Written and read by Stephen Moss. Produced by Simon Barnard
Monday 26 September 2016 14.38 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2016/sep/26/truth-beauty-and-annihilation-my-quest-for-chess-mastery-podcast
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/sep/14/truth-beauty-and-annihilation-a-life-in-chess
I was probably the most average chess
player in the world. But there came a point where being average was no longer
enough. I had become good enough to know how bad I was. I was attached to two
clubs in south-west London, Surbiton and Kingston, and was mixing with players
who were very good, who had international master titles, one notch below the
coveted grandmaster title. I wanted to be like them. I wanted to
feel at home on the 64 squares.
I was a middle-aged man who had done OK in life, but there was
something missing. I hadn’t created anything substantial;
hadn’t mastered a discipline. I craved substance, and saw in chess a possible way of laying down a marker. I
would become an expert, demonstrate that I wasn’t just a dilettante.
After a lifetime of chess mediocrity, I set out to achieve
excellence, for the first time in my life to truly master a world, to become
good – not just good at chess, but at living. To get really expert I would have
to be focused, disciplined, ruthless even – all the things I had
found it difficult to sustain in an often rackety life.
My intermittent love affair with chess began when I was 11.
I was certainly no prodigy. For one thing, I started too late – some 11-year-olds
are virtually grandmaster standard. I was OK but, as
with most other things in my life, didn’t work hard enough at the game. I
wanted instant brilliancies; refused to do the slog of reading books, and saw chess as an art not a
science. I had a friend who saw it as a science not an art, read books on opening theory, and always beat me. I played for my
school, and had a decent record, but what I mainly remember is that we always
got biscuits and orange juice before each match. Schools admired boys who
played chess. Unlike the girls at the school, who tended to favour rugby
players.
As part of my quest, I thought it might make for a poetic experience to return to Newport, the place of my birth, to play in the South Wales summer congress. I was staying with my parents, who acted as if the intervening 38 years had never happened, making me sandwiches and giving me a Thermos flask of tea to see me through the rigours of the day. My first game was on Saturday morning. My opponent had a relatively low grade (grades in chess are not unlike golf handicaps, and designate how good players are: the top-rated player in the UK has a grade of around 280, mine was around 133) and he played like it, giving up a pawn for nothing in the opening, and then losing a piece. The game was effectively over, and it irritated me that he insisted on playing on. I don’t know if it was boredom, fury, tiredness or simple incompetence but, as we approached the endgame, I committed the mother of all mistakes, blundering away a rook.
He was in a position where he could endlessly check my king with his queen if he wished. He offered me a draw, trying to mask his relief and disbelief at the mistake that I had made, and I had to accept. I had thrown away an easy win and felt ridiculous. I fled the tournament hall, sat beside the murky waters of the River Usk, bolted my sandwiches, and tried not to burst into tears. This was the most abject failure I had yet had to endure, and it would be difficult to recover. So much for the poetry of my return to Wales.
In the middle of one of my later games at the Newport congress, I suddenly asked myself whether I was really enjoying playing. I had the same thought as I watched the deciding game in my section, in which a 17-year-old was playing a crop-haired, middle-aged man to decide who would take first place. Both were down to their last few seconds, the youngster was shaking, and almost every move they made was an error, a rook mislaid here, a bishop casually tossed away there. Eventually the crop-haired man lost on time – in tournament chess, moves have to be made in a set time limit – and the 17-year-old had his prize. But the youth looked drained, shell-shocked, incapable of feeling any pleasure at his victory. Why did we put ourselves through this?
I had had similar doubts after that earlier game in Newport when I had thrown away a rook with what may have been the most ridiculous move in the history of chess. Why was I here making a fool of myself? What was the point? John Saunders, a former Welsh international, was giving me occasional coaching as I tried to crack the chess code. But he was also good at offering homilies. “Playing chess is a vale of tears,” he said during one of our training sessions as we examined an especially egregious, error-riddled game I had played. “This teaches us a very valuable lesson. It doesn’t matter what you do, how you play or how you change your approach to the game. Chess is just a bitch that bites you in the arse.”
Saunders was expressing, albeit less elegantly, a view propounded by HG Wells in an essay entitled Concerning Chess in 1901. “The passion for playing chess is one of the most unaccountable in the world,” wrote Wells, who at times shared that passion but never appears to have become very adept at the game. “It is the most absorbing of occupations, the least satisfying of desires, an aimless excrescence upon life. It annihilates a man.”
Does the
pain always outweigh the pleasure? Siegbert
Tarrasch, the best player in the world (though never world champion)
in the 1890s, thought not. “Chess, like love, like music, has the power to make
men happy,” he wrote in the preface to his book The Game of Chess, published in
1931, three years before his death. But is that really true? A blog by the
English grandmaster Danny Gormally encapsulated the
nightmares chess can induce. “I played a game a couple of days ago where I lost
from a rook up,” wrote Gormally. “At the end of the game I completely lost my
rag and started screaming, which was quite embarrassing in hindsight. Really I
was angry at myself. Other players in the tournament, including my opponent,
saw this meltdown and must have thought, ‘What a nutter’. Increasingly I’m
suffering from poor emotional control. You’d think I’d get calmer as I get
older, but at times I even feel I’m teetering on the brink of madness.”
The Dutch
grandmaster Hein Donner also captured the pain and paranoia that chess can
induce. Writing about the great world championship match in 1972 between Bobby
Fischer and Boris Spassky, and the beginnings of Spassky’s disintegration, he
poured scorn on the idea that chess was one of the least demanding of pursuits.
“What comes dramatically to the fore in this match,” he wrote, “is that chess
is a tough sport. What seems so easy at first sight in fact puts a greater
pressure on the players than any other branch of (physical) sports. To sit
immovably still for five hours on end, in a condition of semi-consciousness,
under the heavy burden of a possible mistake – all this opens the door wide to
serious distress.”
Bobby Fischer, right, and Boris Spassky
contest the world championship in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1972. Photograph: J.
Walter Green/AP
A chess win
offers a high that is almost sexual – that moment of release after sitting at
the board for four hours plus. But do the highs make up for the lows? John
Saunders, my chess coach, didn’t think so. “The pain of defeat is greater than
the joy of victory, at least for a pessimist like me,” he insisted, which may
be one reason why he retired from competitive play in his late 40s to
concentrate on writing about the game. He found it even harder to derive
satisfaction from playing once computer chess programs, now available to
everyone, became all-seeing and able to spot flaws even in games you thought
you had won well.
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Why do we
put ourselves through it? It seemed to be a question that concerned amateurs
more than the pros, who had played since they were five and for whom it had
become a way of life, as natural as breathing. Some eulogised upon the game’s
beauty and heritage, but for most it was enough that they excelled at it.
David
Spanier, another journalist (and hapless amateur) who fell in love with chess
and wrote a book about it 30 years ago, had a simple explanation for the game’s
enduring appeal: “Chess is a substitute for life itself ... Over the board all
the dramas and colours of living are continually being played out in
imagination. [It has] something like the effect of a gently powerful,
pervasively consuming, hallucinatory drug.” Robert Desjarlais, a chess-loving
American anthropologist, also uses the analogy of drug addiction in his book Counterplay: “Just as the chemical
properties of heroin directly and immediately affect the central nervous
system, so chess can lock into certain pathways of the mind, and it doesn’t
easily let go.”
Desjarlais,
though, doesn’t stop there. He examines this peculiar passion, the reasons we
become addicted. “For some, chess is a hobby picked up along the way,” he
writes, “while for others it’s a cathedral of truth and beauty. The attractions
often relate to the drama that each game promises, the competitive challenge in
pitting one’s skills against another’s, the intricate complexity that comes
with any chess position, the rewarding intellectual conversation that takes
place between two minds during a game, how focused concentration can take a
person into a domain of pure thought removed from the hassles of everyday life,
the way chess enables people to know their mind better, the pleasures of
learning and participating in the conceptual history of modern chess, the
camaraderie to be found at chess clubs, the thrill of accomplishing something
creative at the board, and the way in which truth and beauty – and perhaps a
measure of wisdom – can be found in chess.”
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I liked that
truth and beauty came at the end of Desjarlais’s list. When I set out on my
mission, I wanted to grasp the truth of a position and create something
beautiful. But as I played in more and more tournaments, I just wanted to win:
to beat my opponent and improve my grade. Of course one does that by
understanding more about chess, by becoming more adept at analysing positions,
by getting closer to their mystical “truth”. But I had also come to see that
strength of character, calmness under pressure, the sheer will to win were just
as important. Maybe even more important at the amateur level, where errors
abound. “The winner of the game is the player who makes the next-to-last
mistake,” said Savielly Tartakower, a Polish grandmaster from the first half of
the 20th century and the game’s greatest aphorist. Kill or be killed. To hell
with truth.
The
romantics would disagree. In the early decades of the 20th century, chess was
seen as a beautiful, rarefied pursuit akin to philosophy and the arts. The
French artist Marcel Duchamp loved the game so much there were rumours that he
planned to forgo art to concentrate on chess. “While all artists are not chess
players,” he said, “all chess players are artists.”
Duchamp was
an excellent player, good enough to play for France in chess olympiads and to
get a draw in a tournament in 1929 against Tartakower, a result that pleased
him so much that he framed his scoresheet. There is, though, a conflict at the
heart of chess, one that even Duchamp, who did not disguise the inherent
violence of the game, recognised. Chess aspires to the condition of art, with
beautiful ideas and aesthetically pleasing tactical combinations, but it is
also a base struggle to destroy the other player.
Marcel Duchamp: ‘While all artists are not
chess players,” he said, “all chess players are artists.’ Photograph: Eliot
Elisofon/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image
Hein Donner
addressed the question of whether chess was a profound endeavour or a complete
waste of time in a newspaper column published in 1959. He imagined world
champions, once they had reached the summit, asking themselves: “What purpose
has all this energy served? Has there been a point in all this strenuous
effort?” He went on to dismiss the then world champion Mikhail Botvinnik’s
rationalisation of chess as a branch of art. “A chess player produces nothing,
creates nothing,” argued Donner. “He only has one aim: the destruction of his
opponent. This may be done in a very artistic way. But there is something
strange about those perfect games in which deep strategies or brilliant
combinations secure victory. They are published all over the world and are
included in textbooks, these games that are ‘all of a piece’, but in fact they
are not chess games at all, they are monologues. A real chess game can only be
experienced by two people. Nothing can be said about it. Nothing comes of it.”
According to
Donner: “The whole point of the game [is] to prevent an artistic performance.”
The former world champion Garry Kasparov makes the same point. “The highest art
of the chess player,” he says, “lies in not allowing your opponent to show you
what he can do.” Always the other player is there trying to wreck your
masterpiece. Chess, Donner insists, is a struggle, a fight to the death. “When
one of the two players has imposed his will on the other and can at last begin
to be freely creative, the game is over. That is the moment when, among
masters, the opponent resigns. That is why chess is not art. No, chess cannot
be compared with anything. Many things can be compared with chess, but chess is
only chess.”
Did I want
to win at all costs, or was I trying to serve some
higher calling? My view oscillated wildly during the course of my odyssey.
Occasionally I did experience the joy of trying to capture the truth – I
remember one out-of-body experience in a tournament at Hastings where time
seemed to freeze and nothing else mattered but burying myself in the position
in front of me, questioning its meaning, divining what it really meant. But at
other times, I didn’t give a damn about the meaning – or, indeed, the means.
All that mattered was the end of beating my opponent, crushing him into the
dust.
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A year or so
into my three-year mission, I was in one of my “truth and beauty” periods.
Treat chess with respect, play for the right reasons and glory will follow.
Inevitably, in my next game, it didn’t work out that way. I had agreed to play
a game for Kingston, one of my two league teams, against Redhill. I’d been
playing for Kingston in a desultory way for several years without ever really
feeling attached to the club.
Whereas my
other club, Surbiton, met in the congenial surroundings of a large, rambling detached
house that doubled as a day centre for the elderly and was doing well, Kingston
stumbled from crisis to crisis. It was short of players and, having been
evicted from a Quaker hall that was being redeveloped, now had no real home and
was forced to resort to an Asda in Roehampton – a world away from the
chandeliered Viennese cafes in which chess had flourished in the early part of
the 20th century. The romantic in me hankered after that golden-age ambience,
and Kingston’s plight seemed to sum up the decline of chess since it had been
front-page news in the Fischer era.
These little
London clubs – replicated in towns all over the UK, where chess aficionados
meet in the back rooms of pubs and social clubs – are hangovers from a time
when the game was thriving. Back then, there was little else to do, and men –
it was invariably men – were looking for a way to fill dark winter evenings.
Chess, like fishing and pigeon fancying, is a great form of structured
time-wasting.
Kingston had
15 or so regular players, all but one of whom were men. Mostly, they were past
50 and had played chess all their lives. They had grown up in that postwar
period when it was part of their school life, and the game had then become an
integral part of their adulthood too. Even the ones who took breaks to marry
and have children, as I had, eventually came back. Chess had them for life, and
for some the board was their world, perhaps even their salvation.
We were
playing in Asda’s cafe, thankfully closed to the paying public – the clatter of
cups and a gawping audience would have been an indignity too far. I was up
against a player graded 160 who annoyed me with his habit of invading my space
by stretching his legs out under the table. He played slowly and fell
hopelessly behind on time. I was gradually building a better position and had a
huge time advantage, so as we neared the time control – we each had to play our
first 35 moves in an hour and a quarter – I felt it was inevitable I would win.
Shades of Newport, and another demonstration of Donner’s adage that the
position he hated most was one that was “totally winning”.
Foolishly, I
forgot this sage observation and just waited for my opponent to crumble. But as
the time control approached, he started to speed up, banging his hand down on
his clock and stopping recording his moves, as is sometimes allowed when you
have less than five minutes left. I was still playing at a leisurely speed,
convinced I had more than enough time to secure victory. My advantage was
getting bigger, and I felt sure he would resign at any moment. But he didn’t
resign: he carried on, played ever wilder moves and set me a series of problems
that ate into my time. I lost control of the position and, worse, lost track of
how long I had left, so that the flag on my clock fell as I was about to make
my 35th move. I had lost on time – a game I had spent the past hour believing I
had won. He had somehow made 10 moves in a minute and suckered me into defeat.
I was devastated, hardly able to speak or think coherently.
The chess
world championship was taking place when I played this appalling game. The
young Norwegian Magnus Carlsen was giving the reigning champion Viswanathan
Anand a beating, and the latter had just lost a crucial game with a terrible
blunder that virtually guaranteed Carlsen would become the title holder – at 22
the joint youngest player, along with Garry Kasparov, to become world champion.
After Anand’s defeat, grandmaster and former British champion Jonathan Rowson
tweeted: “Just as men will never ‘get’ what it feels like to give birth,
non-chess players will never know the unique torment and anguish that flow from
such a defeat.”
Magnus Carlsen, right, playing Vishwanath
Anand in the world chess championship in 2013. Photograph: Manjunath
Kiran/AFP/Getty Images
Rowson had
summed up precisely the way I felt after losing the Asda game. I believed that
somehow I had been cheated. I deserved to win that game. My opponent may have
been nominally a 160, but I had played the better chess. Natural justice
demanded that I should be the victor. I wanted to make some sort of protest.
Did he stop recording his moves too soon? Did the five-minute rule really apply
in these circumstances? Should we have made an effort to reconstruct the game
afterwards – neither of us was scoring by the end – rather than offering a
frosty (on my part) handshake and disappearing into the night?
I made
myself look ridiculous by moaning about the injustice to anyone who would
listen. I should have taken it on the chin, but I seemed incapable of doing so.
I had a terrible, sleepless 24 hours, until gradually some sort of sanity
reasserted itself. A few days after my defeat, while commentating on a rugby match
in which Wales once again fell short against South Africa, the former England
hooker Brian Moore said: “In sport you don’t get what you deserve.”
When the new
mid-year grades were announced about halfway through
my quest, I had managed to add a few points – pulling myself up painfully to
136, an old codger’s grade if ever there was one. I was about to “celebrate” my
57th birthday – an age to consider retirement, not to set yourself improbable
challenges. John Saunders liked to see the battle for chess excellence as a
mountain to be climbed. I felt I was still struggling to find a route up from
base camp. How on earth could I begin the ascent?
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I had
attached great importance to winning the Felce Cup – the annual championship
for Surrey players graded under 140. I had somehow managed to make it to the
final, against a likable Frenchman who played for Wimbledon. This was played
over two games so we could reverse colours – playing with the white pieces
confers a small advantage because you get first go and can, in theory, dictate
the play. I won the first game with white, so all I needed in the second game
to win the cup was a draw. As the big day approached, I told myself I needed to
stay relaxed: if I wanted this too much and put pressure on myself, the
likelihood was I would lose. Relaxed concentration – that’s what was required;
an intense focus on the game, but sufficient mental flexibility to avoid
freezing and to allow myself to know when to strike.
I took the
day of the final game off, stayed in bed late and rested ahead of the evening
encounter. Despite playing with the black pieces, I managed to get a small
advantage by move 15. This seemed to provoke him, and he launched an unwise and
premature thrust with his pawns. This was not his natural game – I had played
him before and knew he was happier waiting for me to overreach myself – but he
needed to win to force a play-off. He sacrificed a pawn for a speculative
attack, I parried and launched a counter-attack, he failed to see how potent it
was and, on move 31, faced with a simple three-move sequence that would force
checkmate, he resigned. I was champion of the great, historic county of Surrey
(brackets, division three). Now, at last, I had a large cup to fondle, polish,
cherish.
After
winning the Felce I felt wonderful, but there was still part of me that asked why
I was doing this
After
winning the Felce I felt wonderful, but there was still part of me that asked
why I was doing this. Was chess really a pursuit worth wasting your life for?
Was it a boon or a curse? The American writer, inventor and statesman Benjamin
Franklin, a keen (though by all accounts not very good) player, believed it was
the former, producing an essay titled “The Morals of Chess” (published in 1786
but written half a century earlier) which argued that it was good for the soul.
“The Game of
Chess,” wrote Franklin, “is not merely an idle amusement. Several very valuable
qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired
or strengthened by it, so as to become habits, ready on all occasions. For life
is a kind of chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or
adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and
ill events that are, in some degree, the effects of prudence or the want of
it.” Franklin said chess taught you foresight, circumspection, caution and
optimism.
Contestants in the Four Nations Chess League
tournament at Holiday Inn, Birmingham, in 2015. Photograph: John Robertson for
the Guardian
More than
two centuries later, former world champion Garry Kasparov wrote a self-help book
based on the belief that chess offers signposts for life, titled How Life Imitates Chess. The game, he argued,
was an “ideal instrument” for developing effective decision-making. “Psychology
and intuition affect every aspect of our decisions and our results,” wrote
Kasparov. “We must develop our ability to see the big picture, and deal with
and learn from crises. Such decisive moments are turning points ... we select a
fork in the road knowing we won’t be able to backtrack. We live for these
moments and in turn they define our lives. We learn who we are and what truly
matters to us.”
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“Chess gave
me a way to channel difficult emotions into something creative and
constructive,” said Jonathan Rowson, a brilliantly insightful writer on the
game, in a column in the Glasgow Herald. “From the age of about five to about
25, whatever sadness and confusion I held inside me became fuel in my quest to
improve.” Rowson was expressing the reason many people play the game. It was a
source of validation, a place where the rules and rituals made sense.
At the
outset of my odyssey, I had hoped chess would be good for me – that it would
make me a better, more complete, more focused person, able in some way to
engage with life in a less superficial manner than in my first five decades. I
had largely been disappointed. I had become a marginally better chess player,
but there was no great evidence I had become a better, more focused person. I
was still overweight – my dietary and gym regime, designed to back up my
assault on this chess Everest, had never quite clicked into place; my
commitment to work, in both chess and my rather understated career, remained
uneven; I still felt I was underachieving and too inclined to drift along.
Chess was
supposed to change all that – to make me a more driven, purposeful individual,
and teach me the life lessons espoused by Kasparov. Some hope! Siegbert
Tarrasch said “chess has the power to make men happy”, but I thought that the
former British champion James Plaskett’s observation that “the pure and
solitary nature of chess attracts some fragile minds and helps hold them together”
was nearer the mark.
According to
his biographer Calvin Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp knew why he loved chess and why
it sustained him all his life. “Duchamp’s working methods were marked by an
almost mathematical precision,” wrote Tomkins, “and one of the things he loved
about chess was that its most brilliant innovations took place within a
framework of strict and unbendable rules. ‘Chess is a marvellous piece of
Cartesianism,’ he once told me, ‘and so imaginative that it doesn’t even look
Cartesian at first. The beautiful combinations that chess players invent – you
don’t see them coming, but afterward there is no mystery – it’s a purely
logical conclusion.’”
Infinite
variety and possibility within a strict framework was one of the joys of chess.
It had become apparent to me why Duchamp likened chess players to artists. It
was not so much that they created art, more that they strove to enjoy the
mental freedom of the artist and give themselves scope to create. It was an
attitude of mind. “I have the life of a restaurant waiter,” Marcel Duchamp once
told the art critic Pierre Cabanne, describing his free and easy lifestyle. But
he could just as easily have said “I have the life of a professional chess
player” – freed from the workaday world and living in a constructed reality, a
limitless imaginative landscape made up of 64 squares.
As the end
of my journey approached, I had come to believe that chess, whatever Franklin
and his followers might have thought, was not a moral good or a guide to
living. Like much of art, which it resembled without being able to embody, it
was an assault on bourgeois convention, promoting play above “real” life and
engaging in conflicts that mimic the world beyond the board, while at the same
time mocking it. Why shouldn’t grown men and women play for a living, or, in
the case of many hopelessly impoverished chess professionals, a pseudo-living?
Chess might not make you a better person, but it could make you a freer one.
Main
photograph: Stephen Moss playing Magnus Carlsen in 2009. Credit: Linda
Nylind
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