The Immortal Game (10 page)

The chess intrigue worked perfectly; the diplomacy failed miserably. After much discussion, it became apparent that Lord Howe and his group could not win enough government support to stop the momentum toward war. Franklin was finally forced to give up. He left for America on March 20, 1775.

His boat trip lasted six weeks; the spark of war did not take even that long. Two weeks before he landed, in the early morning of April 19, the Revolutionary War began with Paul Revere’s midnight ride and the battles of Lexington and Concord.

A year later, after helping to draft the Declaration of Independence, Franklin, now aged seventy, traveled to Paris to negotiate treaties and secure a critical military alliance. There, he was thrilled to be surrounded by an overwhelming abundance of top-quality chess players. “I rarely go to the operas at Paris,” Franklin said in designating chess as his cultural priority. “I call
this
my opera.” He played whenever he could with colleagues and admirers, including games in the boudoir of his friend Anne-Louise Boivin d’Hardancourt Brillon de Jouy as she took exceptionally long baths.

C
HESS PLAY
was exploding. Throughout Europe and Russia, crowds packed chess cafés to play friends and strangers. Men and women of means, leisure, and intellectual ambition played chess just as princes and knights had centuries earlier, but now many aspired to excel at it. Much of the surging popularity and higher quality of play was due directly to the Italian master Gioacchino Greco’s new popular style of chess guide. In the early seventeenth century, Greco had become the first chess instructor to chart out entire games in order to demonstrate the trajectory of various openings. That led to a dramatic public breakthrough. In the same way that
National Geographic
magazine made anthropology more accessible to a wider public in the twentieth century, Greco’s full-game illustrations gave the seventeenth-century public a tangible hold on what a strategic chess game could look and feel like. The English poet Richard Lovelace later paid tribute to Greco’s games (as published by the Englishman Francis Beale in 1656):

Men that could only fool at fox and geese

Are new made polititians [
sic
] by thy book
^*16

With Greco’s chess guides, the restless energy of the Enlightenment, and an increase in available leisure time, all of Europe now had a growing chess culture. In France, the mix was particularly combustible. Greco’s games were published there in forty-one separate editions, and chess became a vital part of the Parisian landscape, played avidly in just about every café in the city.

Around 1740, the most ambitious players in Paris began to gather daily at Café de la Régence, a dingy bistro on the rue Saint-Honoré near the Louvre. Chessboards there were rented by the hour, with a higher fee at night to pay for the candlelight. The Régence quickly became not just the most popular chess café in France, but the undisputed center of the chess universe. Improbably, it stayed that way for a long time. “The Régence represents the sun, round which the lesser spheres of light revolve,” reported the English chess author and collector George Walker a century later, in 1840. “It is the centre of civilised Europe, considered with regard to chess. As Flanders in days of yore was the great battle-ground…at which nations engaged in the duello, so for above a hundred years has this café served as the grand gladiatorial arena for chess-players of every country and colour.”

Part of the electric quality of the Régence in its early years was conferred by the presence of M. de Kermur Sire de Légal, a superb chess instructor and without question the best player in Paris. His standing was such that the Régence’s management put him on the payroll in order to keep him there. Then, in 1743, a teenaged musician named François-André Danican Philidor, who had been taking lessons from Légal, began beating him. Word quickly spread of a genuine new chess phenomenon.

In Paris, Holland, and London, Philidor dazzled opponents and onlookers. He had an extraordinary memory, and in 1744 (at age eighteen) shocked the world by playing two games simultaneously while blindfolded. This was not nearly a historical first. Dating all the way back to Sa’id Bin Jubair in 665, a small number of players had played blind throughout the centuries. But for citizens of the eighteenth century, who had little knowledge of previous blind play, it was new and astounding—such an astonishing combination of memory and mental acrobatics that even Philidor’s mentor Légal refused to attempt it in public. In response to Philidor’s reality-defying display, which he repeated seven years later with
three
players, and many times after that, the public didn’t know whether to be impressed or horrified. Philidor, it was said, was “risking his sanity in such a dangerous pursuit.”

In another dramatic episode, young Philidor managed to humiliate perhaps the world’s most famous chess authority. Phillip Stamma was a Syrian-born player who had tantalized Europe with promises of unearthing ancient chess secrets from the Islamic world. His books of 1737 and 1745 were highly sought after by serious players of the day—including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. But when Stamma met Philidor in London in 1747, the Syrian fell short. Philidor beat him eight games to one, with one draw.
^*17

Ironically, it was Philidor’s style of play—not Stamma’s—that truly hearkened back to the ancient days of the slower, more strategic
shatranj
. It turned out that his remarkable memory was not his most important asset. Philidor’s real secret weapon was his fundamentally different way of looking at the board. “Pawns,” Philidor declared, “are the very soul of the game.” It was a brilliant piece of counterintuition. Philidor suggested that the Pawns, which at first glance seemed so powerless as to be expendable, could, working in concert with one another, actually exert more influence than any single piece on the board. He made Pawn structure a priority above all else, putting Pawns into diagonal arrangements to defend one another and supporting them from behind with the more prominent pieces. Slowly, his formidable Pawn fence would then creep up the board, squeezing the opponent’s pieces on the other side and placing some Pawns in strong contention for promotion at the back row. Implemented correctly, this flexible strategy could defuse virtually any brilliant tactical combination wielded by an opponent.

By coincidence, Philidor’s Pawn revolution came just as lasting egalitarian ideals were coming into play in the real world. John Locke had proposed that all men are created equal, with God-given “natural rights” of life, liberty, and property, and that governments should exist only “with the consent of the governed.” The American Revolution would soon be the living embodiment of these ideals. This chess–life concurrence could not have been lost on figures such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, avid chess player and author of the famous declaration “Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains.” Along with Voltaire, Rousseau frequented the Café de la Régence and called chess one of his “expedients.” In a self-deprecating remark that highlighted the distinction between chess intelligence and other types of intelligence, Rousseau said: “I became acquainted with M. de Légal, M. Husson, Philidor, and all the great chess players of the day, without making the least improvement in the game.”

In his memoirs, Rousseau used chess to demonstrate his conviction of speaking truth to power. On one occasion, Rousseau bragged, he not only had the opportunity to play France’s Prince de Conti, but also displayed the courage to beat him: “Notwithstanding the signs and grimace of the chevalier and the spectators, which I feigned not to see,” he later wrote, “I won the two games we played. When they were ended, I said to him in a respectful but very grave manner: ‘My lord, I honor your serene highness too much not to beat you always at chess.’ This great prince, who had real wit, sense, and knowledge, and so was worthy not to be treated with mean adulation, felt in fact, at least I think so, that I was the only person present who treated him like a man, and I have every reason to believe he was not displeased with me for it.”

Voltaire and Rousseau were not the only shining lights of the age that visited the Café de la Régence. The chess center also afforded a brief encounter between Benjamin Franklin and his chess hero Philidor. Arriving at the Régence one day in 1781 with a copy of Philidor’s book, Franklin was quickly ushered to the sacred table, where the author’s signature was procured. Afterward, finding Philidor otherwise engaged, Franklin quickly excused himself.

“François!” exclaimed proprietor Jacques Labar. “You just autographed your book for the American Ambassador!”

At which point, Philidor raised his head for the first time and remarked, “That’s funny, I never knew that he was a chess player.”

THE IMMORTAL GAME
Moves 6 and 7

M
ANY SERIOUS CHESS PLAYERS
talk about chess largely in artistic terms, comparing brilliant games to masterful paintings or great symphonies. But they do acknowledge one key difference. “It is a pity,” says Anthony Saidy, “that, unlike music or painting, chess requires of the viewer an initial period of instruction before revealing its aesthetic quality.”

A pity indeed for all of us chess novices—since many of us long to at least appreciate superb chess even if we don’t have a realistic hope of ever attaining it.

Fortunately, there is another route to true chess appreciation, separate from the rote memorization of openings, tactics, and strategies. It is to study the history of play—not just legendary encounters like the Immortal Game, but also how an array of many different well-played games fit within the various styles of play introduced over time: the evolution of chess play. Since chess is largely a game of knowledge built on past experience, there is a demonstrable arc to its progress, dating back to the beginning of the modern game, circa 1475. Each era learns from past eras, and develops a new level of sophistication.

This idea of chess’s stylistic evolution was introduced to me by Nicholas Chatzilias, a young, Brooklyn-based chess instructor whom I met one day while looking into the New York–based program Chess-in-the-Schools. Over a sandwich near an elementary school in Sheepshead Bay, I shamelessly name-dropped my famous chess ancestor, Samuel Rosenthal, and immediately got a bright-eyed look in response. “You’re related to
him
?” he said. “I teach some of Rosenthal’s games in my chess club.”

I asked how games over a century old could be useful in chess instruction today. Chatzilias explained how the games from different eras fit together like links in a chain. Studying a sequence of them in context, we can understand not only the collective knowledge of chess, but also how that knowledge coalesced over time. It’s the same reason we study the history of anything. Any knowledge is an accumulation of experience and can give off a harsh glare if suddenly imparted all at once as though it were divine revelation. Better to understand it as an organic entity, with a rich and glowing life history.

Chatzilias suggested I pick up a copy of Anthony Saidy’s
The March of Chess Ideas
, which I did immediately. That book runs through the four great eras of chess play: Romantic, Scientific, Hypermodern, and the New Dynamism. Hoping to understand them all, I approached them in chronological order; for one simply cannot understand a later style without understanding its predecessors. The first period, Romantic play, stretched all the way from 1475 to the 1880s, and was characterized by swashbuckling attacks, clever combinations, and a relative lack of long-term planning. Romantic chess was almost all tactics (short-term maneuvering) and very little strategy (long-term planning). It was chess as hand-to-hand combat.

I was glad to know about the Romantic school of chess, because it fit well with how
I
wanted to play—attack, trick, surprise, attack again. It turns out that Romantic chess is the style
every
novice player wants to play, because it is innocent fun and because we simply don’t know any better. It is also how great chess masters played for centuries—because
they
didn’t know any better. In a game that presented trillions upon trillions of possibilities, effective strategic planning was simply too difficult to intuit; instead, it took hundreds of years to evolve. Even after Philidor, in the mid-eighteenth century, had proven the virtue of his Pawn strategy, contributing the first real inkling of a more holistic, strategic approach to the game, the Romantic school continued on for more than another century. The great Romantic masters steadily cooked up more and more dastardly tactical tricks to try and outmaneuver one another.

Looking back now, the Immortal Game stands as the pinnacle of Romanticism. It was one of its greatest monuments; its winner would forever be known as the Romantic school’s all-time great practitioner. Both Anderssen and Kieseritzky knew of Philidor’s legacy, of course. But like all great players of their era, they fundamentally ignored his major ideas and stuck to the Romantic style—good, quick, exciting, tactical chess, ingenious combinations and attacks.

In his next-to-last opening move, Anderssen (White) developed his Knight to f3.

6. Nf3

(White Knight to f3)

This packed a particular punch because it developed a piece, put pressure on two center squares, and attacked the Black Queen—all at the same time.

The Knight attack forced the Black Queen to retreat to h6.

6….Qh6

(Black Queen to h6)

Saving his Queen was a necessary move for Black, of course, but also a wasted one. Kieseritzky accomplished absolutely nothing else, and he hadn’t even completely removed his Queen from danger. He would soon be forced to save her again. Meanwhile, Anderssen was developing at a healthy pace, and with every move getting something else accomplished.

On the other hand, Kieseritzky may have liked his position at this point, because if he could regain the offensive he had many provocative possible moves. He hoped it would soon be his turn to start vexing White.

7. d3

(White Queen’s Pawn to d3)

White then moved to protect his Pawn on e4 by moving his Queen’s Pawn forward one square to d3. This was also a nice developing move, which allowed White’s Bishop to put some pressure on the Black Pawn on f4.

7….Nh5

(Black Knight to h5)

Black responded with a decidedly nondeveloping move: Knight to h5.
^*18
Thus middlegame began. If the opening moves in each chess game are a coy dance, a limbering up, some tentative steps in the ring where one takes a few pokes at one’s opponent to flush out his soft spots, the next phase of the game is something else altogether. The middlegame is full-on combat, thorny, dense, and unpredictable. “Play the opening like a book, the middle game like a magician, and the endgame like a machine,” Viennese player Rudolf Spielmann would later advise. Even the most experienced players, familiar with hundreds of opening combinations, do not know for sure where they are headed in the middlegame, and must rely on intuition when they get there. This is where mere
billions
of game possibilities become trillions upon trillions, and every player confronts distinct chess molecules that they have never seen before and will never see again.

It is also the leap into the wide-eyed thrill of the game. Now so many pieces are in play that anything can happen. For master or novice, it is often a glorious place to be: no more waiting around on the beach; now you are smacking against high, crashing, erratic ocean waves. Is that a life raft headed your way, or a saw-toothed shark? For a short time during the middlegame it may be impossible to tell, and that’s much of the fun.

(It may not last long. Soon the thrill may decay into emptiness and dread, with a gnawing feeling that your opponent has a much keener understanding of where the game is heading, and has probably already bested you. Yes, you can feel his cold shadow now, even if you can’t yet see it. You are falling inexorably into his invisible trap. Though it looks like the game is more or less even, you are actually already drawing your final few full breaths.)

In a conventional twenty-first-century game, the players do not usually arrive at the middlegame until somewhere around move 10 or 12, and the arrival is most often signaled by both sides castling for safety. By then, most or all of the Bishops and Knights have been developed, and the hypercomplex interplay of threats and counterthreats can begin.

Rigid definitions of chess’s stages cannot, of course, begin to capture all the spectacular variation and the creative possibility inherent in the game. They are nevertheless useful, pointing to some unavoidable realities. In a competitive chess game, development is crucial. Failing to develop one’s pieces as efficiently as possible in the opening moves is like neglecting to vaccinate young children. Death isn’t
certain
, but you can expect to face serious trouble. An undeveloped position quickly cedes board control to the opponent, and forces one to play a defensive game with fewer and fewer decent options.