologic a l , tech nologica l-woven i nto contemporary chess prac­ tice. A popu lar conception of chess i s that it's purely a mental activity, conducted in a bodiless, word less domain by solitary thinkers who grapple with each other in a space of pure thought. But the ga me-l ike all human a ffa i rs-has a lways been a product of social, cultural, politic a l , biologi­ cal, and technological a rrangements. A chess player i s not a lone, heroic actor but is, rather, caught up i n complicated webs of mea n i n g and action . Chess is an ever-sh i fting tangle of neural network s , bodies, social rela­ tion s , perception , memory, time, spectators, h istory, na �ratives, comput­ ers, databases. A combinational complexity fixes any hu man chess scene, not u n l i ke the combinational i nterplay of pieces on a chessboard. Giving thought to that complex ity, making a study of it, a n anthropology of chess

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can attend to the thickets of forms and forces i nvolved in contempora ry chess practice-and, more general ly, i n l i fe itself. It makes sense to t h i n k of chess players as participating i n distinct cul­ tures or subcultures-or, more preci sely, i n sets of i ntercon nected chess communities-for the social rea l ities of chess players are defined by cultur­ a l ly specific practices, values , la nguages, and social relations. Backwa rd pawns, wea k color complexes , seizing the i n itiative , en passant, back-rank mates, weak masters : the game i nvolves an arcane set of rules, concepts, and vocabulary that c a n prove i n accessible to the u n i n iti ated . Stuart R achels, a phi losopher and former U . S . chess cha mpion , deems this "the curse of chess"-the fact that "even a rudi menta ry understanding of chess takes time to develop, and until it i s developed , chess seems utterly dull."5 For seasoned players, i n contrast, chess i s l i ke some enchanted palace they have stumbled across, its beauty and aston ishing i ntricacy known only to a few. "It's an amazing game," one player tells me , "but most people don't understand anything about it." Whi l e that may be true, it's possible to convey the complex ities of the game to others. The conceptual stance I 've adopted in portraying the lives of chess players is not very d i fferent from the one I employed a few years back while trying to grasp the cultural logic of shamanic healing practices i n Nepa l , or the felt i m mediacies of l i fe i n a shelter in downtown Boston for people considered homeless and menta lly ill. Through a n intensive engagement with the for m s of l i fe i n question, I 've tried to understand those forms well enough to explain their makeup to others previously u n fa m i l i a r with the m . There is no single c h e s s culture, just as there a re no singu l a rly bounded "cultures" at work i n people's l ives. Any single portrait of a n actual chess player enta i l s a speci fi c time, place, and nexus of people. The temporal setting of this book i s the fi rst decade of the twenty-fi rst centu ry, an age of weekend tou rneys , fad ing neighborhood chess clubs, globa l i zed networks of chess players , and rapid i n novations i n computer and med i a tech nolo­ gies. Global i nterconnectedness has made the a l ready i ntense practice of chess even more fa st-paced, i n formation-rich, and cyborgi a n . The regional setting for this study i s pri marily the Northeast of the Un ited States, where city dwellers and suburbanites find ways to cram i n chess a round the edges of hectic , cell-phoned l ives . The people under consideration are, chiefly, a multinational m i x of a mateur, sem iprofession a l , and professional players, ranging i n age from seven years old to eighty-two, from both the Un ited States and elsewhere , whom I 've come to know th rough my engagements with the ga me. Considering that those engagements are at a decidedly a m ateur level , the rea l m of chess I write about most inti mately i s that of

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people who do not make a living from competitive chess but a re i nten sively i nvolved w ith the game. Accordingly, I do not privi lege professional chess as the most authentic and i n formed rea l m of chess experience (though pro­ fessional chess i s clea rly at a higher level of ma stery than a mateu r chess) , but regard it, rather, as one of several fields of practice i nvolved in a much broader theater of human action and i nterest. Call it a n anthropology of passion-of the ways that people a re enrap­ tured by certain endeavors and activities, and of the vectors of such fervor. O thers h ave written about the passion ate engagements of orchid enthu­ siasts and scrabble players and a m ateur boxers . I want to chronicle the passions and counterpassions of chess players . My aim is to explore the sinews of their i nterests and consider when their a rdor veers i nto addiction or obsession. I also want to probe what happens when the zeal for certa in endeavors runs dry and people grow a mbivalent about thei r i nvestment in them. Chess lays bare key exi stential themes i n the l ives of those touched by its energies. These themes a re not un ique to chess players; they underpin much of modern l i fe . What delights, struggle s , and ambivalences sway people ? How do they man age competing i nterests and passion s ? What a re the rewards and costs of obsessive focus? With passion comes purpose. M a ny competitive chess pl ayers work h a rd on their games . They study the game, sharpen their tactica l vision , analyze past battles, steel themselves for competitive grinds, and try to promote effective modes of thought while play i ng. They engage in "self­ for m i ng" activities and devise certain "technologies of the self," to use the words of French historian M ichel Foucault. 6 A s Foucault deems it, such tech nologies a l low individuals to affect "their own bodies and sou l s , thoughts , conduct, and w a y of b e i n g , so as t o tran sform themselves i n order t o atta i n a certain state o f happiness, purity, wisdom , perfection, or i m mortal ity." Chess pl ayers employ, often w ith zealous discipline , a number of tech nologies of self and subjectiv ity-some physical and soci a l , others cognitive, emotive, mnemon ic. Appropriate t o t h i s current age o f individua l i s m a n d self-fashioning, t h e s e l f becomes an abiding proj ect i n t h e d rive toward m astery. Some a l so d raw o n chess t o i mprove themselves as person s , to become wiser, more ethically refined beings i n the world . Chess offers an education as much moral as i ntel lectu a l , and that adds to their appreciation for the game. These pages bid for a phenomenologically inclined, semi-autoethno­ graph ic approach to thinking and writing about ches s , one that gives pri­ ority to the person a l and social d i mensions of people's i nvolvements with the ga me. What a re the roles of play, ritu a l , thought, feel ing, imagination ,

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memory, empathy, creativ ity, social ity, and technology in the lives of chess pl ayers ? What are the hoes of pleasure, the h istories of p a i n ? How, once the variations a re played out, might the vaga ries of chess add to our hold on what it means to be human ? This book offers a " k n ight's tour" j aunt i nto the experient i a l , soc i a l , cultura l , and technological expanses of the human play form k nown as chess.

A M A TO R Y O B S E S SIO N

So what i ncites the passions of chess players? What do they find in chess , and why do they return to it time and aga i n ? W hile spend ing t i me a mong serious chess players I 've found that, by and large , they love the game . Ta ke Joe Guadagno, a Bronx native and computer software engineer now in his ea rly fifties. I met up with Joe and several chess associates one Su nday afternoon at a weekend tourney held i n Stamford, Con necticut. We got to talking about the trials of tou rna ment chess , how grueling it can be. " You k now, I was just thinking about that when I was in there ," Joe said, gesturing towa rd the playing h a l l . '"Why a m I here ? ' I asked myself. You've got to be a masochist to want to play competitive chess." I spoke with Joe ten days later at the Northern Westchester Chess Club i n Peek s k i l l , New York . I found Joe more rested, and less masochistica l ly inclined, than when I had seen h i m last. Joe sta rted playing in his ea rly teens , right after the " Fischer boom" i n the ea rly 19 70S, using a chess set that he was given when he received his Catholic con fi rmation . No one else i n his Bronx neighborhood knew much about the game, so to play at all he had to hop on a subway head ing south to Man hatta n , where he played at the M a nhattan Chess Club. He developed other i nterests while i n college , b u t then took u p t h e game aga i n i n t h e late 1 9 9 0 s . " I love t h e ga me," he said, w ith a sl ight Bronx accent. " It's a source of endless enjoyment . . . . It's more than just a hobby, it's a passion at a number of levels . " Joe's also awa re of the game's addictive qualities. " I 've had a couple of ti mes i n the past six or seven years where I 've had to say, you know, i f you don't cut a little t i me away from chess, you're j eopard i zing a relationsh ip." The aesthetic qual ities of chess hold Joe's i nterest. " Before I finish," he said, "I want to play at least a few games that a re close enough to m i stake­ free that I can actually present them and say, ' Here's a chess game that's rea l ly worth show ing to other people.' As if it was a m i nor work of art . . . ' Here's a m i nor work of art, but a work of art nevertheless ."' " The cl iche about the beauty of chess i s , to m e , not a cl iche at a l l , " Joe added . " It's an incredibly rich game. Everything that you see w ritten about

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chess by its lovers, about how it's ga me, art, and science, is absolutely true, as fa r as I ' m concerned . I see the a rtistic element . . . . So i n that sense, the game is attractive to me i n so many ways. It's an art form, and it's a chal­ lenging pursuit. It's a whole bunch of d i fferent thi ngs ." O r take GZA, the master lyricist of the rap group Wu-Tang Clan. Born Gary Grice, GZA lea rned to play chess i n 1975, when he was growing up on Staten Island. A lthough he did not play much i n his youth , its strate­ gies now i ntox icate h i m . "I play at home, i n chess shops; I skip meals to play,'� he said in 200 8 . " I n the stud io, I ' l l sit and play for six hours in stea d of fi n ishing a song. At home, a lot of ti mes I ' m playing on Ya hoo! [on the online chess server there] . I pl ay, l i ke, thi rty games every time I go online."7 GZA and h i s cousin R Z A , another member of Wu-Ta ng C l a n , l aunched the Hip- Hop Chess Federation i n 2007, with the idea of getting more young kids to take up the ga me. " You a re l i ke a sponge when you a re you ng," GZA expl a i ned to the New York Times. " K ids a re not being sti mulated. Chess is a game of stimulation . " 8 At t h e e n d of his track "Queen's Gambit,'' GZA rhapsodizes, I be l i k i ng chess Cuz chess i s crazy, right there , that's the ultimate It's l i ke a great hobby right there, playing chess The board, the pieces , the squares, the movement You know, war, capturing, thinking, strategy Planning, music, it's hip-hop, and sports It's life , it 's rea l ity.

Most of those who take up the game a re and always w i l l be a m ateurs at it. But it's i mportant to keep i n mind that the word amateur stems from the Latin amator, "lover, one who loves." For some, chess i s a hobby picked up along the way, while for others it's a cathedral of truth and beauty. There's a score of interlock ing reasons why people stick with the game. The attrac­ tions often relate to the drama that each game promises, the competitive chal lenge in pitting one's skills aga i nst another's, the intricate complexity that comes with any chess position , the rewarding i ntel lectual conversation that takes place between two minds during a game, how focused concentra­ tion can take a person i nto a domain of pure thought removed from the hassles of everyday l i fe , the way chess enables people to know their m i nd better, the pleasures of learning and participating in the conceptual h istory of modern chess, the cam araderie to be found at chess clubs, the thrill of accomplishing something creative at the board, and the way i n which truth and beauty-and perhaps a measure of wisdom-ca n be found i n chess . It's a swirl of deeply felt i ntensities that cut through the l ives of chess players .

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AT P L AY

Play is one of those i ntensities. What are we up to, K h a n and I, while play­ ing chess? We 're playing a ga me, a serious ga me. We're i nvolved i n a certa i n cultural for m , one that c a rries a rule-bound structure a n d a particular pat­ tern of i nteraction. B ra i n s , eyes, arms, hands, fi ngers, chess pieces, board, clock, and speech a re cued i nto a "single visual and cognitive focus . "9 We've brought to the table culturally i n formed understandi ngs of what play i s , what a game is, what competition enta i l s , what it means to win or lose, and how people should relate to their play riva l s . T h e cadences o f p l a y s k i p th rough a v a s t number of situations i n every­ day l i fe. Play motifs crop up i n conversations and legal proce!:d i ngs, in presidenti a l debates and on stock market exchanges. C h i ldren learn about the world th rough pl ay. Play i s evident in moments of d rea m i n g and d ay­ dreaming and fa ntasy, i n acts of fl i rting and foreplay and erotic pl ay, in stretches of recreational d rug use. We hear the jest of play i n riddles, jokes, puns, gossip, wordplay. We find play at work i n beauty contests and white­ water rafting, i n hobbies and gambling, at parties and i n psychotherapy. Play is centra l to musical performances, theater, fi l m , and television shows. It has an i mportant role i n creative and scholarly work , i n fiction and poetry. People busy them selves with pretend play and symbolic pl ay, ritual play and sportive play. It was the ubiquity of play for m s i n human societies that led D utch h istorian Johan Huizinga to title his landmark r938 book

Homo ludens, " Playing M a n . " While we don't have to accept Huizinga's bold thesis that human civili zation itsel f i s fou nded on pl ay, his conten­ tion that play " i s a n i mportant factor i n the world's l i fe and doi ngs " i s convincing. P l a y is as b a s i c to h u m a n fu nction ing as eating or d rea m i ng. I ndeed, rather than think of play as being bound within certain situations on ly, it makes sense to conceive of it as a n elemental feature of people's l ives. " It 's wrong to t h i n k of play as the i nterruption of ord i n a ry l i fe, " says performance theorist R ichard Schechner. " C onsider i n stead playing as the underlying, a lways there , continuum of experience . . . . Ordinary l i fe is netted out of playing. " 1° Chess belongs to a la rger un iverse of play; when two people a re playing chess, they 're up to something that is funda mental to the hu m a n species. Like most other games, a chess game i s c i rcumscribed within l i mits of space and time. Chess i s played on a chessboard, a bounded domain-a "consecrated space "-and there's a clear begi n n i ng and end to a ga me. The outcome i s uncerta i n , however, and that's part of the i ntrigue of playing or watch ing a game. There has to be some degree of i n determinacy, some

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sense of opportun ity and con tingency in the activity at hand, to make it worthy of being cal led a ga me. What will happe n , who is going to w i n , and how? I n competitive chess , something is staked on t h e outcome, b e it t h e players' chances i n a tou rna ment, adj ustments i n t h e i r ratings, a sense of self, or the rega rd of others . Chess play enta i l s na rrative i ntrigue . Undertaking a chess game trips a sense of adventure, of venturing i n to surprises and una nticipated situations. T here's a measure of fa ntasy and make-believe i n games of chess; wh ile the pa rticipants a re p a l m i n g wooden figu res , they 're proceed ing on the sha red assu mption that those figu res stand for much more than their con­ crete m ateri a l ity. I n the cou rse of playing chess a dual consciousness can take for m , i n which a pa rticipa nt is at once m i n d i n g the play of the pieces i n a virtual space and conscious that people a re the operators of those piece s . At any moment either the chess rea l m or the human rea l m can take priority. Those en meshed i n a game can become consu med by it to the point of forgetting their surroundi ngs. What occurs i s a "socialized trance" akin to that found when people a re engrossed i n a conversation , playing sports , or watch ing a theatrical performance. W h i le being absorbed i n this i magi n ative sphere , pl ayers can be transported to a nother rea l m , d i stinct from everyday l i fe . This can enta i l a kind of ecstasy, that of ex-stasis, to use the ancient Greek ter m , wh ich means " to be or stand outside oneself, a remova l to elsewhere . " Nola n Kordsmeier, a friend of m i n e , says one reason he l i kes to play chess is that "the rest of the world disi ntegrates around you while you a re playing chess . . . . There's a la rger a mount of concent ratio n , noth i n g else is i mportant. It's l i ke escaping i nto a whole other world ." As Huizi nga paints it, the primordial qual ity of play lies " i n t h i s i n tensity, t h i s absorptio n , t h i s power of madden ing." 1 1 People play chess. I n l a nguages that speak of chess, from English and Russian to Spa n ish to H i n d i , one "plays chess," as one plays games in genera l . " Playing i s no 'doing' i n the ord i nary sense," says Huizi ngaY Playi n g chess often-but not always-i nvolves an attitude that can rightly be called "playfu l . " It's a n attitude of frol icsomeness , of mischievousness eve n , of hold ing the world " l ightly and creatively," of launch i n g i n to back­ and-forth movements with a nother or with the world in genera l . u Such movements a re central to the phenomenon of pl ay. As German phi losopher H a n s - G eorg G adamer puts it, The movement to-and-fro obviously belongs so essentially to the game that there is an ultimate sense in which you cannot have a game by yourself. I n order for there to be a game, there a lways has to be, not necessarily litera lly another player, but something else with which the player plays and which automatically

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responds t o h i s move with a countermove. Thus t h e c a t at play chooses the ball of wool because it responds to play, and ball games will be with us forever because the ball is freely mobile i n every d i rection , appea ring to do surprising things of its own accord .14

There's a direct back-and-forth movement between two chess players , as they swap moves hand over hand. But there's a lso a sense in which you play with the ca nvas of chess itself. You toy with the different possibilities ava ilable to you, much as a boy can spend hours fieldi ng a tennis ball as it rebounds off the side of a house, or a punster frolics i n the play of words. British poet W. H. Auden suggested that true poets a re those who like "hanging around words l isten ing to what they say."15 Avid chess players enjoy hanging out with chess pieces, minding how they interact. Tending to these i nteractions can occasion a sense of pleasure, of jouissance. "This is why I like to play chess ! " gushed one m a n while analyzing a juicy position with friends one afternoon. Chess can be played i n a mood of levity and a m iabil ity, as when friends get together to play casual games , or it can occur i n a cli mate of grave seriousness , as when two pros tussle over the world cha mpionship. I 've watched budd ies play games with mugs of beer close at hand, with l ittle care for who wins or loses. I 've seen a child th row pieces aga inst a wall after a tough loss , and I 've watched a man pound his fist aga inst a hotel door a fter losing a gam � . I 've overheard pl ayers accuse their rivals of cheat­ ing. I 've observed friendly games turn combative a fter perceived sl ights . Chess is often fa r from "playfu l . " Competitive chess is a "serious game," as anth ropologist Sherry Ortner would put it, a politica l ly cha rged a rena of social relations and cultural formations that people grapple with and l ive th rough " w ith (often i ntense) purpose and intention . " 1 6 One veteran player told me that he thought participating in tou rna ment chess made people less, rather than more , playfu l : " People take it very seriously. There's a lot at sta ke." There a re d i fferent possible modes of engagement i n the game: seriou s , studious, reflective , playfu l , soci a l , solita ry. Chess is primarily a social enterprise. While playing chess you can spend five i ntense hours with someone you h a rd ly know otherwise-and m ight never see aga i n . A sense of comity often comes with playing chess at a neighborhood club or a tournament h a l l , as you're surrounded by others who endorse what you're doing and l i kewise find it to be

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endeavor. Chess is often taken to be a lonesome, semisolitary m atter, i n which a person i s a lone w i t h his thoughts for long stretches o f t i m e . But play i ng chess i s often a deeply social a ffa i r, as opponents , friends, acquain­ tances , and potential on lookers a re often close at hand.

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Chess belongs to a l a rger soci a l game in which we're i nvested, with its social c i rcles , tou rnaments, rating systems, and status hierarch ies. Part of the game of competitive chess is to see how fa r you can climb i n that par­ ticular "sk i l l culture." 1 7 For ma ny, pa rticipating in this scene constitutes one of the m a i n purposes of their l ives , with thei r i nterest and i nvestment i n chess waxing and w a n i ng as the years pass. For some, competitive chess is the foremost focus of their days on earth. Chess Is My Life is the title of two autobiographies of world- class players . People play chess, it's true, but it could also be said that the game plays them. A s Gadamer puts it, "all playing is a being played.'' 1 8 Th at's to say, while playing chess people step i nto a specific form of activity and engage ­ ment, and the formal qual ities of the game shape how they think and act. They get caught up i n the game. A n unwritten script is at hand; chess players k now, i n general terms, what w i l l h appen through the next minutes or hours of their games: they 'll excha nge moves until someone w i n s , or the game is d rawn . While playing chess you can be c a rried a long by the formal flow of the game. Being carried a long i n that way can be comforting or enticing or con fi n i ng. Social l i fe proceeds i n much the same way. There's a ritual quality to chess, as there i s in many games and domains of pl ay. Chess games are governed by rules, they i nvolve patterned routines and standard i zed action s , they enta i l a restricted code of behavior, and they h ave a set of fixed begi n n i ngs and endings . All this speaks to the form a l , ritu a l i stic tone of many chess encounters. R ituals often promote a sense of inclusion and belongi ng. People pa rticipating in ritual acts can feel that they a re part of a community or sha red sensibi lity. Players can come to understand that they are part of a commun ity-be it a network of "chess budd ies," a nationwide clan of chess player s , or a global chess society. The rituals of chess can also convey a sense of the sacred , of otherness and transcendence. Forms of play have a lot i n common with religious rites found around the world, for both play and ritual enta i l a set structure sepa rated , spatia l ly and temporal ly, from the happeni ngs of everyday l i fe . As H u i z i nga s e e s it, " t h e a ren a , t h e card-table, t h e magic c i rcle , t h e temple, the stage , the scree n , the ten nis court, the court of j ustice, etc . , a re all in form and fu nction play-grounds, i . e . , forbidden spots, isol ated , hedged round, h a l lowed, within which special rules obta i n . A l l a re temporary worlds within the ord i n a r y world, dedicated to the performa nce of an act apart." Both play and ritual can offer a sense of transcendence to those who participate i n them. "It is possible to specu l ate ," remarks play theorist Brian Sutton -Smith, "that the primord i a l association of the two, play and

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rel igion , i s d u e t o t h e power of a lterity, of otherness, t h a t they both share. They both take thei r participa nts beyond their present c i rcumstances, one th rough prayer, med itation , song, or rapturous transport, the other through ecstatic play i n the ga me." Play pa rticipants step beyond ordinary existence . " I believe chess can bring me closer to the spiritual part of this world i n a way that si mple material stuff can't," observes I r i n a K rush, a n i nternational master from Ukraine .19 "Absolutely u n m i xed attention is prayer," claims French phi losopher S i mone Wei l . 20 The pai nstaking observances requi red of chess pl ayers can i nvolve a kind of prayer. Some scholars contend that the origi n s of chess lie i n religious rites. As it is, a chessboard physically resembles a n altar upon which sacred rites take place. A board with pieces on it remind s me of H i ndu mandalas that I 've seen in Nepal, or the altars of indigenous healers i n Peru, as each i ncludes a bounded dom a i n that conta i n s symbolic icon s . Rel igious designs l i ke these at o n c e represent a n d s u m m o n t h e forces and energies of the world. Chess does the same, or so it seems at times. While play i ng I sometimes feel I 'm tapping i nto the forces of the u n iverse and thus sensing its primal m atter and physics . " I I: ever was, and i s , and shall be, ever-living F i re," said Heraclitus, " i n measures being k i nd led and i n measures going out ." Chess touches those fires.

"QUICK N O W , H E R E , N O W "

R ight now I 've got K h a n to contend with, in another fa st-paced game. The detritus of our action s , captu red pawns and pieces, lies about the table. I 've got a decent position, someth i ng to work with. My pawns a re solid; my pieces, active . But K h a n has a way of stirring up trouble, setting fi res left and right that I have to snuff out before they burn up the board . He's got a penchant for helter- skelter positions where his i m agination can pay off. H i s energy appears endless. I 'm fi n d i ng good moves and my m i n d is crisp. We 're match ing each other threat for threat, cascad i ng through a succes­ sion of possibilities, until we reach a n endgame i n which I have the edge . K h a n resigns just before h i s clock runs out. The thri l l i ng energy of games l i ke this makes bouts of blitz chess worth the effort. Bl itz is chess at its most playfu l , especi al ly i n i n formal settings-at chess clubs , i n parks or homes, between rounds of tournaments. "I l ike playing blitz because it's fun," Khan tells me. " You can play a lot of chess , and get some games i n , and it becomes more psychologica l , with the time factors i nvolved. It makes it a lot more enterta i n i ng as opposed to a slow game." M a ny love blitz. Some steer clear of it. Bl itz is one of fou r major kinds

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of chess played these days, each defined by the time controls used. With correspondence chess, players send thei r moves by mail or e-mail i n games that can take years to complete. Classical games , the foci of most tou rna­ ment and match contests, can take fou r to six hours. I n rapid chess, each player has from twenty to sixty m i nutes. Then there's blitz chess , wherein "the slowest game i n the world becomes the fastest." 2 1 Each form carries its own tempora l ity, its own mood and flow i n time; each promotes a d i ffer­ ent mode of consciousness and social i nteraction . With blitz you can play five - m i nute or three-minute games , or, i f you 're a true speed freak, revel in one-m i nute frenzies. If your time runs out, you lose the ga me, even if you have a w i n n i ng position. The w i n s usually go to those who play both accu rately and quickly. Many games end i n frenetic flourishes of moves and flung pieces. Blitz, which means " l ightning" i n German, i s the right word for this k i nd of chess. " O u r nature lies in movement; complete calm i s death ," wrote French phi losopher Blaise Pasca l . Blitz is poetry i n perpetual motion . It's Bud Powell o n j azz piano, Charlie Bird on tenor sax. The tempo is fast and fu rious, but also blissfully melod ic. It's NHL hockey w ithout the breaks between plays. It's a pleasure when both sides are playing with precision and i m agin ation . At ti mes while pl ay­ i ng blitz I feel I ' m at one with the world, flowi ng with its flow, in synch with its bebop rhyth ms. At other times, I 've entered a plane of tense energy. Blitz is the antistructural counterpart to serious chess, its wild, D ionysian energies antic i n contrast to the more Apol lonian orders of tou rna ment chess. Psychologist Jerome Bruner cal l s play "that special form of violat­ ing fix ity." By this he means that pl ay, chiefly undertaken by the young, disrupts patterns of action that are a ltogether fi xed with i n a particular ani­ mal species. Blitz chess violates fixity: it can take its pl ayers out of the set structures of everyday life and those of more classical forms of chess. O ften a fter dallying in a stream of blitz chess I find myself to be looser and l ighter i n spi rit, less constrai ned , and more open to creative approaches to the world. R ichard Schechner says that the looseness common to many play moods-looseness in the sense of "pliabil ity, bendi ng, lability, unfocused attention "-encou rages "the discovery of new con figurations and twists of ideas and experiences."22 Blitz promotes creative looseness. Blitz chess can provoke a return to chi ldhood glee. It can inspire

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ludic tone, a playing with play, i n which the players cavort with the play form itself. " It's j ust more fun than tournament chess," G reg Shahade, an A merican international ma ster from Philadelph ia, said one day, during a stretch of years when he'd been opting for blitz chess over rated competitive games. "A l l I want to do, actual ly, is play blitz. I think if chess was a l l blitz,

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that would be my d rea m . It would completely ruin the quality of the game, but it would be fun for me." M i khail Ta l , a Latvian player who became world champion i n 1960, at the age of twenty-three, was fond of blitz. "That's enough for today," he would say at the end of a day's tra i n i ng in preparation for a match in 1967. 21 He would then signal the next activity : " B l itz, blitz." Ta l was happy to play blitz with fel low grandmasters or with a m ateurs who spotted h i m i n hotel foyers. At t h e e n d of a tourna ment i n Zurich i n 1959, he found an avid blitz pa rtner i n a kid from B rook lyn. Ta l had a l ready packed h i s bag to leave when he got a c a l l from Bobby Fischer, the fa med A merican player, then sixteen, who had also competed i n the tou rna ment and was stay ing i n another room i n the hotel. " I 'm flying to New York i n the hour," Bobby said. "But i f you agree to play some blitz I'll give up my ticket." Not everyone is up for such pleasures. When grandm aster and chess author Genna Sosonko i nterviewed Soviet grandmaster M i k h a i l Botvi n n i k i n 198 8 , he asked t h e former world champion, " D o y o u sti l l p l a y for fun sometimes ? " to which the chess patriarch, then seventy-seven years old, responded , " I h ave never played for fu n . " " I suppose that you a re n o t very keen o n blitz ? " " The last time I played blitz was i n 1929, o n a tra i n ," said Botvi n n i k . " We traveled w i t h a tea m from Leni ngrad t o Odessa t o play a champion­ ship match and we had a blitz tournament during the train journey. I came i n first."24 The ludic qualities of blitz often occasion an a m iable soci a l scene, par­ ticularly when "skittles" (casual) games crop up i n clubs or a mong friends. The games a re ma rked by friendly bantering from both players and a ny k ibitzing onlookers . The word kibitzer stems via Yiddish from Kiebitz, the German word for peewit, a bird that makes a high-pitched call that can be heard as "pee-wit," or perhaps "kee-bitz." While kibitzing is taboo during formal games, kibitzers often sound off during i n formal blitz games, bleat­ ing warn i ngs , cooing advice. " Watch out for his rook ! " The players them­ selves also d i spense com ments on their own positions. "My piece seems to be square deficient," remarks one player during the course of a game at a neighborhood club upon di scovering that one of h i s k n ights, attacked by a paw n , had no safe square to land upon . " I can't bel ieve I just did that," says another after locki ng his bishop i nto a corner. O r they riff on their opponent's action s . "That's very mea n , very mea n," wheezes a player whose position is collapsi ng. " He's turning to feathers ! " chortles a m a n , intimat i ng that h i s opponent i s ch icken ing out. " Yes. Yes . N o . N o . Yes . Now we come i n l i ke fl i nt. N o w we're coming i n l i ke fl i nt,"

2.0

I

Blitzk rieg Bop

said a man while playing blitz chess in the sk ittles room at the 2009 World Open tourna ment, held i n a hotel i n downtown Philadelphia over the Fourth of July weekend. Others voiced rambles of their own or excha nged sallies with varied a mounts of attitude as the games , hou rs, and cash bets capered on. " You're going to pay. You w i l l pay." "That don't look kosher. That does not look kosher." " Now, th at's cute . That's cute . That i s cute. That, my friend , is cute." " T h at should have been a draw." " D raw? You couldn't even d raw a picture." My favorite l i ne was heard i n the southwestern corner of Washi ngton Square i n New York C ity, where chess hustlers convene to win some cash from other hustlers or from un suspecting passersby. " You can't dance at two wedd ings," said one seasoned player as his opponent was trying to stop two of his pawns from reaching the eighth rank, where they could be promoted i nto queen s . "No, sir. You can't dance at two weddings . " Remarks by players can have a strong performative force . Provocative speech can serve as effective action on a par with good moves made on the board, add i ng to the tactical and psychological i mpact of the pl ay. T hey can prod, taunt, tilt, destabi l i ze, sweet-talk, or trash-talk an opponent. As anthropologi st Thierry Wend l i ng says of blitz talk in h i s 2002 ethnography of chess pl ayers in France, " Speech i s used l i ke a weapon, a ' verbal joust' that doubles the purely chess confrontation . . . . It's remarkable how much the players h ave a half-intu itive, half- reasoned knowledge of the power of speech . Used i n this way, w ith its psychologic a l , expressive, and performa­ tive powers, speech reinforces and doubles the efficacy of moves played on the chessboard." 25 Words and gestures often converge , with utterances sound i ng in time with the assertive placement of pieces and the pounding of chess clocks. "Thus," Wen d l i ng writes, "the gesture, the blow on the chessboard or on the clock dramatizes the expressivity of speech ; the body serves as a technique of l anguage. " Such ta l k , usually good-natured, is part of the game. My friend Nolan tends to deliver a running commentary on h i s blitz play, painting a stream­ of-consciousness canvas of a chess player's mind. " Why did you do that? Oh, I see. My rook 's attacked . So what can I do about it? . . . It's just a ga me." Players vary i n the velocity of their chess reasoning. To watch expert bl itzers is to revel i n the speed and accuracy of thei r thoughts and actions. Hikaru Nakamura, a young A merican grandmaster and one of the best blitz players i n the world , rifles out h i s moves at exceptional speeds, stu n n i ng his devastated opponents . ( " It's amazing," one youth says of Nakamura . " H i s mind works so quick. Boom-boom-boom ! " ) I find t h a t I can't keep u p with strong blitz players; I can't see as much as they do i n split- second interval s .

Bl itzk rieg Bop

I

21

Moving a t l ightn ing speed , they appear t o possess a more advanced percep­ tual consciousness . " How can they see so much, so quickly and so accu­ rately ? " I ask mysel f. One answer lies i n the fact that strong players have a vast storehouse of chess patterns from which they draw. This gives them a rich and habituated practica l feel for the game; they can size up a game position at a gla nce and hit on viable ways to proceed a fter t h i n k i ng about the situation for only a few seconds. Even so, m i stakes happen often i n blitz chess, especially i n comparison to the precise artistry of grandmaster chess. Bl itz's fast pace means that one has little time to ca lculate systemati­ c a l ly. The t h i n k i ng is quick, abrupt, and la rgely intu itive because the sec­ onds a re ticking. I magine playing a game of Scrabble i n which each side has five m inutes for the enti re contest, or consider writing a poem with a five­ m i nute dead l i n e . That gives some sense of the brea kneck t h i n k i ng i nvolved in blitz chess. You h ave to be a "spontaneous strategist," much l i ke boxers in the ring, whose tra i n i ng enables them to act and react reflexively. 26 This helps to exp l a i n why, as compared to players who rely on stra ight-out cal­ culation, so-cal led " i ntu itive players" tend to fa re wel l i n blitz and other rapid time-controlled games: thei r feel for chess positions helps them to make snap judgments. Bl itz games often enta i l a rapid succession of moves , fol lowed by quiet i nterludes when a pl ayer devotes twenty seconds to t h i n k i ng about h i s option s , and then another flurry of move s , l i ke a boxer's combin ation o f punches. To do wel l y o u h ave t o think quickly and keen ly. I f pl ayers a re d istracted while playing blitz, even at a subconscious level , they can lose their playing edge , and miss things left and right. The same goes for when they 're tired. B l itz ca rries tones of pure i m med i acy. When playing blitz you're i n the moment of that moment, with little time to think of anything else. It's a world of spontaneity and presence, of the "quick now, here , now, a lways ," to use a poet's word s . 27 Blitz games a re often ephemera l . A game i s played and fi n i shed; then the pieces a re pri med for another round. Blitz i s l i ke un recorded j a zz i n a n ightclub: you a re attend i ng to the beautiful sequences , the lush chord s , a l l t h e w h i l e knowing they 'll be l o s t t o any permanent record . One of m y field notes entries speaks t o this: " O c tober, 2 0 0 6 . A b l i t z g a m e aga inst D a l e S h a r p , at t h e Friday n ight club. A Cata l a n , where I sacri ficed m y rook to open up l i nes of attack aga i nst h i s k i ng. A complete onslaught, memorable , breathtak i ng. We swept the pieces up a few second later, to start a new game. No trace of it a fterwa rd s . Not sure i f everything was correct, or how the game would play out with exact play on both sides. A thrill and mela n -

22

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Bl itzk rieg Bop

choly to this." Usually there is no record of a blitz game, no lasting trace of it, except i n the minds of the participants-a kind of pha ntom chess. M a n h attan hosts several public places where blitz players congregate . A long with the chess shops on Thompson Street there a re severa l parks. Battery Park i s one of them , but folks say it ha sn't been the same si nce 9/n . Some players who worked in the twin towers never retu rned . The south­ western corner of Washi ngton Square Park fields a sem icircle of conc rete chess tables where homed and homeless gather. Grandmasters were known to play there regula rly i n the 1970s and 198os, but that golden age is long past; now the corner is i n habited mostly by "hustlers, drug dealers, and crazy people," as a refugee from the place puts it. Bryant Pa rk, next to the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, has a cleaner feel to it, as suits its central location. M a ny blitzers go there for their speed fixes . Money i s wagered , discreetly, i n these places: from $5 t o $ro a g a m e , b u t I 've heard some gamblers have th rown down $ ro,ooo or $2o,ooo stakes. Many park players rely on offbeat schemes that work best on short notice but a re scoffed at by tou rnament players . " He's a street pl ayer," one man says of another. " T h at stuff m ight work i n the parks, but not i n tou r n a ments." Blitz evokes strong sentiments a mong chess players. A few take delight i n blitz and consider it to be chess in its purest for m . Others a rgue that the quick pace can lead to super ficial thought and a relia nce on cheap tricks, which can be detrimental to a person's ga me. " Blitz and rapid chess involve a lot of smoke a nd m i rrors, while stand a rd chess is a quest for truth," remarks one pl ayer. The sentiment dates back at least to the eighteenth centu ry, when French chess sage A n d re Phil idor averred that "skittles a re the social glasses of chess-indu lged in too freely they lead to i nebriation , and weaken the consi stent effort necessary to build up a strong ga me." More modern language gets at similar idea s . " It 's sad to rea l ize that there a re people who think that chess is only a 5 - m inute game and miss the beauty, creativity, logic, and depth of slow games," says chess w riter Kelly Atk i n s . " B l itz is fine for those who enjoy it, and it has its place, but it's the fa st food version of our game-McChess i n my book ." 28 If you dally in too much blitz, goes the convention a l wisdom, you can slide into bad habits. You can develop a penchant for playing obvious moves quick ly, without giving serious thought to the nuances of the position . " Bl itz kills ideas," said Bobby Fi scher. A person's play can get sloppy, pedestrian. I 've seen this i n my own efforts: if I muck around too much with blitz, when I sit down at the board to play a slower game I act hasti ly, fl inging a kn ight there, slapping a pawn here, in a scattershot of knee-j erk responses. " It's da ngerous to play too much blitz," says Sam Shankland, a young

Blitzk rieg Bop

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23

i nternational master from C a l i forn i a . " I t builds bad habits. I used to move notoriously quick ly, which i s very bad for one's practical chances. It's dan­ gerous to play too much ." Sti l l , Sam executes thi rty to eighty blitz games a month . " I t keeps my game in for m , rem i nds me of my open i ngs, and keeps my tactics sharp." O thers as well try to modulate between the con fl icting pulls of passion and reason , between wanting to bask i n the pleasures of blitz and knowing it's best to go about chess i n more purposefu l ways. Most players find that blitz, l i ke a lot of other da ngerous substa nces, can be i m bibed i n moderation. You don't want to get hooked on it at the expense of more classical modes of pl ay. But you don't have to avoid it l i ke the plague, either. " Use fast games to practice open i ngs, or to relax once i n a while, n o t as a steady d iet," D a n Heisma n , a chess instructor, advises h i s students . 29 Many find t h a t it's a good w a y t o l e a r n n e w open i ngs , as o n e can get i n a l o t of g a m e s on s h o r t notice, and t h a t playing b o u t after bout helps one to develop a richer feel for the game. Robert Cousi n s , an expert­ level player, spoke of this one day as we talked about the game. " Yes, I enjoy playing blitz," he said. " T here's also a d i fferent feel to it. It's l i ke rap music as opposed to opera ." Robert received con fi rmation of the value of playing blitz when he sta rted to take lessons a couple of years back from Adnan Kobas , a F I D E master from Bosnia who teaches chess in New York and Connecticut. " When I fi rst started studying with Adnan," he told me, " he looked at my games and said, 'Okay, you and I a re goi ng to play a lot of blitz, because it improves your tactical vision , it helps you with practicing your openings, it exposes you to new ideas. And it helps with playing i n time pressure ."' Robert plays blitz with friends and on the I nternet, a handful of games each week. These encounters are bala nced by tough, over-the-boa rd competitions. Then there are those pl ayers, less a mbitious, who thi n k they've seen better days at the board, who end up playing blitz more than anything else, who love its fleeting joys and m iseries, who sit down for a few games and a re still playing hours later.

I look at my watch. It's after midn ight now. "A couple more ? " K h a n asks. " Sure." We 've lost track of the number of games we've pl ayed ton ight. There's a world sleeping around us, we've got thi ngs to do in the morni ng, but we're thi rsty for a few more combinations. This is chess as friendship. We set up the pieces. Khan reaches out and starts my clock.

24

I

"It's pretty much the only time I ever feel anything " " It's the only thing that doesn't get boring a fter a while," says Elizabeth Vica ry, an ebu l l ient woman i n her ea rly thi rties who has devoted much of her l i fe to play i ng and teach ing chess. " I 'm obsessed w ith it." E l i zabeth took on a series of unorthodox jobs after graduating from Columbia Un iversity. She worked as a personal assistant for a Jordanian pri ncess , wrote encycloped ia a rticles , and then worked for Chess i n the School s , a nonprofit orga n i zation based in New York that provides chess i nstruction to i n ner-city kids. That post led to her current job, which i s to teach chess at IS 3 1 8 , a j u n ior high school in Brooklyn . It's a "dream job" for her, for a long with being able to teach chess she gets a lot of support from the school's administration. She teaches what she wants to, and she has the funds she needs to buy digital chess clocks or sponsor her students' trips to the scholastic nationals tourna ment each year. She has been playing and absorbing the ga me along the way. It's the game's potenti a l for mea n i ng-making more than its competitive side that propels El izabeth. " G a mes a re very beautiful in the na rratives them­ selves . . . . I don't have any other activity that I do that I feel l i ke it's mean­ i ngfu l . Every thing else I do I feel l i ke I should be doing something else . . . . You go to a party, and you talk to some people on a roof i n Brook lyn, and you feel l i ke, Why am I talking to this drunk jerk? R ight? And you feel you a re i mproving as a person , or you're m a k i ng progress toward something, or there's some i n herent meaning i n it." Chess assures her l i fe of a moral education and a durable fabric of meaning. E l i zabeth has kept a blog si nce August 2007, where she posts candid musi ngs on chess-related topics. When I fi rst met her, she had just w rit­ ten an entry, "I H ate Myself," in which she screa med out her frustration with herself for losing a tou rnament game that weekend. I n the game, she miscalculated the outcome of a n overly opti m istic rook sacri fice. "A nd you know what occurred to me last n ight that I was going to tel l you about ? " s h e a s k s h e r readers. " I rea l i zed t h a t I play chess because it's pretty much the only t i me I ever feel anything. The rest of the time, with just a couple exception s , I a m a l most completely numb. S omewhere a long the way I tu rned i nto a zombie." I ask her to say more about this. " Yeah," she says. " I j ust don't feel that much. I don't feel that invested in anyth i ng else, and I guess as a n adult your rel ationships sort of settle down a little bit, so there's no big drama i n my l i fe emotion a l ly. And so every-

I

25

thing else I can do on autopilot, and chess is the only time that I actually h ave to be there , where I have to work h a rd i ntellectually. . . . Chess is the only ti me that I rea lly h ave to work , that I really have to try, and I 'm rea l ly on the l i ne in any kind of way. And so, yea h , it's the only ti me-it sounds bad-the only time I feel extremes of emotion ."

C H A PT E R 2

Notes on

a

Swindle

Nothing binds t w o people like a serious chal lenge on a chess­ board, making them counterposed poles of a j ointly produced mental creation i n which one i s a n n i h ilated to the other's advantage . There is no ha rsher or more implacable defeat. The players bear l i felong scars, neither body nor soul ever recovering fully. -Paolo Maurensig,

The Liineburg Variations

J u ly 19, 200 3 . You're not sure how much English you r opponent knows, so when you meet him at the board you nod and smile on ly, and he does the same. At least he's not the gruff, unfriendly type. Vlad i m i r Grech i k h i n is his name. He's wea ring a blue d ress shirt unbuttoned at the collar, looks to be i n his ea rly sixties, and has the sturdy build of someone who has done manual labor during his l i fe . He's rated 2200, which i s the baseline for a master's rating. You suspect he has seen better days at the chessboard, that he's not playing at the level he was once capable of. You wonder where he's fro m , when he came to the States, what kind of work he does, and how long he has been playing chess. But there's no time for that kind of talk. You're at the Marshall Chess Club i n M a nhatta n , a few blocks north of Washi ngton Square Pa rk, waiting for the fi rst round of a weekend tourna­ ment to begi n . From the outside, the red brick building at 23 West roth Street doesn't stand out i n any way. The only feature that distinguishes it from the other townhouses l i n i ng this stately residential st reet is a s m a l l plaque by t h e front d o o r t h a t announces t h e club's name. B u t step i n side the place on any weekend and you'll happen upon a cra mped but vital domain of chess pra x i s .

Notes on

a

Swindle

I

27

W E E K E N D WA R R I O R S

You entered that domain today, a few minutes before noon. You climbed the creaky wood sta irs to the second floor and encou ntered a mix of folks waiting for the tou rna ment to begi n . Kids were seated at tables too big for them, pedd l i ng blitz games with friends they hadn't seen since the weekend before. The father of one of these prodigies had set up his laptop on a corner table to get a head on some work while his son competed. Older players were stand i ng about, talking, checking to see who else had shown up that d ay. Two middle-aged men were hunched over a board, rehashing a game they had played several even i ngs before. "I should have exchanged rooks when I had the chance," one of them said. The second nodded . Other players-a g i rl accompanied by her mother, col lege students, masters from Russia and Eastern Europe, club regulars, gangling teenagers from Brooklyn-trickled i n to the building and cli mbed the stairs to the second floor, where they l i ned up outside the club's office and registered for the day's event. Founded i n 1 9 1 5 by Frank ] . M a rsha l l , the strongest American player of his time, the club is one of the most renowned i n the world. Occupying the fi rst two floors of a brow nstone, it has served as a competitive a rena for generations of chess players , i nclud i ng Bobby Fischer i n h i s ea rly, less reclusive days. It's a mecca for serious players i n the New York a rea. " I f you want to play the best players , th at's where you go," said a friend . Some find the place " intense" and "unfriendly" and play elsewhere, but for others the brusque i ntensity comes with the territory. The club runs a number of tou rna ments month ly, i ncluding weekend Swisses , where people compete for cash prizes and rating points over a two-day stretch. You've been playing i n tou rna ments here off and on since the previous J u ly-when you lost your fi rst game to a n eleven-year-old gunning for bigger scalps. O n most occasions you 've played in t he Under 2000 section, which comprises players rated 1999 and lower, but this weekend you're playing i n the Open section with the hope of getting i n some h igh-quality games against strong, master-level competition . Your current rating of 1 876 puts you i n the top 6 percent of a l l tournament players . I n the lofty heights of the M a rsh a l l , though, it places you at the bottom of the pool of contend­ ers i n the Open section . The top of each pyramid i s a pyra mid i n itself; you're at the base of that smaller pyra m i d . Your goa l i s not to w i n a l l your games, but to play well and learn someth i ng i n the process. A fter doling out the thi rty-five-dol l a r entrance fee for nonmembers you walked about, noting the fra med photographs of fa mous pl ayers adorn­ ing the walls. I n one, greats l i ke A lekhine, Capabl anca, N i m zowitsch ,

28

I

Notes on

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and M a rshall stand unsmi l i ng a round a chessboa rd . I n another, Fischer sta res i ntently at a position. I n the hal lways, computer printouts posted on bul letin boards an nounce the results of recently completed tourna ments . Toward the front stands Capablanca's table , where the great Cuban player was fond of playing. At

r 2 : 45

the tou rnament di rector posted a sheet of paper that l i sted the

pairings for the first rou nd, and pl ayers c rowded a round it l i ke h igh school athletes chec k i ng to see whether they made the tea m . You were p a i red aga inst Mr. G rech i k h i n , a ma ster-level Russian em igre and regu l a r of the club. You played h i m once before, back i n June, at another M a rshall week­ ender. A fter a long, muddled game, you stepped into t i me trouble , messed up a tense position , and lost. " T he endga me," you said after resign i ng, while look ing at the remain ing pieces on the board . You meant to say something l i ke , " I was doing wel l enough until the endgame, when , short of time, I made some bad moves." But given his l i m ited Engl ish, you uttered only the shorthand version . " Yes. The endga me," Grechikhin replied. Later, you wondered if he took you r comment to mean that you can't play the endgame wel l . A mericans have a reputation for that.

O P E N I N G S A N D E N DI N G S

The endga me is the t h i rd and last stage of a game i n its prototypical for m . Chess players t h ink o f t h e game as being composed of three phases: open­ i ng, midd lega me, and endga me. The opening consists of the initial moves, i n which pl ayers try to develop thei r pieces i n effective ways, create a safe h aven for their k i ng, and prepare their forces for the battles to come. The midd lega me proceeds from the opening, with the pawn and piece con figurations established i n the open ing stage setting the terms of the contest. I f t h e g a m e i s n o t decided earlier on, then it w i l l c o m e down t o an endga me, which i s , by definition , when there are only a few pieces left on the board; the other pieces have been exchanged . Si nce the d i m i n i shed material m a kes a d i rect mating attack less feasible, the play i n endgames often revolves a round attempts to advance a pawn to the eighth rank, where it can be promoted to a queen or a nother piece. That additiona l piece can then help the side possessing it force a win th rough checkmate. The three stages of the game requ i re d i fferent k i nds of know-how. The open ing requi res a k nowledge of effective ways to deploy one's pieces. Success i n the midd legame usually rests on the resou rcefu l employment of one's experience and understa nding of strategic and tactica l ideas. Most

·

Notes on

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Swindle

I

29

endgame positions requ i re a tech nician's k nowledge , geared toward con­ verting a n edge i n to a w i n n i ng advantage. Or, as Viennese grandmaster Rudolf Spiel mann put it severa l decades ago, " Play the open ing l i ke a book, the m iddlegame l i ke a m agic i a n , and the endga me l i ke a mach i n e . " S i nce hard work is a prerequi site for acqu i r i ng any degree of expertise i n any of these areas, players vary in the i r strengths and wea knesses in each phase of the ga me. Pl ayers i n d i fferent chess societies tend to focus on d i fferent aspects of the game when lea rning it. I n Russia and eastern Europe, schoolch ildren learn chess by study i ng the endgame fi rst and foremost , then go on to enha nce their understanding of the other phases of the game. The focus on the endga me, the i r teachers understa n d , gives them a refined feel for the possibilities of each piece and, ultimately, a n i n formed sense of how to steer spec i fic ope n i ng or m idd lega me formations towa rd adva ntageous endi ngs . I once asked Predrag Traj kovic, a gra ndmaster from Serbi a , for h i s opinion on the best way to learn to play chess wel l . " To sta rt from endga mes, while creating a small open i ng repertoire," he a n swered . "If you don't know end­ games, you don't know the goa l . It's like when you d rive somewhere, l i ke th rough New York C ity, and you're not sure which is the best way to go. T h i s is like a chess game. For many players, a chess game is l i ke m a k i ng a trip without a goa l , just driving." K nowi ng endga mes well gives a player a clear sense of the desi red desti nation and a road map for getting there . M a ny A merica n s , i n contrast-espec i a l ly those who learn the game on thei r own-a re known to devote much of thei r i n itial stud ies of the game to a deta i led i nculcation in various open i ng systems. They do so i n part because studying "openi ngs" is easier and more exciting than endga me study, and in part because the returns on such a n education can be i m me­ d i ately appreciated, si nce one is able to establish a decent position after the fi rst five or ten moves of a game. The downside is that the same A merica n s , or s o t h e mythology goes, often neglect t o u ndertake a serious study o f the endga me, even later in their chess careers .

" O U T O F B O OK "

M r. G rech i k h i n m ight h ave come to assume that you a re a typical Ameri­ c a n pl ayer after your fi rst game together. He's sitting across from you now. You're soon to embark on that wei rdly i n t i mate s o c i a l encounter known a s a tou r n a m e n t chess ga m e . S i nce G rech i k h i n did not overwhelm you i n your last ga me, you feel you have a decent shot aga i nst h i m .

30

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Notes on

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Swindle

You're positioned elbow-to - elbow a longside other players in the room , which i s the size of a small classroom a n d sepa rated from the adj o i n i ng h a l lway by a red curta i n . This ritual space holds severa l rows of tables , two or three chessboards to a table, with a nu mbered piece of paper taped next to each one. The h ighest-rated player i s at the fi rst board, playing the highest-rated player from the second tier. You r opponent i s the fi fth-h ighest rated , so you're seated at Board

5·

I lye Figler, a well-k nown master and chess coach, sits a few feet away. He's facing off aga inst Katharine Pel letier, a girl in her high school years. Next to him i s Jay Bonin, a n i nternation a l m aster who plays more tourna­ ment ga mes each year than a nyone else-a whopping

509

in

2002.

A short,

stocky man who often looks l i ke he's one relaxed breath away from dozing off, Bonin works days in the rri a i l room of a Manhattan law fi r m , sorting letters , m a k i ng deliveries. He can be found most even i ngs and weekends at the M a rshall or at the Nassau Chess Club, on Long Island. When friends used to ask him why he played so much, he wou ld a n swer, "I wouldn't know what else to do." 1 Today he's wea ring a shirt with a logo on the back that reads , " S low S moked Memph i s Style." He's p a i red up against a n expert- level player w h o looks a b i t nervous. Bodies and voices settle dow n i n the room. A round you, other games a re begi n n i ng; you shake hands with G rech i k h i n , and then start his clock. He's been assigned the Wh ite pieces. You h ave Black . You each have n i nety m i n utes to make your fi rst thi rty moves. A fter that there's a n addition a l "sudden death" h o u r u n t i l someone w i n s , someone's t i m e expires, or a draw is agreed upon . The player w ith Wh ite a lways moves fi rst, so G rech i k h i n makes h i s fi rst move. You w rite down the move on your ga me score sheet. With your own fi rst move you try to steer the game toward a combative , double- edged defense k nown as the Sicilian D efense. It's c a l led a Sicilian because an ea rly seventeenth-century advocate of it was from Sici ly. In chess, recogn ized sequences of open ing moves a re known as openings if they a re undertaken by W hite ( " Bishop's Opening") and as defenses i f undertaken b y Black ( "Alekhine Defense " ) . Chess is l i ke A merican football i n that there is an assortment of n a med formations that players can wield i n setting up offen sively or defensively : while in football we find the West Coast offense and a

3-4

defense, in chess we have the Spanish Game, the

French Defense, the Queen's G a mbit Declined. One d i fference is that i n chess, the combatants don't l i n e u p a l l at once, as play proceeds on a turn­ by-turn basis: Wh ite posts a pawn here, Black answers w ith a k n ight there , as the game builds on a vibrant excha nge of motives and ma neuvers.

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You'd l i ke to lead the game toward the Accelerated D ragon , a variation of the Sici l i a n you've been playing l ately. Grech i k h i n wants nothi ng to do with that. He steers the game i nto a n offbeat anti-Sici l i a n vari ation known as the Wing G a mbit, where he proposes the sacri ficial gambit of a pawn to ga i n good control of the center squares and scamper h i s pieces i nto pl ay. He wants to m i x thi ngs up and outplay you in a complicated melee. H i s g a m e strategy th rows y o u o ff ; y o u were hoping for a more measu red ga me, i n waters you k now better. You flinch. You don't want to play aga i n st this. You've seen this position on chessboards before , and have fought against it i n blitz games. You understand that the chess theorists out there consider the gambit dubious , but you don't rightly know what to do aga inst it, so you'll have to play by feel. You're a l ready "out of book," as they say. You feel your heart pulsing in your chest. You're look i ng to survive the open­ i ng. You're remi nded of a boxer who steps i n for the fi rst rou nd only to be p u m meled out of the r i ng. Grech i k h i n 's cava lier approach makes you wonder i f he doesn't think mu ch of h i s opponent's chess s k i l l s . He probably wou ldn't wield the ga mbit aga i nst a stronger player. Perh aps he's a i m i ng for a quick win against what he takes to be a patzer, an i nexperi � nced player. You give your next moves a lot of thought, as your clock ticks off pre­ cious minutes . T here's no way you want to get your k i ng caught i n a lot of crossfire before it has time to find cover behind a row of pawns. You decide to play cautiously, a i ming for a solid defensive setup, and decline G rech i k h i n's pawn offer. You figure there's probably not much established theory covering the positions that w i l l result from your move , so you're both i n uncharted waters . I f your game were a theatrical play, it would be a n experimental off- off-Broadway production . G rech i k h i n makes a move. You think about how you want to pa r ry, and make a move of you r ow n . He does the same after a few m i nutes, as the two of you become embroi led i n the syncopated , back- a nd-forth d i alogue that makes up a tou rnament game. At one point, you see what you take to be a way that G rechi k h i n can launch an attack. You start to worry about h i m opening up the center before you can h ide your king on the kingside. But he doesn't fol low that course , either because he doesn't notice it h i mself or because he decides that it's not worth pursuing. The game proceeds along a less violent path. A sequence of c a refu l ly selected moves leads to a position where you're not badly off. With your eleventh move , you nudge your queen from its starting posi-

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tion to a square that looks prom ising for it, and then sit back to take stock. You've survived the fi rst onslaught. You've managed to develop your pieces and get your k i ng castled safely behind a row of paw n s , w ithout giving up too much grou nd. You r heart beats less frantical ly. You step out of the room to get some water, and return to the board. You take a look at the game to your right. A man i n his fi fties ( Russi a n , apparently) i s playing a gritty game aga inst a hormon a l k i d pushing sixteen at best. The Marshall fields a spectrum of chess players. Eager schoolkids, many with persona l tra i ners, are looking to earn rating points. H igh school and col lege players are out for blood. Casual players show up every so often, while grandmasters swing by to earn a bit of cash. Middle-aged regu lars play every weekend, because that's what they do. A mong them a re some Russian players who know their way a round a chessboard. The multicultural mix of the place attests to chess being a med ium that transcends languages, genera­ tions, cultural sensibilities. The l anguage-free geometries of the game permit people to relate i n ways that otherwise would be tough going. It's G rech i k h i n's turn to move . He's look i ng for a way to get a w i n n i ng edge in the position . He has a wealth of knowledge to draw on: games he has played i n his l i fe , or what he remembers of them , as wel l as ideas he has picked up from studying the games of the great masters ; all the tactical motifs he has soaked up over the years; the endga me stratagems he has acqu i red. Much of this is ava ilable to him more th rough i ntuition than th rough overt, conscious cogn ition . He has a fa i r sense of chess psychol­ ogy, of when to stir up compl ications and when to sit back and wait for h i s opponent to make the fi rst big mistake. He has a l i fetime of experi­ ence with which to work . "In A frica, when an old m a n dies, it's a library burning," says Malian writer A m adou H a mpate B a . Veteran chess players embody a s i m i l a r store of perishable k nowledge. But your opponent is also getting older, and knows perhaps better than anyone that his mind is not as sharp as it once was. It's not only what a person knows that helps h i m a long in a chess ga me. It's what he does with what he knows-how he performs at the board that d ay or hour. You're both draw i ng from the cogn itive and physical resources ava i lable to you in trying to vanquish the other.

'A G O NI A'

Chess pits one player aga inst another. If we fol low French thinker Roger C a i l lois's classi fication of games undertaken by human bei ngs-ga mes of

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competition (agon; footb a l l , b i l l iards) , of chance and fortune (alea; playing dice, lotteries) , of simulation and role-playing (mimicry; playing pi rate or house) , and of d isorientation and vertigo (ilinx; spi n n i ng a round until one gets d i zzy)-then it's clear that chess i s a game of agon, of i nterpersonal contest. 2 The word agon comes to us from ancient Greece, where it referred both to the conflict between the protagonist and a ntagonist in a work of lit­ erature and to contests, as in athletics and music, in which pri zes were awarded . Related to that term a re such modern words as antagon ist, from the G reek antagonistas, "competitor, opponent, rival," and agony, from the G reek agonia, "a (mental) struggle for victory " and "the feeli ngs of exhaustion, or p a i n , after the event." As C a i l lois says of games of agon, " T he point of the game is for each player to have h i s superiority i n a given a rea recogn ized. That i s why the practice of agon presupposes sustai ned attention, appropriate tra i n i ng, assiduous application, and the desire to w i n . It i mpl ies d i scipline and perseverance." Much the same could be said of chess and chess players. "I l i ke that i n chess , un l i ke i n cards or other games , there's no such thing as luck," says K i m Qvi storff, an a m ateur player from Denmark. "There's you and your opponent. It's a me-and-you k i nd of thing." Each k i nd of game, it i s said, has its own proper spi rit-its own mood, metaphysics, and ethics. What is the proper spirit of chess ? I f chess were a universe onto itself, it would be a cosmos founded on the agon istic play between two sets of warring, i mpersona l forces, what Nietzsche once cal led "the strife of opposites." l It would be a world cha racteri zed by i nterlocki ng dualities. Chess is relentless a ntagon ism, a d i a lectics of W h ite and Bl ack pieces, l ight and d a rk squares, self and other, w i n n i ng and losing, play and competition . T here's ten se play between opposing forces and a struggle between two embod ied consciousnesses. You're trying to get someth i ng done with each move-place a kn ight on a good square, create wea knesses i n the enemy's ca mp-wh i le your opponent i s trying to accompl ish some­ thing of his own or to contest what you're trying to do. It's l i ke striving to compose a poem while standing next to a naysaying obstructionist. For me, this cou nterpresence i s most at hand when I 'm facing strong players . It's as though I ' m fighti ng against a force field of some sort; aga inst something hard , unyielding. This spi rit of confl ict makes the creative efforts i n chess more l i ke those found i n a high-stakes tenn i s game than those evident i n individual a rts l i ke painting or in colla borative arts l i ke dance or jazz ensembles . The

agonia of chess is such that a player i s a lways trying to create within a field

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of resistance, and any attempt to proceed creatively, to sculpt something effective or beautifu l , i s i n tension with the opponent's own efforts. I n the wistfu l words of A lexander Alekhine, the fourth world cha mpion , which he w rote in the preface to a r929 book by a composer of chess puzzles, " I wou ld l i ke t o b e able t o create alone, without the necessity, as i n games , of adj usting my plans to those of the opponent, in order to create some­ thing that will rem a i n . Oh! This opponent, this collaborator aga i nst h i s w i l l , whose notion o f Beauty a lways d i ffers from yours and whose means (strengt h , i magination , techn ique) a re often too l i m ited to help you effec­ tively ! What torment, to have your thinking and your fa ntasy tied down by another person ! "4 I magine a m aster painter whose every brushstroke i s countered , stroke b y stroke, b y t h e h a n d o f a nother. Chess games a re tugs- of-wa r of w i l l and effort. I ntentions butt heads with counterintention s . " T he opponent i s a lways very a n noy i ng! " said Bent L a rsen, a Danish grandmaster and one of the world's best players i n the l ate r96os. It's enough to m a ke one detest an opponent's presence , to wish his for m out of existence . Chess is at once playful and cutthroat. There's a persistent tension between the competitive thrust of the game and the fact that friendly ties can crop up a mong chess players. Chess encounters can also bring hea lthy exposure to otherness and d i f­ ference. They offer a way of extend ing and enriching oneself through the fra n k rega rd o f others. Chess teachers say as much when discussing how play i ng the game makes clear to children and adolescents that there a re other persons in the world, with thei r own yea r n i ngs and active demands. As Leonid Yud a si n, a Russian-Jewish grandma ster and trainer from St. Petersbu rg, tel ls it, "The m a i n problem for kids i s to understand that the other exists . ' I want! ' That's a l l they do i n l i fe . . . . With chess , you have to t h i nk about what this other person doe s . It doesn't help to say, ' No, I don't l i ke this ! ' And it's pai nfu l ; kids need to w i n . In chess, if you make a wrong move , you're lost. It's a very good way to show that it's i mportant to work seriously, and to understand that this other guy exists." Chess readily provokes a "traumatism of the other," as phi losopher E m m a nuel Levinas m ight put it. A tough contest can take you out of the bubble of your thoughts and force you to con front the demands of a nother. You r opponent's w i l l fu l d i fferentness disrupts t h e self-sa meness of y o u r own being.1 Speak i ng for myself, I 've come to value the useful traumatism that comes with playing aga i nst a tough opponent or with a friend. It would be a m istake, however, to say that it i s a l l otherness, or con flict and tension on ly. Chess players pa rticipate i n a sha red activity and can become engaged i n a " mutual tuni ng-in relationship." Austrian A merican

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social phi losopher A l fred Schutz uses that phrase i n considering the under­ pinnings of face-to-face commun ications i n his well-known essay, " M a k i ng Music Together: A Study i n Social Relationship," origi nally published i n 1 9 5 1 . Ta k i ng t h e performance o f music as his example, S chutz contends

that all commun ication i s founded on a rel ationship of mutual attunement, "by which the 'I' and the ' Thou' are experienced by both participants as a ' We' i n vivid presence." S chutz says of d i fferent k i nds of relationships between a musical performer and audience, "In all these c i rcu mstances , performer and l istener a re 'tuned-in' to one another, are living together th rough the same flux, a re growi ng older together while the musical pro­ cess lasts . "6 Much the same happens when two people a re i m mersed in a conver­ sation: there's a sense of collaborative flow, of s w i m ming i n a common stream of consciousnes s . Chess players often come to be tuned i n to each other. Living together th rough the same flux, they can experience them­ selves as a " We" i n a vivid co-presence . T hey a re "co-performing subjec­ tivities" engaged w ith one a nother. 7 O ften , wh ile one is playing a game, there's a pa lpable sense that one i s giving thought to the same chess pat­ terns as one's opponent. In my fieldnotes I w rote , " S ept. 2 8 , 200 8 . Playing casual games with K i m , at h i s house, on a Sunday afternoon . I 'm struck by the fact that, wh i le we 're trying to beat each other, there a re so many points i n the games where our opposing actions work i n coord i nation with one another, i n sets of synchronized sequences of force and counter-force." Chess is a crux of con flict and connection .

D OUB L E TIM E

W h i le Grech i k h i n is sorting out moves, you're giving thought to the posi­ tion as wel l . The d igital chess clock stands to your right, with one ti mer counting down the m i nutes and the other hovering i n a temporary state of quietus. The clock i mplies a "double temporal ity," as Thierry Wen d l i ng puts i t . 8 Each pl ayer's a l lotment of time proceeds hand in hand with h i s opponent's. T h i s u n ique b i n a r y temporal a rrangement d o e s n o t fa ze veteran chess players, as they h ave long gotten used to its methods and rhyth ms. M i k h a i l Botv i n n i k , world cha mpion i n the 1950s and 196os and the patri a rch of the Soviet school of chess, advised that a player should engage in concrete calcul ations when it is h i s move , and more general strategic considerations of the game when the opponent's clock i s ticking. You heed that advice now and consider the game i n position a l terms. You have to

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play defen sively, it's clear, as your opponent has more space and you're respond i ng to his threats more than he is to yours. But you have a decent hold over key center squa res with your pawns and pieces, and you're not losing by any means. T h i ngs could be worse, you conclude upon assessing · your respective prospects i n the complex p osition at hand, as you progress from the open i ng to the m idd lega me.

E XQUISIT E V I O L E N C E

T h e a r rows i n figu re

r

denote moves on Black's p a r t worth considering, o r

anticipati ng, i n t h e current position. T h e l i nes o f force ind icated suggest somet h i ng of the strategic and tactical features of the position. Chess play­ ers tend to think of any game as consisting of a complex weave of strategy and tactics. W h i l e strategy consists of setting and achieving long-term goa ls during the game, such as establ ishing a favorable pawn formation, tactics i nvolve short-term ma neuvers, often of a forcing nature. It's much l i ke m i l itary campaign s . While the strategic a i m of a ca mpaign m ight be to ga i n control of an i mportant h i l ltop, the tactical procedures that help a batta lion achieve that a i m consist of specific, and often bloody, sequences of actions: seizing control of a bridge, dest roy ing the enemy 's air support, adva ncing up the h i l l . While some contests a re highly strategic i n form and others i nvolve sharp, tactical battles, i n most games a combi nation of strategic and tactical motifs ripples th rough the stages of play. That's the case in the present position. The main st rategic feud is over key squa res in the center, with the Wh ite player trying to establ ish control over those squa res so that he can launch a successful attack, and his riva l trying to undermine any such control, by tactical means if need be. The task before you then i s to figu re out the best way to proceed , consider­ ing the nuances of the position and the i nterlocking sequences possible with one move or another. All this makes true chess s k ill-what some call the abil ity to play "real chess "-a di fficult state to achieve . That m i stakes occur i n the games of even the best players , who have years of battle-tested experience under their belts and a century-plus of championship chess to d raw from , attests to the depths and complications of chess. It awes and humbles people, and they a re thrilled when they manage to pi lot a good ga me. The i ntricate folds of a rose, the distributed work i ngs of the human bra i n , New York 's Grand Central Station during rush hou r : chess offers s i m i l a rly lush i nvolution s . The combinational i nterplay appeals to many chess players , even i f they haven't thought about it as such. Commentators

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2

3

4

5

6

7

8 h FIGuRE I.

g

e

d

c

b

a

A middlegame position against Vladimir Grechikhin; the

arrows indicate moves on B l ack's part worth considering , or anticipating, in the current position

on the game have pointed out that the exponent i a l , fruct i fy i ng nature of chess moves leads to a vast number of possible positions in a short stretch of time. The total number of distinct board positions after Black's second move i s reportedly 7 1 , 8 5 2 . 9 A fter fou r moves each it is more than 3 1 5 bil­ lion. The c a lculus continues with each new move , leading m athematicians to conclude that the estimated total number of unique chess games i s about I

0120

,

which is more than the total number of electrons in the u n iverse .

Yet that mathematical feature is not what holds the i nterest of chess play­ ers wh ile playing, perhaps because most of those hypothetical moves a re pointless, but also because any possible arrangement of words i n a con­ versation between people , or the various ways that musical notes can be strung together, would i nvolve s i m i l a rly astronomical numbers, w ith most of the sequences being nonsensical. What sei:?:es the imagination, rather, is the labyrinth of meaningful possibi lities, of i nterconnecting forms, found i n any position. The intricate arrangements that readily arise from these possib i l ities a re

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due , i n l a rge part, to the d i fferent pieces' diverse forms of allowed move ­ ment: rooks cannonball down files, bishops shoot a long d i agon a l s , kn ights prance over squares and pieces. U n l i ke a game of checkers, in which all the pieces move the same way, chess enta ils a heterogeneous mix of d i fferent potent i a l ities. What a rises out of this variety i s not mere chaos , a hodge­ podge of movement and for m , but a formally patterned complexity. To some, the aesthetic form that comes closest to it i s found i n certain works of music. Many of Bach's compositions, such as his cello suites or The Art

of the Fugue, with their plural ity of motifs interweaving th rough time, cor­ relate with the harmonics to be found at the chessboard. I f a rch itecture is frozen music, then chess i s a n ever-shifting construct of polyphon ic forms. That ordered complexity can be downright pleasing, fascinating. " Well, at some level I don't feel I h ave a choice whether or not I play chess," said my friend Nol a n , when asked why he l i kes to play. Nolan grew up in Little Rock, A rkansas, and moved to New York to attend college . When I fi rst met h i m , in 2 0 0 2 , Nolan was a senior with long, c u rly h a i r and a straggly re d beard . His h a i r i s now cropped close to his scalp and he's clean-shaven . W h a t hasn't cha nged is h i s passion for chess. A fter graduating from col­ lege , Nolan worked for a year as a u n ion orga n i zer in Detroit, M ichiga n , and S p o k a n e , Wa s h i ngton . He found t h a t h i s bosses were them selves exploitative, so he quit and returned to New York, where he la nded a job teaching chess. All a long he has been working on his game. He has been at my home on m a ny occasion s , where we've worked together analyzing game position s . "At a certain level," he said, "chess becomes a l most l i ke an addiction . Ever si nce I was in h igh school I was obsessed with playing ches s , learn ing more about chess, and going to chess clubs and compet­ i ng . . . . If you're serious about chess , and you get the bug, it seems l i ke there's a l most noth i ng else that you want to be doing." Nolan prefers chess to other board games, such as Parcheesi or checkers. " It's i n fi n itely more complicated than any other game. I think it's the sheer complication , the complexity-the multiplicity of choices-and the dynamic factors." What's less clear i s why such patterned complexity appeals to humans, whether it be i n chess or music or l iteratu re. Has the human bra i n has evolved i n a manner that has led it to delight i n the " beautiful problems" effected by it?10 O r i s complexity, as such , a high- modern obsession ? That complex ity enta ils a principle of i nterrelated ness. Just one m i nor change , such as moving a Black pawn from one square to another, can a ffect the " fields of force" at hand, much as the i ntroduction of a new species of weed or the demise of a particular kind of i nsect can a lter the ecology of an entire region , often to devastating effect; "every move played

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d i sturbs the balance of time, force, and space . " 1 1 Chess can promote aware­ ness of systemic rel ations, and of the pri nciples of i nterrel atedness, propor­ tion , and balance that regu l a rly accompany such rel ations. I s there wisdom to be had i n such awareness? Perhaps so. Anthropolo­ gist G regory Bateson was a brilliant thinker and one of the chief engineers of systems theory, i n which resea rchers study the cha racteristics of com­ plex systems i n nature and society, i ncluding the many cybernetic feedback loops of i n formation processing that characterize such systems. Bateson l i ked to t h i nk of wisdom as "a word for recognition of and guida nce by a k nowledge of the total systemic structure." By this he meant that if we can come to appreci ate the systemic relations, the "dance of interfaces ," b u i lt i nto so many l i fe forms, be it a si ngle orga n ism or the ecology of the planet at l a rge , then we 're stepping i nto a kind of knowledge that can be c a l led wisdom. Bateson found that humans tend to act and think i n purpose­ fu l , goal-d riven way s . These tendencies lead them to neglect the systemic nature of l i fe , the ecosystems they l ive i n , or their own minds, often w ith destructive consequences. Many fa rmers faced with corn-eating insects will th row i n secticides on their crops without thinking of the l a rger effects of that poison on the soi l , while suburban ites burn ca rbon fuels to rush to work on time while ignoring the effects of their automobile emissions on the atmosphere. At the same time, Bateson argued, certai n domains of human experience, such as art, rel igion, and d rea m s , can serve a "correc­ tive function . " They do so by helping people to appreciate the fact that l i fe depends upon " i nterlocking circuits of conti ngency."12 Chess c a n serve a corrective function . It can help us counter a too­ pu rposive and l i near view of l i fe , and make our outlooks more holistic and more ethically sound. It can help us to wise up. It's tempting to believe that a measure of wisdom can arise out of an awa reness of the systemic relations found i n ches s , especially when such d i scernment i s cruc i a l ly needed i n an age of global warming, greedy fi n a nciers , and feud ing nation- states. Chess instructors say that learn i ng the game's procedures can help chi ldren enhance their understa nding of the relations a mong d i fferent forces i n l i fe and add to their rega rd for the methods of j udgment, i nterdependence, logic, i n itiative, and patience. This is not a lways the case a mong adult pl ayers , however, as any appre­ ciation of the system ic relations found i n chess does not always transl ate i nto an appreciation of relations outside the game. For one thing, many of those who h ave devoted their l ives to play i ng chess often act i n their everyday l ives i n ways-aggressive, self-interested , short-sighted, a rrogant, vai nglorious-that a re anything but wise. Many become qua rrelsome

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and antagon istic, and develop a n antipathy for human i nconsi stencies or contrad ictions. The more occasiona l players of the game, i n contrast, a re the ones who appear to be the better "adj usted." At the same time, to become truly great players, people have to devote themselves to the game i n such single - minded, si ngle-purposed ways that they can come to neglect more balanced, i nterrel ation a l ways of acting i n l i fe. "The longer you play chess , the more self-centered you become," said A leksander Woj tk iewicz, a recently deceased Pol ish A merican grandm aster. " It's necessary i n chess to put yourself fi rst," Woj tkiewicz told author Paul Hoffm a n . " It's easy to forget that a nyone else exists. That attitude doesn't work i n the rest of l i fe . That's why few of us chess players can hold marriages . " L l A nother complicating factor i s t h e idea that coinciding with t h e themes of balance, h a rmony, and i nterrelatedness i n chess a re the equ a l ly i mpor­ tant motifs of aggressiveness and assertiveness. Violence occurs i n a h igh­ quality ga me-central pawn formations a re demol ished, the shelters of k i ngs assaulted. Even i f that violence i s beautifu l at times, it is violence nonetheless. As M a rcel Duchamp put it, " C hess i s a sport. A violent sport. This detracts from its most a rtistic connections . " 14 Some young players learn that the hard way, when they seek i n their games to create ha rmonious a rra ngements of their pieces , with each piece and pawn i n "neat," mutu­ ally protective correspondence with its neighbors. But i n their desire to establish a n i ntricate a rch itectu re of form, these pl ayers often neglect their opponents' position s , and stronger players h a m mer their artfu l tableaux mercilessly. The h a rd lesson learned from such drubbings i s that h a rmony and balance i n themselves do not win chess games . S k i l led aggression does. T h i n k of a spider and its web, or a cheetah on the prowl . Chess i nvolves a tense i nterplay between relatedness and forcefu l vio­ lence. And since biologica l l i fe itsel f appears to proceed a long s i m i l a r lines, from the civili zations of humans to the simplest organisms, perhaps any true wisdom to be cultivated through chess relates to the rea l i zation of the fact that a l l l i fe-forms have a combination of harmony and aggressive i ntent built into them. Life enta i l s a combination of beauty and violence­ an exqu isite violence-or so the physics of chess would suggest.

T H I N K , M O V E , C L O CK , W R IT E

A couple of other games have ended , in either bloody assaults or expedi­ ent d raws. I lye Figler has a pressing edge i n h i s game aga i nst Kath a r i ne Pelletier, while Jay Bonin is beating up on h i s outcl assed opponent. J ay sets up a n ice mating attack, and then goes in for the k i l l as his opponent

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broods a t the board, red-faced i n defeat. Upon w i n n ing, Jay gets u p and walks off with a cana ry-swal lowing smile, score sheet i n hand. The room is quiet. The loudest sounds a re the tick i ng of chess clocks and the hum of the a i r-conditioner. People have settled i nto the muted rhy thm of tourna ment ga mes: t h i n k , m a ke a move, press the clock, write down the move made. T h i n k , move , clock, write. T h i n k . You and you r opponent a re doing t h e s a m e . G rechikhin is pressing against your position , while you're trying to hit on moves that give good counterchances. With his sixteenth move Grechikhin makes a decision that surprises you: he moves his queen one square forward , where it's operating a long the same diagona l as you r own queen , which stands a few i nches away. One s ma ll step by the l ady, and the ecology of the game shifts. By post­ ing his queen on a square that is in d i rect com munication with your own queen , G rech i k h i n i s offering to excha nge quee n s . Once these m ighty pieces a re off the board , the ga me can boil down to a n endga me. _ What 's going on here? you ask yourself. Reuben Fine, a n A merican grand master and psychoa na lyst, once contended that a leading chess pl ayer preferred opening variations that i nvolve an e a rly exchange of queens because he unconsciously desired to get "rid of women" i n order to deny or regul ate his sexual i mpulses. 1 5 You k now l ittle about your opponent's psychody n a m ics, but your guess is that he wants to eliminate the queens not because of any psychosexu a l issues but because he thinks he can out­ play you i n an ending, espec i a l ly since you collapsed at the end of your previous ga me. ( " Yes. The endga me . " ) But i n letting you exchange queen s , and so getting h i s most powerful piece off t h e battlefield, he a l lows y o u to relieve some of the pressure aga inst your position . You do just that. Your pieces breathe easier. Excha nges fol low. The position i s si mpl i fying into a n ending i n which you'll each have a couple pieces and a cluster of pawns. You're not sure who will be better off. You play on. You're both trying to position your pieces on better squares, to try to ga i n some k i nd of advantage . A s you concentrate , the world fades a round you. You're unaware of a nyone or anything else i n the roo m . No sound. No movement. No opponent. You're conscious only of the possibi l i ­ t i e s on t h e board. T h i n k , move , clock, w rite. T h i n k aga i n . At t i m e s you can't shake the feel i ng that a grandmaster or computer would make more precise moves, but that's a feeling you seldom succeed i n shaking. It's an even ga me until he lets you grab one of his pawns on the queen­ side. To do so, you h ave to let you r k n ight get boxed i nto a corner, where it risks getting trapped . You take time to calcu l ate the " va r i ations," the possible sequences of moves, and see that the kn ight is safe after a l l , and

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can come back i nto play if you play the right combination of moves. You take the paw n , press your clock, take a breat h . Moves a re m a d e a long t h e l i nes envisioned . You hear a fa int g a s p from your opponent. You take this to be h i s sudden awa reness that your kn ight i s safe a fter a l l , and he's down a pawn for nothing. The fact that you cal­ culated a l l this better than your master- strength opponent injects a dose of con fidence into your syste m . I'm seeing things well today, you tell yourself.

CO G N I T I V E M A G IC

Chess c a n provide a modest sense of mastery in the world , even if it's only for moments at a time. O nce players get to a decent skill level , any game they play can field a number of maneuvers-forging a devious bishop pin, setting up a ki ngside attack-that spa rk feeli ngs of satisfaction and accom­ plish ment. The senti ment here i s much the same as the one that comes with hitting a fastball solid ly, crafting a n effective sentence, or identifying words i n a crossword puzzle. These minor masteries a re important for people's enjoyment of chess. What's more, the better people are at chess , the more mastery they can c l a i m . C h e s s players can find they a r e acting in the world, i n itiating l i nes o f thought and action, rather than si mply respond i ng t o whatever l i fe th rows at the m . E ach turn of a game requ i res thought and action ; with each move , the player acts creatively and i magi natively in the world . " There is no one game," said seventeenth-century British w riter R ichard Brathwaite, "which m ay seeme to represent the state of mans l i fe to the fu l l so well as t h e chesse." M a n y have found keen and lasting paral lels between l i fe and chess. " Chess i s l i fe," said Bobby Fischer. " L i fe i m itates chess," said Garry Kasparov. I n playing chess, a n i magi native process is often at work whereby one finds oneself contending with a reduced and s i mpli fied ver­ sion of l i fe . Such m icrocosms are common to human beings; people around the world work with materials and activities-pai nti ngs , altars, d rawings, rituals, games, performances-that function as symbolic representations of the world at l a rge . I n some societies, the a rchitectural design of houses stands as a m icrocosm of the un iverse, as do the sacred a ltars presided over by religious speci a l ists. Many theatrical performances also explicitly model the world . As religious schol a r Catherine Bell relates it, performances "do not attempt to reflect the real world accu rately but to reduce and simplify it so as to create more or less coherent systems of categories that can then be projected onto the fu l l spectrum of human experience."16 Why do people so often i nvoke , and seek out, such models? Levi- Strauss

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suggests an answer i n his book La pensee sauvage, in commenting on the proclivity for humans to reduce thi ngs to small-scale models i n play and art. With works of art i n m i n d , U:vi-Strauss asks, " What i s the vi rtue of reduction either of scale or in the number of propertie s ? " As he sees it, by reducing an aspect of l i fe to a si mpler, more manageable size, people feel better able to comprehend its nature : "Being smal ler, the object as a whole seems less formidable. By being quantitatively d i m i n i shed, it seems to us qual itatively s i mpl i fied. More exactly, this quantitative transposi­ tion extends and diversifies our power over a homologue of the thing, and by means of it the l atter can be grasped, assessed and apprehended at a glance ." 17 That tendency, Levi- Strauss holds, is evident in a l l art and i n a l l m a g i c . It's at work i n ritual and hea l i ng practices a r o u n d t h e world, i n w h i c h hea lers make effigies t h a t represent t h e ghosts, demons , and w itches a ffl icting the l iv i ng. By crafting small-scale representations and acting on them i n magica l ly potent term s , people give concrete for m to the forces of the world and attend to them in effective ways. A similar process i s at work i n chess , as the ga me-a tangible m icro­ world-can promise a safe rea l m , one that a person can develop some mastery over, or turn to i n t i mes of a n xiety or bewilderment. Life can seem less for midable and confusing when you're dealing with the dynamics of action within the frame of a chessboard. Many find in chess a world that i s simpler, purer, and more condensed and c i rcu mscribed than the world at large . Reducing l i fe to the dom a i n of chess i s an act of cogn itive magic i n the sense that people, th rough acts of simulation and model i ng, remake a chal lenging world on thei r own term s .18 By a ltering focus, hom i ng in on the task at hand, and ga i n i ng a fresh perspective-d ayd rea m i ng, think­ ing outside preset fra mes , stepping i nto a rea l m of play-a l i feworld can be a ltered. Th rough these sleights of consciousness, people rework the experiential grounds of their l ives so that their world becomes d i fferent, at least for a spel l . " O n e reason that I 'm playing so much chess these days is that it takes my mind off all my worries," one man told me a fter his girlfriend broke up with h i m . " W h i l e playing, I think only about the game. That's so n ice." Chess enables people to thi nk themselves out of a ha rsh world. This capac­ ity reminds me of the ways i n which residents of a shelter for the homeless mentally ill i n Boston (where I conducted fieldwork i n the ea rly 1990s) would resort to routi nes of pacing, read i ng, sm all talk , being alone, sleep, drugs , or psychiatric medications i n order to " zone out" for a while and keep their suffering at bay. Some trust i n chess to do the same. Forms of play help people to assume control of their lives. A nth ropologist

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M ichael Jackson calls such efforts "mastery play "-pl ay, i n other word s , t h a t "helps people rega i n a s e n s e of control i n situations t h a t overwhe l m , confuse, and d i m i n ish them ." 1 9 I n u s i n g this term, Jackson is d rawing from severa l psychologists-Freud , Piaget, W i n n icott-who have shown how children use play as a way to ga i n control over the c i rcu mstances of thei r live s . Adults also engage in such mastery pl ay. In the days after my father died i n

1992,

my mother, deeply grief-st ricken, took comfort i n a rocking

cha i r that she set up by her kitchen table; she found the rhythmic, repeti ­ tive motion soothing. This w a s a kind of mastery pl ay. Ritualization i s a term that anthropologists use in speaking of the repetitive activities people engage i n over the course of thei r everyday l ives . R ituali zation is often mundane, unspectacu l a r, and not reflected upon . People who go for walks a long the same route each day a re involved i n acts of ritua l i zation, as a re people who play sol ita i re on their computers. R i t u a l i zed actions offer a way for people to acqu i re a sense of order and control over thei r l ives. As Jackson sees it, " i n ner turmoil or disorder may be man aged by 'ritu­ ally' reorga n i zi ng one's mundane environ ment-clea n i ng or redecorating a house, rea rranging fu rn iture, weed ing a ga rden, buyi ng new clothes . . . cha nges i n one's experience a re ' i n duced' by work ing on an aspect of one's l i feworld that is a menable to m a n ipulation . " Such a n action, Jackson sug­ gests, "offers respite, assists focus and i n duces a sense of being in control of one's c i rcu mstance s . " 20 T h rough such ritual efforts, people often attend to a doma i n ( prayer, garden i ng, v ideo games) that carries less a n x iety or uncerta i nty than another doma i n , such as the world at l a rge . Chess c a n promote just this sort of rituali zation . Often when I play a n eveni ng's worth of games at a l o c a l c l u b or spend a few afternoon hours a n a lyzing position s, I find that the ritual istic process at work during those hours helps me to ga i n a measure of focus and composu re i n my l i fe . Words I would apply to this process a re containment, ordering, making things right. The game fra mes and sha rpens my stance vis-a-vis l i fe . At times, chess offers a domain that is trouble-free and c a l mer than l i fe i n genera l . " I f I feel a n xious o r u ncomfortable," observed top Soviet grandmaster Efim G el ler, "I sit down at the chess boa rd for some five or six hours and gradu a l ly come to ." When a fa mily member d ied a few years back, I trav­ eled to Boston to attend the fu nera l . The morning of the fu neral I had a few spare m i nutes before we set off to the church. I took out a chess set and worked th rough some position s . The cognitive magic, t h e active p l a y with i n a microcosm, and t h e ritual­ i zation that come with skil led chess play can make for the k i nd of "creative l i v i ng" that the British psychoa n a lyst D. W. W i n n icott, for one , considered

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crucial to a psychologically hea lthy l i fe . Wi nnicott found that such creative livi ng-what he calls "creative apperception"-is fi rst manifested in the play activities of a child. " It is creative apperception itsel f more than any­ thing else that makes the i ndividual feel that l i fe i s worth living . . . . I n a tanta l i z i ng way many i ndividuals have experienced j ust enough of creative living to recognize that for most of thei r times they a re living uncreatively, as if caught up in the creativity of someone else, or of a mach ine." 2 1 Such thoughts rem ind me of what E l i zabeth Vicary sa id-that chess i s the most "mea n i ngfu l " activity in her l i fe , participating i n the game m a kes her feel that she i s i mproving as a person , and it's the only ti me she's "on the line in any k i nd of way." Chess enables her to engage creatively with her l i fe and fa sh ion a moral sensibil ity for herself. The danger is that chess play can become the net sum of a person's l i fe , and a substitute for acting and relating more general ly, t o t h e extent that the person ends up retreating from l i fe . The elements of contraction can be gleaned from a

2009

posting by a chess pl ayer on h i s blog, subm itted after

a wom an he was dating broke up with h i m . " Well now that is all over with and to be honest I think I a m actually happy," this young man reported i n an entry called " Back to What's I mportant." " W h i le I was with her," he continued, "I ra rely got to play chess and I should have rea l i zed right away that it was not goi ng to work because of that. A s h appy as she made me, chess m ade me happier and I felt bad about wa l k i ng away from it for two months . . . . I really m i ssed chess . The next ti me I decide to get i nto a rel ationship I w i l l be sure to make it clear that chess is my priority and i f she can't handle the fact that chess will sometimes come before other things , then adios senorita . . . . Yea chess is the only thing i n my l i fe that I a m sure about, the only thing that won't stop l i k i ng me or caring about me . . . . Though it may sound sad , chess i s the only thing i n my l i fe I can count on to a lways be there. It i s my escape, my desi re, and my passion . " Count on t h e ga me, fa ncy it a rel iable passion . Yet when t h e sacraments of chess trump human relationships, l i fe can lose depth and richness . The game eclipses a person's real l i fe and relationships, and the pieces on a board become more sign i ficant than relationships with fa m i ly and friend s . S o m e c h e s s zealots find it d i fficult t o manage wel l i n everyday l i fe , or to i ntegrate the world of chess with the world at l a rge .

"S O M E P E O P L E FA L L D O W N IN T HIS WO R L D "

Grandmaster Leonid Yudasin spoke of this problem one day. Chess is "a very rich rea lity," he said. "But on the other side, it's a very small real ity.

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Because it's such a n i ntense, small real ity, you can't get to the big reality from i n side. It's one of the problems i n chess, to relate the small reality to the big real ity." "A nd how to do wel l in both ? " I asked. " Ye s , and find balance." "A nd some people don't do that wel l ? " " N o , n o t real ly. It's o n e of the d i fficult experiences i n chess, t o d o that. It's one of the very d i fficult experiences." Leon i d , a thin, l i nguistically playful m a n who sports a thick beard , dark clothes, a n d a ya rmulka i n accord with the pri nciples o f the Torah, offered these thoughts while talking with me and a student of mine i n the otherwise unoccupied tournament room of the M a rshall Chess Club one wintry December a fternoon . The student, M ichal S a l m a n , the d aughter of Russian i m m igrants who grew up in I srael before coming to the States a few years back, was helping us to com mun icate across a gulf of languages and cultures. As we spoke , I tried to keep track of Leon id's rapid combina­ tions of words while two custodians worked outside the room , cleaning the club's sta i rwel ls and h a l lways. For Leon id, " balance" is centra l to the structural dyn a m ics and expe­ riential requ i rements of chess and l i fe more general ly. Leonid was born i n 1959 i n St. Petersbu rg, "one of the greatest chess cities i n h i story." He learned to play chess when he was five years old, when his father, a strong a m ateu r checkers and chess player, i ntroduced h i m to the game. He received a rigorous chess education i n schools and Young Pioneers associations from s k i l led instructors who had devised "professional meth­ odologies" for teaching chess. "I was a very strange young gentleman. I didn't h ave very good conversationa l relations w ith some of the other kids because I l i ked to be i n this world," Leonid explai ned , gestu ring toward his head and the rea l m above it. "A nd chess i s a very good place for that. I wasn't so cra zy. I wasn't crazy enough to be a world cha mpion , but I was crazy enough to be a world champion candidate. I was a bit d i fferent from normal-but not very much ! " Leonid w a s one o f the best p layers i n the world i n the e a rly 1990s . He won numerous i nternational tou rnaments, a n d was joint w i nner of the USSR Cha mpionship i n 1990. In 2004 , he oversaw the publ ication of a book to which he devoted six years of resea rch and writi ng. The six­ hundred-page tome, penned in Russian and carrying a title that translates into English as The Millennium Myth in Chess, offers Leon id's phi losoph i­ cal and psychological musi ngs on the gameY " It's generally about the essence of chess . "

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He competed twice in the candidate m atches for the world champion­ ship. O n both occasions, c i rcu mstances led h i m to play i n less than opti m a l ways , and he did n o t reach h i s goal of becom i ng world champion. I n

I 99 I ,

S oviet grand master Vassily lvanchuk defeated h i m i n a taxing m atch . I n r994,

Leonid played Vlad i m i r K ra m n i k , the futu re world champion , who

was then j u st eighteen years old, in a quarter - fi n a l m atch held in Wijk aan Zee. He lost i n seven games, by the score of

2 .5-4 · 5 ·

" I played two

candid ate m atches," Leonid related , "and with both, I couldn't completely belong to chess. I m m igration, fa m i ly, everythi ng-! had no t i me to pre­ pare. D u r i ng my m atch with Kramn i k , for instance, a close relative of m i ne was sick, and I was mostly in the clinic. I wasn't prepared at a l l . " Leonid offered s o m e thoughts on this period i n h i s l i fe i n a

2004

inter­

view publ ished i n Chess Life: "There was a time when I wanted to be world champion . When I was the co-w i n ner of the Soviet zon a l tou rna­ ment, I was very serious about chess. But because of some fa m i ly priorities, some mystical things, some l i fe things, I fel l down at chess and it became a small part of my l i fe for a time. Someth i ng i n side was a l ittle broken. For whatever reason, God decided I wasn't ready. It took a few years for me to come back to normal