The Immortal Game (34 page)

C
HAPTER 4

“This Century, like a golden age”:
historyguide.org/earlymod/lecture1c.htm.

you’ll have to trust the number crunchers on this:
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Chess.htm
.

“barely thinkable”:
Stefano Franchi, “Palomar, the Triviality of Modernity, and the Doctrine of the Void,”
New Literary History
28, no. 4 (1997), pp. 757–78.

The estimated total:
I. Peterson, “The Soul of a Chess Machine: Lessons Learned from a Contest Pitting Man against Computer,”
Science News
, March 30, 1996.

“I understand you,” replied the queen:
Yalom cites Christopher Hibbert,
The Virgin Queen: Elizabeth I, Genius of the Golden Age
(Addison-Wesley, 1991).

“I thinke it ouer fond”:
Basilicon Doron
, London, 1603. William Poole, “False Play: Shakespeare and Chess,”
Shakespeare Quarterly
55, no. 1 (2004), p. 62.

In 1550 Saint Teresa:
Saint Teresa of Ávila,
The Way of Perfection
, Chapter 16, translated by E. Allison Peers (Image, 1964), online at
ccel.org/t/teresa/way/cache/way.txt
. “I hope you do not think I have written too much about this already,” she writes, “for I have only been placing the board, as they say. You have asked me to tell you about the first steps in prayer;…even now I can hardly have acquired these elementary virtues. But you may be sure that anyone who cannot set out the pieces in a game of chess will never be able to play well, and, if he does not know how to give check, he will not be able to bring about a checkmate.”

In 1595 English courtier Sir Philip Sidney:
Poole, “False Play: Shakespeare and Chess.”

Cervantes used it:
Don Quixote
, Part 2, Chapter 12.

The English playwright Thomas Middleton:
Jenny Adams, in personal correspondence. The play was extraordinarily popular, one of the first plays ever to have a continuous run. Adams also points out that Middleton also used chess to represent a rape in his play
Women Beware Women
. Adams cites T. H. Howard-Hill’s edition of the play (Manchester University Press, 1993).

political cartoonists:
See cartoon on p. 299. See also
http://www.chessbase.com/columns/column.asp?pid=166
.

law firms:
See
http://goodwinproctor.com
.

technology consultants:
Allarus.

the U.S. Army would adopt:
The Army “Psyops” unit uses chess in its insignia:

A 1991 political cartoon by Pancho from the French newspaper
Le Monde
.

John Locke:
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
, Chapter 13, Sections 8 and 9.

“The whole world is like a chess-board”:
Eales,
Chess
, p. 65. Eales also suggests that the bag metaphor encouraged peasants to be patient for greater rewards in the afterlife.

Chess, as James Rowbothum suggested:
From Poole, “False Play: Shakespeare and Chess.”

T
HE
I
MMORTAL
G
AME
: M
OVES 4 AND 5

Kieseritzky’s earlier wins in 1844 and 1847 were against, respectively, John Schulten in Paris and Daniel Harrwitz in England.

C
HAPTER 5

Along with just about everyone else:
H. W. Brands,
The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin
(Anchor Books, 2000);
The Papers of Benjamin Franklin
(Yale University Press, 1959); Benjamin Franklin,
The Morals of Chess
(Passy, 1779);
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
(1793), online at
earlyamerica.com/lives/franklin/
; Ralph K. Hagedorn,
Benjamin Franklin and Chess in Early America
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 1958).

Thomas Jefferson tells a similar story:
Jefferson to Robert Welsh, 4 December 1818, supplied by Kristen K. Onuf, Monticello Research Department, online at
monticello.org/reports/quotes/chess.htm.

“In the Age of Reason”:
Larry Parr and Lev Alburt, “Life Itself,”
National Review
, September 9, 1991.

“He seldom goes to bed till day-break”:
John Conyers, “Annual Register for the year 1767,”
Characters
(1800), online at
humanities.uchicago.edu/homes/VSA/Conyer.htm
.

In 1754, the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn:
Daniel Johnson, “Cold War Chess,”
Prospect
, no. 111 (June 2005),
www.tiea.us/5195.htm
.

Mendelssohn’s last written work:
From “Controversy with Jacobi over Lessing’s Alleged Pantheism,” online at
plato.stanford.edu/entries/mendelssohn/#7
.

Admirers frequently worked to pair him with good players:
Names from Bill Wall,
geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lab/7378/prez.htm
.

Of Jefferson, a friend wrote:
Ellen Wayles Coolidge Letterbook, p. 37(1853), supplied by Kristen K. Onuf, Monticello Research Department, online at
monticello.org/reports/quotes/chess.htm
.

“I call
this
my opera”:
Hochberg,
The 64-Square Looking Glass
, p. 7.

His standing was such:
“Chess: The Fickle Lover,” online at
angelfire.com/games/SBChess/Morphy/fickle.htm
.

playing two games simultaneously while blindfolded:
Seven years later, he pushed it to three blindfold games at once.

Dating all the way back:
So says John B. Henderson, in his column “The Scotsman,” at
http://www.rochadekuppenheim.de/heco/ar0203.htm.
Murray, on the other hand, says that the Muslim Borzaga was possibly the first exponent of the art of blindfold play, circa 1265.
History of Chess
, p. 192.

Philidor, it was said:
Henderson, “The Scotsman,” at
rochadekuppenheim.de/heco/ar0203.htm
.

In his memoirs, Rousseau:
The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
, Book 7, online at
etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/r/r864c/book7.htm.

T
HE
I
MMORTAL
G
AME
: M
OVES 6 AND 7

the evolution of chess play:
In fact, one of the great masters of the early twentieth century, Richard Reti, suggested that every player’s personal learning curve in chess instinctively repeats chess’s evolutionary path. “Such evolution,” he offered, “has gone on, in general, in a way quite similar to that in which it goes on with the individual chess player, only with the latter more rapidly.” Furthermore, Reti provocatively declared, “[in] the development of the chess mind we have a picture of the intellectual struggle of mankind.”

Even after Philidor:
With his novel approach, Philidor was one of the earliest players to advocate a
closed game
—one in which Pawns are not exchanged early on, but instead work toward a united and formidable front. This was in contrast to the
open game
, the universally popular style of Pawn exchanges or sacrifices that forced vertical openings in the fence of Pawns and encouraged a quicker, more aggressive contest.

C
HAPTER 6

the Café de la Régence:
George Walker, “The Café de la Régence, by a Chess-player,”
Fraser’s Magazine
22 (July to December 1840).

his underling opponents frequently found it inconvenient to win:
Thierry Libaert,
Revue du Souvenir Napoléonien
, no. 424 (1999), p. 55. Conveyed by Peter Hicks, Fondation Napoléon.

exiled to the tiny island of St. Helena:
St. Helena measured 122 square kilometers (47 square miles). The story finally came to light in 1928, during an exhibition of Napoleonic artifacts. Source: Mike Fox and Richard James,
The Complete Chess Addict
(Faber & Faber, 1987).

A chess set designed for Napoleon, with cannons for Rooks. From the treatise
Nuovo giuoco di scacchi ossia il giuoco della guerra
(Genova, 1801), by Francesco Giacometti,
online at chessbase.com/columns/ column.asp?pid=166.

“There’s all sorts of anecdotal evidence”:
Emma Young, “Chess! What Is It Good For?”
Guardian
, March 4, 2004.

the British public became fascinated:
“The London Correspondence Match,” online at
bm3.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/ecchist2.htm.
Between 1834 and 1836 Paris and London competed in another high-profile correspondence match, which Paris won.

That event fed interest:
Adolf Anderssen later said that he learned chess strategy from another William Lewis book,
Fifty Games between Labourdonnais and McDonnell
(1835).

Travel and long-distance communication were cheaper:
brynmawr.edu/library/speccoll/guides/travel/europe.htm
.

timed to coincide with a major international fair in the same city:
The five-and-a-half-month festival of industrial and culture offerings from around the world attracted some six million visitors to London’s Hyde Park. The chess competitors gathered about a mile away, at the St. George Club at Cavendish Square.

“Comfort is not particularly high”:
From an old article translated and reprinted on
avlerchess.com/chess-misc/Translate a Finnish Article on London 1851-182037.htm
.

In 1103 the knight Pierzchala:
Jerzy Gizycki,
A History of Chess
(Abbey Library, 1972), p. 31.

In 1564 a mock-epic poem,
Chess
:
The poem, by Jan Kochanowski, paraphrased an earlier effort by the Italian poet Marco Girolamo Vida. Source is Prof. Edmund Kotarski at
monika.univ.gda.pl/~literat/autors/kochan.htm
.

a major Polish revolt against Russian rule:
“During the Polish uprising, the Jews suffered, as always, at the hands of both sides: the [Russian] Cussaks who suppressed them and the revolutionaries who demanded money from the Jewish community.” Dr. Kasriel Eilender,
A Brief History of the Jews in Suwalki
,
http://www.shtetlinks.jewishgen.org/suwalki/history.htm
. (I have altered the punctuation in this quote for clarity.)

In 1884–85, Rosenthal led a Paris team:
Carlo Alberto Pagni,
Correspondence Chess Matches between Clubs 1823–1899
, Vol. 1 (1996).

In 1887 he was awarded:
Tadeusz Wolsza,
Arcymistrozowie, mistrzowie, amatorzy: Slownik biograficzny szachistów polskich, tom
4 (Wydawnictwo, 2003).

Rosenthal was said by Wilhelm Steinitz:
He had chess columns in
Le Monde Illustré
and
Republique Française
. Steinitz said Rosenthal averaged 20,000 francs per year in the last thirty years of his life (Hooper and Whyld,
Oxford
Companion to Chess
). That amounts to $57,670 in 1991 U.S. dollars. (Average exchange rate in this period was 5.15 francs per dollar. One U.S. dollar in 1875–1900 equates to $14.85 in 1991 U.S. dollars, so 20,000 nineteenth-century francs = $3,883.50 nineteenth-century dollars = $57,670 1991 dollars. Sources:
nber.org/databases/macrohistory/contents/fr.htm, nber.org/databases/macro history/rectdata/14/m14004a.dat
, and
http://web.archive.org/web/2004112408 5221/http://www.users.mis.net/~chesnut/pages/value.htm.)