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

6. LIVING CHESS

How can we begin to understand what goes on inside the minds of world-class players while they are moving pieces on the sixty-four squares of the chess board for hour after hour, game after game, week after week? Months of preparation, mental and physical, precede so grueling a contest as Reykjavik. What resources of skill, intellect, memory, and imagination, of stamina and courage, does a match require?

The British Broadcasting Corporation archives contain a clue in a unique recording of a 1930s interview with Alexander Alekhine. Alekhine is preparing for his title challenge with Max Euwe, the only authentic amateur to become world champion. (Nearly four decades later, as president of FIDE, the sport’s governing body, Euwe will preside over the Fischer-Spassky match.) In the precisely enunciated, beautifully modulated diction of the day, the interviewer asks whether Alekhine does not by now know all the combinations in chess. His voice high-pitched and heavily accented, Alekhine replies, “Oh no, believe me, a lifetime is not enough to learn everything about chess.”

Like Fischer, Alekhine was a chess fanatic and loner. He lived and breathed chess; he was fiercely competitive, constantly seeking self-improvement, capable of turning violent on the rare occasions that he suffered defeat. His knowledge of the openings was unsurpassed. In Alekhine’s time, opening preparation could take elite players up to around move nine or ten, before the game spun off in a novel direction. By the early 1970s, theory had progressed to the extent that often the first fifteen moves would be familiar. Now, in their remarkable memory banks, assisted by computer databases, the chess elite can shuffle through a mental card index consisting of both published games and home-based spadework that may cover them to move twenty-five or beyond. Up to this point they will recognize each position after each move from a game already played, the published analysis of a game already played, or their own private study.

Eventually, however, the sheer immensity of possibilities will land both players in uncharted territory. Indeed, that a board game can generate such intricacy is the real marvel of chess.

Writers trying to convey this complexity have their own pet mathematical picture or comparison to illustrate the scale of the numbers involved. Thus, in Fields of Force, his book on Fischer-Spassky, George Steiner states that there are 318,979,584,000 legitimate ways to make the first four moves. It is said that there are more possible variations in a game of chess than there are atoms in the universe (roughly 10⁸⁰) and seconds that have elapsed since the solar system came into existence (roughly 2×10¹⁷). As for chess, it is estimated that there are approximately 25×10¹¹⁶ ways for a game to go.

This is the figure for theoretical permutations within the rules of the game. But for any given position, the serious player can immediately rule out of consideration the majority of legal possibilities. Take the opening move. White can advance any of its eight pawns one or two squares and can move each of its knights either to the center or to the side of the board. That is twenty legitimate moves in all. But in fact, almost all serious games begin with a two-move thrust of the king’s, queen’s, bishop’s pawn or the king’s knight to the center. So only four of these twenty moves are regularly played.

Even so, one can see how the possible variations soon spiral beyond ordinary comprehension. Assume that in a typical middle-game position there are eight sensible continuations for each player on each move. Over the next five white moves and five black moves, there will be 8×8×8×8×8×8×8×8×8×8 permutations (8¹⁰), or 1,073,741,824; that is more than 1 billion paths down which the game could plausibly twist and turn.

How does a chess player cope with the huge size of the chess cosmos? A layperson might assume that the answer lies in sheer computational ability, and that good chess players are those who can calculate further ahead than mediocre ones. And of course there is some truth in this—though not much. Staring at the board and crunching through the possibilities can get one only so far, for there are simply too many branches on what is a near infinitely sized tree. Today’s computers can calculate millions of moves per second. Yet they still struggle against the human insights of the leading grandmasters.

The real explanation of what chess players do is less rational. It is closer to what we might think of as an artist’s vision and has to do with a kind of intuition. A chess player examining a position sees not an inanimate set of carved or molded pieces waiting to be moved from square to square, but diagonals and ranks and latent possibilities, what Arthur Koestler described as “a magnetic field of forces charged with energy.”

Why do grandmasters recognize that at a certain point in the game, a knight should be positioned on the f5 square rather than c4 or d5? Obviously they might foresee that in certain variations, a knight on f5 defends a crucial square, or threatens a particular combination of moves, or supports a particular maneuver. Or it might be that f5 acts as a temporary staging point for the knight’s ultimate destination. However, there can be both more and less to it than that. Grandmasters somehow “feel” that f5 is the right square; it satisfies their conception of the game, fitting into some kind of deep, unarticulated structure. The German grandmaster Michael Bezold spent several months playing chess with Fischer in the 1980s. “He just felt that a certain move was the right move without calculation. And after analyzing, we saw it was the right one.” The Cuban-born José Capablanca, world champion from 1921 to 1927, was noted for relying on his intuition but reproached himself for this, as though his innate sense for the game were in some way reprehensible—or less admirable than an approach of pure calculation.

An analogy between chess and mathematics or music may be instructive. All three pursuits regularly produce prodigies—those marvelously gifted and precocious beings so rarely found in the worlds of painting or poetry, drama or literature, ballet or bel canto, or in other forms of art where raw talent needs to build steadily on experience and developed sensitivity. It is barely conceivable that a fourteen-year-old would have a sufficient range of emotions and experience to write War and Peace or paint Guernica. But he or she could play Elgar’s violin concerto, propose a mathematical proof, or become U.S. chess champion. Genius in chess is a magical fusion of logic and art—an innate recognition of pattern, an instinct for space, a talent for order and harmony, all mixed with creativity to fashion surprising and hitherto new formations. Max Euwe said of Alekhine, “He is a poet who creates a work of art out of something that would hardly inspire another man to send home a picture postcard.”

Comparing the beauty of chess and music, Harold Schonberg, the senior music critic of The New York Times, wrote, “If chess were as popular as music, if as many people responded to its subtleties and nuances, the masterpieces of Steinitz, Capablanca, Alekhine, Botvinnik, and Fischer would not be held far below the masterpieces of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms.”

The creative imaginations that go into a great chess game and a great piece of music are closely allied. Spassky has been called the Mozart of chess; like Mozart’s music, his chess was a brilliantly fluid combination of form and fantasy. He himself took pride in being labeled the “Pushkin of chess,” explaining in a Yugoslav magazine that it was “because of my elegant and harmonic style, I suppose.” Musicians are often good chess players and vice versa, while mathematicians often excel at both chess and music. Mathematicians see in certain equations the artistic beauty that chess players see in certain combinations. Max Euwe trained as a mathematician. A law in vector theory is named after the early-twentieth-century German world champion Emanuel Lasker. Mark Taimanov is a virtuoso concert pianist.

The splendor of Fischer’s chess lay in its cleanliness, its simplicity; if his moves were notes, they were struck not to impress an audience, not to delight himself by their wit or ingenuity, not to achieve beauty (though they had their beauty). They arose out of the logic of the board and Fischer’s profound yet unfathomable sense of harmony.

There is a passage in Stefan Zweig’s novella The Royal Game, that celebrates the uniqueness of chess, while also drawing parallels with music and mathematics.

Every child can learn its basic rules. Every bungler can try it. And yet it requires within those unchanging small squares the production of a special species of master, not comparable to any other kind, men who have a singular gift for chess, geniuses of a particular kind, in whom vision, patience and technique function in just as precise divisions as they do in mathematicians, poets and musicians.

One artist who proclaimed the aesthetic qualities of chess was a moving force in the Dada movement, Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp achieved notoriety in 1917 through showing a urinal as an exhibition piece under the title Fountain. It symbolized his contempt for bourgeois art and was a pioneering exhibit in the revelation of everyday artefacts as objects d’art. But at this time chess was already on its way to taking over Duchamp’s life, eventually ruining his marriage. On his honeymoon, he analyzed chess problems until, it is said, one night, in a rage, his wife glued the pieces to the board. Later he abandoned art altogether for chess—competing for France in the chess Olympiads. He had a unique perspective of both the artistic and the chess worlds. “From my close contact with artists and chess players I have come to the conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.”

Of course, creativity is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for high achievement at the game. Just as professional musicians have to practice continuously, so chess professionals need constant study. They must be abreast of the latest opening innovations. They must plow through the games of their peers. They are always topping up their mental store of patterns, improving their judgment and deepening their feel for various types of position. They also need constant competition in order to remain battle sharp.

Along with artistic vision, memory is a vital ingredient in the chess player’s makeup. And all world-class chess players have shown an astounding ability to recollect games. Fischer’s total recall struck even fellow professionals with awe.

However, a chess player’s memory is of a particular kind. During World War II, a Dutch chess master and psychologist, Adrian de Groot, made a breakthrough in our understanding of the chess mind. De Groot conducted a series of experiments in which he showed a variety of chess positions to a variety of players, from the expert to the beginner. They were exposed to these positions for just a few seconds, after which they were given a chess set and asked to reconstruct them. Their ability to do so correlated closely with the strength of their chess. Max Euwe, who took part in these tests, never failed to place each piece correctly.

De Groot showed his subjects typical chess positions such as one might come across during a typical game. Later, psychologists widened his experiment by conducting similar tests with randomly placed pieces. The results were intriguing. When the pieces were positioned arbitrarily, the expert performed no better in reproducing the board than the beginner. What the expert could do was recognize regular patterns of pieces. Thus, after the castling maneuver on the king’s side of the board—when the king moves to the knight square and the rook leaps over it—white will routinely have several pieces on certain squares (for instance, the king on the gl square, a rook on fl, and pawns on the f2, g2, and h2 squares). A chess player needs almost no time to absorb such a familiar cluster of pieces. Such clusters can be regarded as akin to phonemes in language; they are the game’s basic building blocks. The top chess masters can instantly make out thousands of such clusters.

Just as some people have an affinity for language, some will also have a natural aptitude for pattern recognition and retention, which is then enlarged by study—perhaps physically expanding the relevant area of the brain itself, as tests have shown happens to London taxi drivers who have to memorize all London streets to gain a license.

This capacity to recall positions has led to staggering public feats, one from grandmaster Miguel Najdorf. Najdorf was born in Poland in 1910 but was in Buenos Aires for the chess Olympiad when German tanks crossed the border into Poland in 1939. He stayed in Argentina, and during the war he took up a challenge to play forty boards “blindfold.” The term blindfold is chess player’s argot; in practice, Najdorf sat with his back to his opponents as their moves were read out to him. This required keeping in his head the positions of 1,280 pieces (initially) on 2,560 squares. He had undertaken the challenge after losing all contact with his family, hoping they would read of his exploits in the press. He won the vast majority of games, but there is no evidence that this news reached home.

Given the skills required of the chess player, and the repeated mental strain from playing game after game after game, it is small wonder that, in George Steiner’s words, “this focus produces pathological symptoms and nervous stress and unreality.”

The image of the near insane chess champion must be approached with caution. For the vast majority of grandmasters, mastery of chess is combined with a normal social and emotional life. Spassky had a life outside chess recognizable to chess players and non—chess players alike, a family, hobbies and passions, feuds and friendships. Yet the number of great players whose behavior away from the board has been eccentric, bordering on the outlandish, cannot be ignored. Some champions have clearly lived on—and a few have crossed—the fine line between genius and insanity.

Before Fischer, the United States had produced only one player with an unquestionable claim to being the world’s best, Paul Morphy, who came from a wealthy New Orleans family a century earlier. Morphy was Fischer’s favorite player of all time; he characterized him as “perhaps the most accurate chess player who ever lived.” As a young man, Morphy demolished the foremost players in the United States before traveling to Europe in 1858 in search of stronger opposition. There, too, he trounced everybody in sight. Like Fischer, who came to identify with him closely, Morphy’s exploits over the board captured the nation’s headlines and imagination. His name was used to market various products, such as cigars and hats. Although he did little apart from chess, Morphy loathed any suggestion that he was a professional, deeming it more respectable to live off an inheritance from his parents. He also despised the chess “scene.” Still only in his twenties he descended into a state of paranoia and depression and became a recluse. Occasionally he was seen wandering the streets of New Orleans, muttering to himself in French. At the age of forty-seven, he was found dead in a bathtub, surrounded by women’s shoes.

The first official world champion, the Prague-born Wilhelm Steinitz, who did scratch a living from chess, became convinced at the end of his life that he could beat God, even if the Lord were granted a pawn and a move head start. Akiba Rubinstein, a Pole, one of the preeminent players in the early twentieth century, was certain that other players were out to poison him; he lived in an asylum from which he journeyed to the chessboard. In the same decade, the Mexican master Carlos Torre removed all his clothes while traveling on a public bus in New York. His breakdown may have been triggered by a relationship with a young woman that had gone sour. From that moment on, he never recovered sanity. Was chess partially responsible? International master Bill Hartston, a psychologist, says, “Chess is not something that drives people mad; chess is something that keeps mad people sane.” Clearly, it failed to do this for Morphy and several others. What about Fischer? His later life appears to supply the answer.

The chess mentality offers rich pastures in which psychoanalysts may safely graze. Freudians in particular have delighted in speculating on what subconscious drives govern the average chess player. Ernest Jones, pupil and biographer of Freud, wrote a paper in 1930 entitled “The Problem of Paul Morphy.” He focused on the relative impotence of the central piece, the king, leading him to the startling deduction that chess is “adapted to gratify at the same time both the homosexual and antagonistic aspects of the father-son contest.” Grandmaster Reuben Fine, himself a psychoanalyst and author of a book about the Fischer-Spassky match, was also taken by the role of the king and the sexual connotations of the game of chess. Ignoring female players, he maintained that the king aroused castration anxiety among men, since it “stands for the boy’s penis in the phallic stage, the self-image of the man, and the father cut down to boy’s size.” Fine concluded, “Chess is a contest between two men in which there is considerable ego involvement. In some ways it certainly touches upon the conflicts surrounding aggression, homosexuality, masturbation, and narcissism.”

Fine used his psychoanalytic tools to analyze Fischer. He saw particular import in Fischer’s statement that he would like to “live the rest of my life in a house built exactly like a rook.” According to Fine, the libidinal undertones expressed in this desire are impossible to ignore. The preference offered “a typical double symbolic meaning: first of all it is the strong penis for which he apparently finds so little use in real life; second, it is a castle in which he can live in grandiose fantasy, like the kings of old, shutting out the real world.”

The Freudian view remains ultimately unfalsifiable and so not, in the view of many philosophers, scientific: certainly in this extravagant form, it is difficult to take seriously. What a survey of great players tells us is that all human life is there: drunks and womanizers, the happily married and the lonely, the businesslike and the otherworldly, the religious and the atheistic, the democratic and the totalitarian, the honorable and the treacherous. But alongside their brilliance, at their competitive acme they share one other quality—an uncommon steeliness of character.

In no high-level sport does a player need to be tougher psychologically than in chess. In most sports, nerves dissolve in the flow of the action; in chess there is a deadly surfeit of time for brooding. Most professional games last several hours. A match against the same opponent can go on for several weeks. A whole hour can pass waiting for an opponent to make a move, while the inevitable question nags insistently: Has a weakness been found?

If panic, doubt, or defeatism creeps in, the affected player may begin to see less clearly, begin to adopt too cautious an approach or, in desperation, too cavalier a style. The conviction may grow that an opponent is seeing further and deeper. Inspiration becomes impossible. The British journalist and chess fan Dominic Lawson puts it vividly:

As in all walks of life, in chess there are various mechanisms for handling the stress. It is possible that Fischer coped in part by channeling it into rage. Certainly some players (notoriously, for example, Mikhail Botvinnik) have a talent for loathing an opponent, a loathing that improves their performance at the board, sharpens their sense of competition, and channels their aggression. Korchnoi is in that class, too, capable of whipping up antipathy for a single game.

Though very competitive by nature, Spassky belonged to a far rarer breed. Like Smyslov and Tal, he wanted to befriend his opponents, to create an atmosphere conducive to weaving creative magic. For him chess was more artistry than slow-motion Sumo wrestling. And like Taimanov, as an artist he needed the stimulus of spectators.

Of course, Spassky had learned to control his emotions and to stifle any expression of feeling, though in earlier days he was often ill after a tournament, afflicted by tonsillitis and a high temperature. But later on, the German grandmaster and psychologist Helmut Pfleger measured the stress levels (blood pressure and so on) of a number of grandmasters in a major tournament in Munich. He discovered that Spassky was the calmest. Spassky’s serenity was an asset: any champion would have had his nerve tested by the manner in which Fischer stormed his way to the final.