Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time

14. EYEBALL TO EYEBALL

How does one negotiate with a Fischer, a man who is apparently prepared to risk everything rather than accept a compromise? Most people would not consider that to be rational. Yet there were few occasions when the challenger did not get his way with FIDE, the Icelandic Chess Federation, and other tournament organizers. The board and pieces, the lighting, the chair and table, the noise level, the proximity of the audience, the visibility of the cameras—all had to be just so. The prize money or appearance fee had to be increased. The games had to be played at specific times. Fischer’s exasperated opponents would capitulate in the face of these demands, sometimes after putting up a perfunctory, halfhearted fight. But with other competitors, the tournament regulations were always strictly interpreted. So why with Fischer did the rules take on this remarkable plasticity?

Game theory, a branch of mathematics that analyzes complex human behavior through simple models, offers some insight into Fischer’s success to those perplexed by the apparent weakness of officials. Game theory has been used to revolutionize the study of intellectual disciplines from economics to international relations and from evolutionary theory to philosophy. Its proponents have won Nobel Prizes, and one of its key exponents, John Nash, has been the subject of a best-selling book and Oscar-winning Hollywood blockbuster, A Beautiful Mind.

“Games” come in various kinds. There are, for example, games of perfect information, such as chess, where at each stage of the game one knows all the opponent’s steps to date, and games of imperfect information, such as a sealed auction, where one can only speculate about the sum of money a rival has bid. Then there are games of cooperation (where, as the name implies, players cooperate to achieve the best possible outcome) and games of noncooperation (where individuals act only in their own self-interest, irrespective of what other players are doing).

One reason Person A may not cooperate with Person B is that Person A’s gain is Person B’s loss: this is a zero-sum game. In nonzero-sum games, both sides can benefit. Compare chess to the usual form of charades, in which there are no teams and individuals take it in turns to act out the title of a book, movie, play, or song in front of the rest of the group, who try to guess it. In chess, your defeat is my victory. In charades, we all win or lose together.

So how would a game theorist explain the conundrum of Fischer’s apparent bargaining imprudence and his negotiating success?

In bargaining, theorists have long recognized that there are rational advantages to irrationality, or at least to the appearance of irrationality. One purely academic illustration of this has a woman returning home to discover a dangerous-looking burglar in her house. She recognizes that the burglar has a motive to kill her because she can describe him to the police. If she could swallow a tablet, making her, for a short period, wholly and transparently mad, the burglar might believe she will not be able to identify him later and so might leave her unharmed.

Some game theorists even go so far as to say that we are biologically hardwired to be irrational—say, to want vengeance even when by hurting others we will only suffer further ourselves. It is possible that we have evolved to be partially vengeful; if my enemies know I will come after them, even at considerable cost to myself, they are less likely to inflict harm on me in the first place. The evolutionary drawback of such hardwiring is that once violence begins between individuals, factions, or nations, it becomes tough to stop, as evidenced by the generations of warring families in Sicily wiped out by the vendetta.

James Dean, in his 1955 classic, Rebel Without a Cause, made famous the deadly game of “chicken.” In one variant of this suicidal game, two drivers hurtle toward each other from a distance of several hundred meters. The first driver to swerve away from the line of contact is “chicken” and the loser. If neither swerves, there will be a devastating collision. Now, as the driver of one of those cars, if you can convince the other driver that you are not worried about the consequences of a crash or want death, then the battle is half won. When your opponents realize that you have no fear, that victory (or not being defeated) is all that matters to you, that you do not value your life, then they will see no point in trying to test your courage. One game theorist, Herman Kahn, wrote, “The ‘skilful’ player may get into the car quite drunk, throwing whisky bottles out the window to make it clear to everybody just how drunk he is. He wears very dark glasses so that it is obvious he cannot see much, if anything. As soon as the car reaches high speed, he takes the steering wheel and throws it out of the window.”

Bertrand Russell said that “chicken” was played by two groups: juvenile delinquents and nations. During the Fischer-Spassky match, the preeminent concern of the U.S. administration was the conflict in Vietnam and how to end it. Earlier, in 1969, President Richard Nixon had explained his madman policy to his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, as they strolled along a beach in Florida. As Haldeman recounted it, “He [Nixon] said, ‘I call it the madman theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that “For God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry, and he has his hand on the nuclear button,” and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days, begging for peace.’” When Nixon ordered the bombing of Cambodia with B-52s, the intention, in part, was to signal to the North Vietnamese the potential deployment of the bombers in a nuclear role.

Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser, had also reflected on the madman theory. In 1959, he had attended two lectures given by Daniel Ellsberg titled The Political Uses of Madness, in which Ellsberg had explored the diplomatic value of extreme threats by an apparently reckless leader. He instanced Hitler’s bloodless invasions of the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. One of Ellsberg’s conditions for success in the political application of madness was that the demands should be limited in scale and the threat so extreme that the mere possibility of its being carried out would be enough to persuade a foe to yield.

Fischer could no doubt have won the world championship “chicken” contest—he always appeared ready to crash his career. When he stated his all-or-nothing terms for his participation in a match or tournament, it was transparent to those who met him both that he imbued each of his conditions with immense significance, and that his threats were totally credible. He had a record of inflicting financial and career damage on himself on failing to win concessions: when organizers turned down his demands, he had refused to play in tournaments, even withdrawn midtournament. With his all-or-nothing threats, he was not taking up a negotiating position. The threat was not a tactic; he meant what he said. Even as an adult player, Fischer was seen—by officials and friends alike—as an adolescent, capable of viewing everything as a zero-sum game. At the Palma Interzonal in 1970, the distinguished British chess official Harry Golombek asked a rhetorical question: “How had the organizers achieved the minor miracle of getting Fischer to play through the entire tournament?” He himself supplied the answer: “By acceding to all Fischer’s demands.”

Playing “chicken” when you have no intention of swerving may be a way of repeatedly winning the game, but it is a perilous path. For eventually such a contestant will come up against an opponent unaware of his reputation, or who believes his reputation for recklessness is inflated, or who thinks he has been having things his own way for too long and is prepared to tough it out, or who himself takes a similarly cavalier attitude to death. During one of Fischer’s tournaments, an official implicitly recognized the danger. “Sure, Bobby’s a genius. But what happens if we have three or four geniuses with their own phobias and demands?” Sousse—as we have seen—was an instance of Fischer pushing his demands too far.

In his description of the inebriated “chicken” driver who chucks out the steering wheel, Herman Kahn put the hazards of playing “chicken” another way. “If his opponent is watching, he has won. If his opponent is not watching, he has a problem.”

Happily for Fischer, his negotiating partners had been watching every step of his career. Several times he took his match against Spassky to the brink of destruction. He provoked not just the Soviets, but the Icelanders and FIDE to the very limit of their tolerance. Almost each time they caved in.

With his “madness” established and his demands, if not reasonable, then at least, with considerable effort, manageable, Fischer proved at Reykjavik to be a hugely effective player of “chicken” as well as of chess. A condition for success was that the threat should be extreme—and for the Icelanders, Fischer’s threat to walk out was precisely that.