web analytics

Category: Chess

Categories
Aztecs Chess Friedrich Nietzsche St Francis

The human side of chess, 12

In case of mental disorder

‘First do no harm’.

—Hippocratic Oath

Carlos Torre Repetto undressed on a streetcar in 1926 on Fifth Avenue in New York. That happened during the crisis that eventually led him to quit chess. The immigration police deported him in a steamer to Merida. Gabriel Velasco, the author of the only well-written book about the Mexican grandmaster, omits these vital events about his life in his misnamed book The Life and Games of Carlos Torre. I know Velasco personally, but in the next few pages I will break the taboo of not writing about Torre’s life. What did the champions think of the Mexican GM? Alekhine wrote:

(Left, Carlos Torre.) Since 1914 the chess world has not seen a first-rate luminary, one of those players who, like Lasker and Capablanca, mark a milestone in contemporary history… But about six months ago, shortly after the New York Tournament, in the United States appeared a faint light susceptible—at least we hope so—of transforming into a star of the first magnitude. We are talking about the young Carlos Torre, who is nineteen years old and whose short career has peculiarities worthy of attention… Without a doubt, Torre is not mature, which should not be surprising in a young man who has so little serious practice, but we admire the solidity of his game as well as his brilliant tactical qualities that allow him to emerge safely from sometimes dangerous positions in which he finds himself due to lack of experience. After having examined a number of his games, we cannot but congratulate Dr Tarrasch on his resolve to invite him to the next tournament of international masters to be held in Baden-Baden.

Alekhine wrote these words in 1924. Just two years later, when he came within a shot of winning the 1926 Chicago Tournament, Torre had the New York crisis. It is worth saying that the only game that Torre played with Alekhine was a ‘grandmasters draw’ played precisely in the 1925 Baden-Baden tournament. Alekhine, who two years later would dethrone Capablanca, immediately accepted the premature draw proposition by Torre on move fourteen: a sign of the respect he had for the Mexican. That year, the Moscow International Tournament was also held, where Torre made a sensational start. He started out beating three strong masters, including Marshall. He then drew two games with Tartakower and Spielmann to obtain other resounding victories, one of them against Sämisch, with which he placed himself along with Bogoljubov, Rubinstein and Lasker leading the tournament. Lasker said: ‘These first steps by young Torre are undoubtedly the first steps of a future world champion’. One of the most famous games of that tournament was the one Torre played with Lasker himself, who had been world champion from 1894 until Capablanca dethroned him in 1921, four years before the Moscow Tournament. Lasker held the title of champion for twenty-seven years. This great champion had to face Torre in the twelfth round of the tournament and got to obtain a positional advantage in the opening: an opening that was baptised as Torre Attack because the Mexican master introduced it to the practice of masterful chess. But on move 25 something unexpected happened. Word spread in the tournament hall: ‘Torre has sacrificed his queen to Lasker!’, something that rarely happens in professional chess. When it happens it causes a sensation. Within minutes Torre and Lasker had fans around their board. That game, known as ‘The Mill’, carved the name of Torre in chess annals; among others, it deserved an extensive comment from Nimzowitsch in My System.

I have quoted what Alekhine and Lasker thought of Torre’s future. The other champion of the time was Capablanca; as I said, the only Latin American who has won the title of world chess champion. It is an irony that very few Mexicans, and Alfonso Ferriz is an honourable exception, openly say that Torre could have conquered it as well. Capablanca commented on Torre after the Moscow International Tournament: ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if this young man soon started to beat us all’. The only game between Capablanca and Torre was played in that tournament. Capablanca was then the world champion, and his virtuosity lay especially in his mastery and understanding of the end of the game: that is why his game with Torre has a special value. The Mexican played with such precision and ingenuity that he managed to tie a very difficult endgame with the champion. Averbach, the Russian pedagogue, chose this ending to illustrate the theory of positions in his book Comprehensive Chess Endings: Bishop vs. Knight. When analysing the ending one is left with the feeling that this game between Capablanca and Torre is beyond the comprehension of ordinary fans, and that only a chess professor like Averbach and others can decipher it. When he played with Torre, Capablanca was at the height of his abilities. His game with the other Latin American is a tribute to the classic style of both, and should be studied as a paradigm of the endgame of knight against ‘bad’ bishop.

Torre’s arch was like the myth of Phaeton. After Torre’s crisis at the age of twenty-one, which marks the end of his brilliant but fleeting career, he lived without a profession, in a petty way and depending on his family until the early 1950s. He worked for a time in a pharmacy helping his brother in Tamaulipas, but he didn’t make a career or have children. In 1955 Alfonso Ferriz brought him to the capital of Mexico and kept him in a ‘very cheap’ guest house, according to him. Both Ferriz and Alejandro Báez, generous chess lovers in Mexico, tried to help him. Ferriz employed him in a hardware store, but the sixty-four-square aesthete was overwhelmed by the clientele.

During my vacations from junior high to high school, I worked at the Bank of Mexico and over time I purchased chess books for my collection (when I came of age I got rid of all of them). After work at the Bank of Mexico in the centre of the great capital, I would visit El Metropolitano: a chess den that, like all dens, reminds me of the room where opium addicts tried to escape from reality. In that unlikely place I listened to the chess master Alejandro Báez. His talk wasn’t directed at the beardless ephebe I was, but at the fans Carlos Escondrillas, Raúl Ocampo and Benito Ramírez who frequented El Metropolitano. My presence at a distance in those talks in 1973 went unnoticed. But what stuck with me the most was that Báez pointed out Torre’s admiration for San Francisco: the saint who undressed in a public place as a protest against the humiliation that his father had inflicted on him. I deduced from Baez’s talk that imitating the Franciscan buffoonery frustrated Torre’s career.

Carlos Torre died in 1978. The Russian magazine Schachmaty published an account of the tournaments of the time when Torre had flourished, from 1920 to 1926. Although Torre was then fifth in the world behind Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine and Vidmar, he was ahead of masters of the calibre of Nimzowitsch, Rubinstein, Bogoljubov and Reti. Note that this fifth place refers to the early years of Torre’s career. Would he have reached the top without his psychotic breakdown, imitating the man of Assisi? As I said, in the book that Velasco wrote about Torre the premature retirement of the master from Yucatán is taboo.

Some Mexican players wonder why if Chigorin, who was close to being a world champion, is considered the father of national chess in Russia, Mexican fans ignore Torre’s figure. One possible answer is that the stigma attached to the term ‘mentally ill’ is the most degrading thing we can imagine: more degrading even than having been in jail or having had a homosexual scandal in Victorian times. It is a subject buried in mystery, and the Criollo Velasco’s reluctance to touch on the subject perpetuates the darkness. Many grandmasters, and even world champions, have suffered nervous breakdowns. Although Steinitz is considered the first world champion, at the dawn of the 20th century he died in abject poverty. It is rumoured that he believed that he was in electrical communication with God, that he could give him a pawn advantage and, in addition, win him.

(Plaque in honour of Wilhelm Steinitz, World Champion from 1886 to 1894, in Prague’s Josefov district.) What causes insanity? Since it is prohibitive for today’s society to ponder the havoc that abusive parents wreak on the mind of the growing child to become an adult, a pseudoscience is tolerated in universities that, without any physical evidence, blames the body of the disturbed individual. This is such an important subject that I have written a dense treatise to unravel it. Here I will limit myself to mentioning some reflections that have to do with chess players.

One of the things that motivated me to write this little book is to settle the score with Carlos Torre’s biography. Unfortunately, there is no relevant biographical material on Torre to know exactly why he lost his sanity. The rumours of his supposed syphilis don’t convince me. Ferriz told me that his friends took him with whores in Moscow. But Torre was sane for the last eighteen years of his life. Had he had neurosyphilis his symptoms would have gone from bad to worse. Torre’s mystical deviations and his imitation of the man from Assisi suggest a psychogenic problem. Likewise, Torre’s nervousness, manifested in the film that captured him playing in Moscow, as well as his habit of smoking four daily packs of Delicados brand cigarettes, suggests a psychogenic problem.

The syphilitic hypothesis that Ferriz told me reminds me of some speculations about Nietzsche’s madness. The author of the Zarathustra suffered from psychosis for almost a dozen years until he died: a psychosis very different from Torre’s fleeting crisis. But as in Torre’s case, blaming a supposed venereal disease for Nietzsche’s disorder has been done so that his tragedy fits within the taboos of our culture.

The root of Nietzsche’s madness was not somatic. The ‘poisonous worms’, as Nietzsche called his mother and his sister in the original version of Ecce Homo (not the version censored by his sister), may have played a role. In The Lost Key Alice Miller suggests that the poisonous pedagogy applied to him by his mother and aunts as a child (his father died prematurely) would drive him mad as an adult. It is worth saying that Stefan Zweig’s splendid literary essay The Struggle Against the Daimon (Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche) has also been translated into English and Spanish. As Nietzsche confesses to us in Ecce Homo, a kind of autobiography where his delusions of grandeur are already noticeable, his mother and sister were ‘the true abysmal thought’ of the philosopher in the face of the eternal return of the identical.

Nor is it convincing what Báez said: that Torre masturbated a lot. In the 19th century the myth that excessive masturbation among boys caused insanity became fashionable; and when old Báez said that Torre was a consummate onanist, I can’t help but remember that myth. Equally wrong is the story of Raúl Ocampo. Although Ocampo is one of the best connoisseurs of Mexican chess, Juan Obregón captured him on the tape recorder maintaining a bizarre theory: that a telegram sent to Torre by the Jews to inform him that his girlfriend was breaking up with him was the trick that triggered the crisis. When I interviewed Alfonso Ferriz, one of the few survivors who knew Torre, he couldn’t tell me anything substantial about the Yucatecan’s childhood and adolescence: the time when his mind was structured and the only thing that could provide us with the lost key to understand his mental state. But one of Ferriz’s anecdotes that most caught my attention was that Torre ‘had an almost mystical respect for women’. He called women las santitas (the holy little ones). ‘How is the little saint?’ was his question when referring to Ferriz’s wife.

I would like to talk a little more about Las Arboledas park. Although Fernando Pérez Melo fled home due to abuse and became destitute, I don’t know of anyone among the park fans who has held his father responsible. Society has been obsessed with not seeing the obvious. As the mother is the most deified figure in Mexico, why not start with her, breaking the taboo of the parental deity? Just as it caused a shock among the ancient Mexicans to see how the bearded people pulled from the pinnacles of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan the effigy of the Coatlicue’s son during the fall of the Aztec capital, for us to mature the figure of the mother has to be defenestrated. When Humboldt visited Mexico, the New Spaniards unearthed the Coatlicue statue to show it to him. They didn’t understand this work of art and they buried it again.

When I speak with Mexicans, I realise that they continue to bury the symbols of those female figures and terrible archetypes that they don’t understand or don’t want to understand. For this reason, the ‘santitas’ that Torre spoke of—compare it with Nietzsche’s expression ‘poisonous worms’—continue to be an object of veneration in Mexico. However, and despite all this speculation of mine, there is no substantial information about Torre’s childhood. Ferriz says that Torre never spoke about his parents or his siblings. So, instead of speculating about his childhood, I will focus on the life of a chess player who died in more recent times and about whom a little more is known.

Categories
Chess Quotable quotes

Alekhine quote

‘You can become a big master in chess only if you see your mistakes and short-comings. Exactly the same as in life itself’.

Categories
Chess

The human side of chess, 11

Daniel King vs. Karpov

When I was a teenager without a compass to orient myself in a complex field, like many others I suffered from acute bibliomania. I bought more than sixty chess books, many imported, where I spent all the money I had earned on various jobs during the high school and middle school vacations. I mistakenly believed that by reading them my game would improve dramatically. Now I only have a dozen. Capablanca, who unlike many chess players knew how to live life, had more cookbooks than chess books.

Alekhine said: ‘Young players put themselves at serious risk when they blindly imitate the innovations of the masters without first checking all the details and consequences of those innovations’. It’s fun to watch my opponents gear up by following the latest fad in fashion in, say, the Closed Ruy López opening only to be confronted with my plain Bird Defence against the Ruy they hadn’t studied. In a tournament I beat Roberto González since the opening with this so-called inferior defence. After Kramnik won the match against Kasparov thanks to his draws with those endgames that emerge from the Berlin Defences, the hobbyists should wake up to the fact that the previous openings that the GMs had made fashionable don’t mean that we fans should play them. (See the number of pages that in Volume C of the Encyclopedia of Chess Openings, one of the twelve books that I now own, the Closed Ruy López occupies.)

Let us remember how when Bobby Fischer conquered the crown, many beardless people imitated his complicated Najdorf Sicilians in the vain hope of becoming Bobbys, when the sensible thing is to play only those lines that we understand well. Fischer mastered the Najdorf with great virtuosity, but I doubt that many will understand it. (Interestingly, in The Queen’s Gambit, Beth’s first teacher suggests to the girl that she study this complicated defence: something that no good chess teacher would suggest to a child who is new to the game.) The one who explains the Najdorf very well is GM Daniel King on his YouTube channel. I was glad to learn that instructor José Luis Vargas, one of the park’s old friends, used my idea of ​​the twice-postponed exchange variant, Game # 3 of this book—an easy-to-understand variant—for one of his small pupils who scored important victories in tournaments, taking his opponents out of the fashion variants. Lasker, like Alekhine, chides the mania of learning variants without having understood the basic concept of an opening. By contrast, books with flashy marketing titles like Karpov’s The Open Game in Action are anti-didactic.

I confess that Anatoly Karpov’s career repulsed me and now fascinates me. In chess, before I became aware of the Jewish question, nothing bothered me more that Fischer had not defended his crown in 1975. This is something that disappointed me in such a way that it was enough to turn away from the game and dedicate myself to understanding human psychology. The American could have successfully defended his title in the 1970s, in the middle of the Cold War. What a sight it would have been to have continued with his 2780 rating when Karpov was still in the 2600s! Fischer was at his peak and scrawny Karpov would have been sandwiched between the fearsome Fischer of the 1970s and the new star, Garry Kasparov: who would have been champion in the 80s, or until the 90s if Fischer had not relapsed into his mental illness. That way Anatoli wouldn’t have risen so high on the altar of Caissa nor would he have been champion ten years in a row. At least that’s how I thought before I woke up to what is known on the internet as the JQ (Karpov, in the middle of the slices of bread in the sandwich, is a gentle.)

Although Karpov would achieve the all-time record for most tournaments won, as a pedagogue he is very bad. In the aforementioned book he published a Scotch Opening game that he played with Timann just to show off his victory. And he wrote about another Scotch game to excuse himself why he had lost with that opening in his world championship match. But the long series of variants and subvariants of the games that Karpov gives us has nothing to do with the ABC of that opening. After 1 e4 e5; 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 d4 exd4; 4 Nxd4 Nf6; 5 Cxc6 bxc6; 6 e5 why does the reader think that 6 …Nd5 isn’t played immediately (but 6 …Qe7)? The answer is that after 6 …Nd5 with 7 c4 and 8 Bd3 White would have a strong attack on the kingside. Without being forced to defend himself with 6 …Qe7! in the main variant, after 6 … Nd5? the bishop on d3 is particularly well placed. This d3 bishop is the Scotch’s letter A if Black plays it badly. I only found out about this because a man named Hidalgo, a Spaniard living in Mexico, scolded me in the park when, not knowing the basics of the opening, I played him 6… Nd5? But in his book The Open Game in Action Karpov omits what the now-deceased Hidalgo had told me. The intricate variations of the games that Karpov shows us with other masters of his calibre are the letters U, V and W of the Scotch: not the A. In short: what the champions play doesn’t have to be what we play: players with six hundred points less of rating.

With the exception of Kasparov’s didactic books on his predecessors, instead of reading other world champions I would suggest subscribing to Daniel King’s channel. Regarding defeats, we know that for the chess player they are like a small death. And sometimes only the fear of it crushes us. I will never forget an image from the 1980s when I had Ibrahim Martínez shivering—literally—in front of me in an active tournament, now called rapid chess (a Volga Gambit that I didn’t score and that I lost with Black, although I was much better). I also vividly remember the grimaces of anguish that in another tournament I saw Alberto Campos make in a game against Arturo Anguiano when the latter made an unexpected move. I commented on the terrible grimaces with Erwin Araica who, like every player, didn’t give it the slightest importance and spoke to me in cold logic about the evaluation of the position.

If someone decides to enter the arena, and I mean official tournaments, he must be prepared not only for defeats but for the draws of won games that lacked definition, and the agonies that some of us suffer while extracting a victory from the opponent. Playing in a tournament conjures up an image from the movie Gladiator in which the wrestlers urinated on the floor of the anteroom on their way to the sunny sands of the Colosseum. If that’s what you have decided, ‘Hail Caissa, those who will bet their ego salute you!’, I suggest that after each defeat (or pyrrhic victory) you find comfort in your personal journal. You can also comment on your games in informal texts, where you don’t have to publish the most embarrassing and intimate stuff. And not just like those nice games that I publish in this book: it is more useful to discuss our defeats with humans. I have written a comment on these and gave a copy to Rafael. Perhaps it is worth mentioning that my score in the 1990s in tournaments, including active tournaments in Houston, was 26 wins, 11 draws and 17 losses. The Club Mercenarios gave me a rating of 2176 but what counts is my FIDE rating: 2109. My numerous defeats are available to anyone who asks me (my e-mail appears on page 3).

The goal of these intimate diaries, public commentaries, and lessons in humility is to get to know each other better and avoid dichotomies of the mind: a topic I’ll address in the next chapter.

Categories
Chess

The human side of chess, 10

Gentile Reinfeld vs. Jew Reti

I have said that except for computers the colour of chess is the colour of blood, and that some chess players live more in the world of emotions than in that of cold logic that neophytes observe from the outside. In those emotions, including the thirst to win, the fate of a game is sometimes settled. But from the point of view of the oracle of Delphi I am afraid to say that many players are still children: they don’t know themselves, much less the universe and the gods. Recall how all Fischer read were the Sunday newspaper comic strips, and how Karpov defended the totalitarian regime of his country before the revolutions of 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

At this point I would like to say something about the chess writer Fred Reinfeld. Although in his time the elements didn’t exist to penetrate the hearts of lost souls, he at least made an attempt to probe them. In Mexico, there is a tendency to value European writers at the expense of Americans. I remember what Octavio Paz said about his grandfather’s library, which was rich in French writers and poor in North Americans. Reinfeld had a humble job as a bureaucrat, sought to move up the social ladder, and managed to commercialise many of his chess books in the United States. But it was in a book by Paz precisely where I read that what is written for money lacks artistic value. Nonetheless, Reinfeld wrote a good book. The Great Chess Masters and their Games: The Human Side of Chess, published in 1952, superior to Masters of the Chess Board by Richard Reti in terms of a didactic vision of what chess is. This statement will sound terrible anathema to those who only know the business side of Reinfeld’s books, but his book shows that Reti omitted the personal element in his analysis of the match between Anderssen and Morphy. I think Reinfeld’s critique of dry schematics, that is, of almost every chess commentator, should be read. I’m not saying reread because books like this are rarely on hobbyist bookshelves. Focusing on the psychological aspect of the champions, Reinfeld tells us: ‘I must confess that I am at a loss to understand why these observations have not been made previously’.

A single example will suffice to illustrate his assessment of why Anderssen lost the match. The German master didn’t fail to understand the hidden laws of chess, the canonical version in Reti’s books. He failed to define his well-thought-out games with Morphy. And he failed because at his age his brain wasn’t as trained to play as his young rival’s. It is sad that Reti’s followers simply repeat the myth of their European mentor without qualms: that Morphy had a secret weapon, his positional knowledge of the open game, the centre and the rapid mobility of the pieces. The truth is that Anderssen understood those principles equally. Reinfeld says something similar about the match between Zukertort and Steinitz, and it is also sad that only because he was not champion the beautiful games of Zukertort, who died two years after his defeat, have been relegated to obscurity.

For Reinfeld, who wrote in the middle of the last century, the most exciting world championships were those of Steinitz with Zukertort and those of Euwe with Alekhine (remember that Reinfeld published when Botvinnik was already three years as champion). On the matches between Chigorin and Steinitz, the bloodiest in world championship history, Reinfeld wrote:

They had an unrivalled insight into the nature of chess. Whereas the popularizers think of chess as being amenable to order, logic, exactitude, calculation, foresight and other comparable qualities, Steinitz and Tchigorin agreed on one thing: that chess can be, and often is, as irrational as life itself. It is full of disorder, imperfection, blunders, inexactitudes, fortuituous happenings, unforeseen consequences.

It is precisely due to the lack of insight from the fans that a great champion like Lasker has never been understood. If there is one thing that caught my attention about his match with Steinitz, it was that he defended himself in a lost position where he could be left with three pawns less. That happened in the seventh game in which the young Lasker disputed the crown of the mature champion. Steinitz made an eccentricity by placing his knight to the h8 square that ended up being quite expensive.

Misunderstanding the extremely complicated position that emerged, a position analogous to those that would emerge much later in Tal’s games, he became demoralized and lost the next four games, the match and the crown. Reti erred in Masters of the Chess Board by saying that Lasker played badly on purpose to confuse the opponent. It’s obvious that Lasker didn’t want to lose so many pawns in his decisive game with Steinitz. Rather, what Lasker was doing was, as Nimzowitsch would say, ‘heroically defend himself’ in lost positions where most of us players would feel dejected. Intuitively, Lasker did that—something that Nimzowitsch, another dry game theorist, didn’t see either—because Lasker knew that if he flipped a losing position he would have a moral advantage over his opponent.

Reinfeld’s extended book subtitle reads: ‘The Story of the World Champions: Their Triumphs and their Illusions, Their Achievements and Their Failures’. Sometimes in my diary I write things that never appear in the schematic books of Colección Escaques, a notable Spanish publisher of chess books during my adolescence; in the more than dry Informants or in Reti’s aseptic books. On one occasion I wrote: ‘I was peeing in fear’ because of my nerves during a game. I’ve heard that the same thing happens to other players. ‘To the bathroom, to the bathroom, to the bathroom’ a friend told me about his tournament experiences. When I wanted to break the taboo and wrote in the Club Mercenarios newsletter the agonies that I revealed in the previous chapter, Willy de Winter, one of the main chess promoters in Mexico, misunderstood my initiative. At the beginning of the next round he asked me in public ‘How do you feel?’ as if implying that only I suffered from tribulations, when the truth is that many others do. De Winter’s question ignored that my initiative was simply to break one of the taboos in chess literature: to speak as frankly as possible, and in the first person singular, about our emotions when we play. But laymen have been able to see the player’s emotions. In 1922 a London journalist wrote about Alekhine:

He is a hatched-faced blond giant, with a sweep of hair over his forehead, and several inches of cuff protruding from his sleeve. First he rests his head in his hands, works his ears into indescribable shapes, clasps his hands under his chin in pitiful supplication, shifts uneasily in his seat like a dog on an ant-hill, frowns, elevates his eyebrows, rises suddenly and stands behind his chair for a panoramic view of the table, resumes his seat, then, as the twin clock at his side ticks remorselessly on, sweeps his hair back for the thousand time, shifts a Pawn, taps the clock button, and records his move.

This is the agony that the chess player encounters not in a game, but in a single move. This is chess. However, de Winter never talks about his emotions in the chess newsletter that he publishes, despite the fact that fans have seen him rise up like Alekhine; put one of his feet on the chair, elbow on his knee and hand on his cheek when he gets nervous in a tournament. It is evident that strong emotions when playing are suffered by all of us. What I said about avoiding self-knowledge is also exemplified by de Winter with the question he asked me.

The idea of journaling is not only to help us heal the pride that only women have the right to tell their sorrows and to cry. We must make contact with what fans not only silence to others, but to ourselves. Making deep contact with our emotions reconciles us with them and allows us to mature. Many chess players, including some who were child prodigies, have failed precisely because they denied the feminine part in them. They didn’t manage to harmonise their cognitive apparatus with the sentimental part of their psyche, nor did they make a healthy eruption of the magma they suffer in the interior towards the temperate surfaces of reason.[1] The private diary that no one but one reads is part of the cure for this psychic congestion.

Another of my suggestions is that you write a comment about your games, emphasising the ones you have lost. Many chess players have a huge ego. They always find the cleverest excuses for their defeats, and they tend to remember only their victories. They look like turkeys puffed up with pride the day before they are killed for Christmas dinner.

Let us remember how Fischer broke with the tradition of Alekhine and Capablanca of writing only about their victories. In My 60 Memorable Games Fischer spoke with great honesty about his draws and even some of the defeats that hurt him the most. The idea of journaling is to deflate turkey pride and accept our level of play. But like other people’s diaries, your own is a private matter. In my comments about my games I cited some of my emotions, but in the diaries we write even more intimate things than saying that we ran to the bathroom. On the other hand, writing a not so intimate comment about the games we have played, and I did try that in the previous chapter, in addition to being healthy it means that we can photocopy it and distribute it among our friends. It is a great therapy to share with others the reasons why we lost or why we suffered so much during the victories, something that others have confessed to me that also happens to them.

There are other advantages to commenting on our games in writing. When I transcribed and analysed the fifty games that I played in tournaments in the nineties, great surprises occurred. For example, due to the low self-esteem through which I was crossing in 1993, I realised that I had resigned a clearly drawish endgame of rooks with Jorge Martín del Campo. Likewise, in another game where I lost the exchange with black against Fernando Araiza, I suddenly resigned. Ten years later, by putting that same position on Fritz, the machine played a tedious game with itself of more than a hundred moves that ended in a draw, proving that my resigning was foolish. During the live game I hadn’t realised that, with eight pawns on each side, losing the exchange in that closed position didn’t mean a decisive advantage. This was recognised by Fritz from the visual thinking screen where he put the sign ‘equality’ or ‘something better’ and not the ‘clear advantage’ of white in the various positions it played after my resignation. Likewise, for years I blamed my opening choice, a Richter attack that I played against Alberto Escobedo in a French Defence, instead of focusing on a blunder that for some reason my memory failed to register: the real cause of my defeat. I had mistakenly been left under the impression that the now-deceased Escobedo had outdone me cleanly in a defence he knew pretty well. When I put Fritz the position I realised that before the blunder, the game I played with Escobedo was even. In fact, the game that Fritz played with itself also ended in a draw.

It is true that chess is so complicated that we shouldn’t even trust computational analysis as the last word on a position. In Caissa’s magical domain the computer can still do mistakes, as Hal 9000 erred en route to Jupiter by underestimating Dave. However, at a slow pace of play it is generally a good reference to calibrate a complicated position that would otherwise take a lot of trouble to disentangle. This is what Kasparov observed in the first volume about his great predecessors: even a computer would take a long time to decipher that position that emerged in the seventh game of the Steinitz-Lasker match, mentioned above. The Fritz I own is a sophisticated program. I recommend that hobbyists take some private lessons with users of the program before using it. It is a great GM slave who not only plays with us every time we ask him to, but it can be forced to play a specific position to solve our doubts, such as the doubts I had about my games with del Campo, Araiza, Escobedo and many others.

While transcribing, analysing, and even photocopying my comments about my games and sharing them with friends doesn’t level me up, it improves morale. But the knowledge of oneself, to reconcile with the past and with the defeats, is a practice that doesn’t occur to those who focus on variants, those who devour Informants or variants of ChessBase believing that by memorising them they will win. The truth is that I have found them crying in tournaments when faced with reality. It’s very easy to get a player out of his favourite line, which prompts me to the next suggestion.

__________________

(1) See ‘The Eternal Feminine’ in pages 176-180 of my Daybreak. PDF clickable from the sidebar.

Categories
Chess Music Racial studies

The human side of chess, 9

‘Why do chess players grieve so much after a defeat?… Because defeat is like a little death’. —Manuel Suárez / Boris Zlotnik

What to do after defeat

None of the chess fans I know knows that mastery of the game is due to factors that have nothing to do with his will. Only in a small group of vocations can a human being aspire to be a child prodigy. Music, mathematics and chess are paradigms. Some compare Bach’s music with mathematics, whose logic is inherent, or a priori a Kantian would say, to the human mind. Also, as a special form of computation that is chess, early training can turn a child with special characteristics into a Capablanca, for whom chess was his mother tongue. The same can be said for Russian and former Soviet republics players who, unlike my very modest level when I played Monroy, reach grandmaster norm at fifteen or sixteen.

Few things have impressed me more than the autobiographical part of Capablanca’s My Chess Career. By winning a match against American Frank Marshall, the Cuban reached the level of a grandmaster without studying a single opening book. This is the most representative fact that I can think of to point out how someone with good genes who learned to play chess from the age of four, and developed the edge of his mind in that computational area, can become a world champion. Capablanca’s brain, the ‘chess machine’, was trained in the span of life in which one is capable of developing new faculties. That is why music conservatories do not admit students after a certain age. The same thing happens in chess.

The neurological development of certain areas of the brain differs between a Capablanca or fifteen-year-old GMs and the rest of the hobbyists. An even more terrible truth is that a high IQ is innate, and has to do with the ethnic group to which one belongs. Not having heard this, many have pursued the mirage that, through sheer study, they would become grandmasters as if it were something similar to obtaining a doctorate in physics. In reality, the rating that a young man learning the game in his twenties can develop is relatively modest, and even the level of a child or pubescent if he doesn’t have the right genes for this game. If we study chess to reach the equivalent of a doctorate, the knowledge acquired can help us to be excellent instructors, but it won’t necessarily allow us to play like the first boards in the world. Like the violin or piano prodigies, in chess what counts is how much we train certain areas of our brain in childhood, puberty and adolescence. Using a crude computational analogy, what really matters is the kind of software our brains were trained with, in addition to racial hardware (nowadays, there are no active chess GMs of the black race).

In the introduction I said that the talks of some amateur fans motivated me to write this book. One of these friends is called Alcides, who is well educated in chess. In the café where we talked Alcides played matches with Yayo, who doesn’t read chess and doesn’t even know how to maintain the opposition in a king and pawn versus king ending. However, Yayo generally beat Alcides in matches. On several occasions I spoke with Alcides about the Lasker manual. He likes the original German version better than the shortened English and Spanish versions. One of these versions once wore on a coffee table, but as usual Lasker’s pupil was swept away by Yayo. Alcides is capable in his profession of computer science and handling of computers. But despite his chess and computational knowledge, his uneducated rival has a better brain to play chess. Let’s put it iconoclastically: Lasker’s manual, and in fact all the chess books that I know, are bad and anti-pedagogical because they don’t start from a vital axiom about the game: the development of certain brain areas differs among people and even among the races.

It is not my intention to discourage Caissa’s suitors. But the young aspiring would spare a lot of dreams if, at home or school, we had been given this elementary class in neurology and raciology. Personally, given my father’s talents in music and visual arts, that was where I could’ve excelled (think of prominent Mexican filmmakers in Hollywood like Cuarón, Iñárritu, and del Toro), not computational business like chess. But even if we take all of this into account, compared to Cuba the chess level in Mexico is low. If we add to this that many of us are ageing and that we don’t have good instructors, those Botvinnik and Averbach that the Russian children and lads had, it will be virtually impossible to make the quantum leap to become GMs. Here I can’t help but come to mind a photograph of instructor Botvinnik with a young Garri Kasparov next to him. It also comes to mind that both of Fischer’s parents were Jewish. His biological father was a brilliant mathematician (Ashkenazi Jews are the ethnic group ranked the highest on the IQ scale).

Listening to a thirteen-year-old boy play Beethoven’s concerto for violin and orchestra is like watching some children from the former Soviet republics play games of blitz. Such is the virtuosity of these Paganinis of Caissa that they give their colleagues a five-minute lead, by just two minutes of their own, and destroy them with diabolical precision. No matter how hard you study, you’ll never play blitz games like that: an infallible measurer of the level of a boy whose mother tongue had been chess. To meditate thoughtfully on what we read in chess literature, to put our games to Fritz to understand them better, to consult the Encyclopedia of Chess Openings to see where we made the imprecision, to play one tournament after another to accustom to fighting chess, may be instructive but not necessarily to jump significantly in skill level. At least not to take the leap that some young people fantasise about. Our brain is already formed, formatted I would dare to say.

Presently, the edge of my mind manifests itself in my speciality of understanding the psychic havoc that abusive parents cause—an area that has nothing to do with chess. Capablanca, who never undertook the chess study marathons that many unsuspecting do, played infinitely better than I and other inveterate scholars. I have said that few things have impressed me more than Capablanca beat a GM during a match without studying a single opening book (on another level, this is exactly what happened in Alcides’ matches with Yayo). At twenty Capablanca had not played a single match with a grandmaster, and he beat Marshall with a crushing score of +8 = 14 –1 (eight games won, fourteen draws and one loss). This is the fact that best illustrates what a genius is. If the pedagogues were humble enough to accept the innate deficiencies of the child, they would know that he won’t speak as fast as the Jew Ben Shapiro, or that he won’t obtain the title of GM of chess at thirteen as did the Nordic Magnus Carlsen, who would conquer the sceptre.

(Thirteen-year-old Carlsen in Norway giving a simultaneous exhibition.) We don’t need to rank high on verbal IQ, the speciality of the Jews, to become a champion. But we do need to rank high, like the Nordics, Slavs or Asians, in spatial intelligence. If you still want to play under these circumstances, my suggestion is that you write an intimate diary about your emotions in the game and your love of the game taking these facts into account.

Categories
Autobiography Chess

The human side of chess, 8

5 Tort – Computer

HAL 9000 and man

I didn’t play this last game with a human being.

When I play with my computer it seems as unequal a struggle as competing in arithmetic with a calculator. As mathematician John von Newmann told Jacob Bronowski, chess is not a game: it is a special form of computing. But before Newmann, Lasker had already intuited that an entity ‘that could keep millions of variants in mind would not need planning’, the theory. The so-called ‘chess theory’ is a crutch for us mortals. The machine that sees billions of actions shows us the quintessence of chess not in its scarlet facet, but its pure and soulless logic. (Despite what fans of A.I. say, the computer system still has no soul.)

When I was fifteen, I went with my father to visit Robert Schirokauer, who changed his name to Robert Hartman, at his house in Cuernavaca. Hartman played chess and I brought my favorite Alekhine book: the beautiful games of his youth that my dad had given me.

Hartman told us that the machine would never beat man ‘because it was Man who programmed it’. Robert S. Hartman was wrong. This game, and on another level Kasparov’s games with Deep Blue, should move us humans to great swallowing of our pride. By the way, it was from Hartman that I learned the word ‘axiology’. His dense book The Knowledge of Good: Critique of Axiological Reason, whose Spanish version my father acquired before Hartman died, is still in the home library. Metapedia’s critical article on the anti-Nazi Hartman was started by me.

 
HOME GAME
November 2003
French Defense

1 e4 e6

2 d4 d5

3 Nc3 Nf6

4 Bg5 Be7

5 e5 Nfd7

6 Bxe7 Qxe7

7 f4 O-O

8 Nf3 c5

9 Nb5 ?!

It’s incredible but this move, which had given me so much success with the players in the park in similar positions, could be inaccurate. The rebuttal the machine applied to me—virtually the rest of the game—is so mathematical that it is terrifying to see such precision in a soulless object.

9… a6!

10 Nd6 f6

11 c3 Nc6

12 Be2 cxd4

13 cxd4 g5

14 g3 fxe5

15 fxe5 g4

16 Nh4 Ndxe5!

From this piece sacrifice Chessmaster didn’t let me go. It won the initiative until my surrender.

17 dxe5 Nxe5

18 Nxc8 Raxc8

19 Rf1 Qb4 +

20 Qd2 Rxf1 +

21 Bxf1 Qe4 +

22 Qe2 Rc2

23 Qxe4 dxe4

24 Rd1

When I made this move of my rook and the next ones I thought I was going to get a certain counterplay and equalizing chances, but…

25 … e3

25 Be2 Rxb2

26 Rd4 h5

27 Re4 Rb1 +

28 Bd1 Nd3 +

29 Ke2 Rxd1!

… I didn’t see this move!

30 Rxe3 Nb2

31 Rxe6 Rh1

32 Re7 Rxh2 +

33 Ke3 Nc4 +

34 Kf4 b5

35 Kg5 Rxa2

36 Kxh5 a5

37 Kxg4 b4

38 Kh5 Rf2

I confess that since move 33 I was taking back several moves: something that can be done to a mindless machine that cannot complain. But not only did I not find a checkmate net; there was not even a continuous check.

39 Kg6 Kf8

40 Rb7 Ne5 +

41 Kg5 Nf7 +

42 Kg6 Nd8

43 Rb8 Ke7

44 Nf5 + Rd7

45 Kf6 Nc6

46 Rb7 + Kc8

47 Rh7

I couldn’t move the rook to b5 because its rook would take my knight and the fork would come.

47 … b3

48 Rh1 a4

49 g4 a3

50 I resigned

I played this game with Chessmaster 8000, although then the Chessmaster 9000 version arrived. Only now, thirty years after having reproduced it for the first time thanks to one of Alekhine’s books, do I understand the French Defense between Capablanca and Reti played in New York, 1924. Capablanca played 9 Qd2 instead of the one I played and beat the Jewish Reti. The strongest commercial program for analysing games now that I review this book for publication is Fat Fritz 2. I do not doubt that if that new engine analysed the above game it would find moves that neither Chessmaster nor I could see.

Stanley Kubrick was a chess fan. I remember a photograph in which he is seen playing on a break with George Scott during the filming of Dr. Strangelove. In the annexes that come with the Chessmaster program you can read that in Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey the HAL 9000 supercomputer faces astronaut Frank Poole in a game of chess en route to Jupiter, and beats him.

But losing to a heartless machine like Chessmaster doesn’t hurt. The first tournament defeat that hurt me was neither more nor less the first game of my first chess tournament, which I played at the age of fifteen outside of what is now called the World Trade Center: the tallest building in Mexico City at the time. My opponent was the strong player Enrique Monroy, who with white opened with a Ruy López in which, with black, I tried to use a defense that Alekhine sometimes played. In part, my defeat was due to the tournament organisers not even informing all of us about time control. I played as if the time limit was not for the first 40 moves, but the entire game. That resulted in that even after reaching the time control I was responding to Monroy’s moves as if it was a blitz game! These were not yet the days of electronic chess clocks. We used mechanical clocks. At that time, losing by default meant that a little red flag on top of one of the two faces of the clocks dropped. Even though I was ignorant of the time control rules in the first round of my first tournament, I blamed myself for the defeat. It was so embarrassing for me to have been beaten that, once I arrived home in a dazed state, I told my parents that the game had ended in a draw…

Categories
Autobiography Chess

The human side of chess, 7

4 ‘The Russian’ – Tort

In pursuit of a metaphorical king

I played this game in a tournament of the Ibrahim Martínez club in the Colonia Roma in Mexico City: a neighbourhood that Alfonso Cuarón made known to the world with Roma, a film that I have criticised on my website The West’s Darkest Hour. I couldn’t say it’s a great game but I’m including it because I used to enjoy reproducing it at home, safe from the agonies of live fighting. Even after playing it long ago, I am delighted to see how I crucified the poor white king in the first row of the board. As in the games in which I defeated Norgaard and friend Marco, the direct attack on the king is what gives us the greatest pleasure. Not during the tortuous live game, of course; but safe at home, with beautiful Staunton pieces of wood, and with our living room fireplace lit.
 

FIDE TOURNAMENT, IBRAHIM CLUB
Time control: 2 hours / 40 movements
February 24, 1993

1 e4 e5

2 f4 d5

The Falkbeer Countergambit.

3 exd5 c6!?

I prepared the Nimzowitsch variant of the countergambit especially for this game. I had made inquiries about the opening repertoire of my opponent, Manuel García Marquina, a young white man nicknamed ‘The Russian’ in chess circles. The referee of the event himself had the indiscretion to tell me that he was playing the King’s Gambit. ‘Really?’ I replied with wicked eyes and a smile. And I went home happy to prepare a line for the Russian: a variant that surprised him.

4 Nf3

Another possibility is 4 Qe2. After this game I heard these words from a fan who was surprised by my victory: ‘The Russian is a specialist in the King’s Gambit’.

4 … e4

5 Qe2 Nf6

6 d3 cxd5

7 dxe4 dxe4

8 Nc3 Bb4

9 Qb5 +

Already in the postmortem, according to some beautiful variants played by the machine, 9 Bd2 would have been better for Black.

9 … Nc6

10 Ne5 Bxc3 +

This opens the a3-f8 diagonal. But if 10… Qd4; 11 Tb1 Nd5; 12 Nxc6 and the resulting complications seem to leave White better. I confess that these calculations, and countless others, I do thanks to my computer system. Only with these sophisticated toys that play first-rate chess have I managed to delve deeply into many of my games.

11 bxc3 O-O

12 Nxc6??

12 Ba3! could have tied the game after 12 … Re8; 13 Rd1 Qc7 (but not 13… Qa5 because 14 Qxa5 followed by 15 Bb5, winning); 14 Bd6 Db6; 15 Bc5 and draw by repetition of moves.

12 … bxc6

13 Qxc6 Bg4

14 Ba3 Re8

15 Qd6 Qa5

16 Bb4 Qa4

17 Bc4 a5

18 h3

And now the direct assault on the king:

18… Rd8

19 Qc7 Qxc2

20 hxg4 Qxg2

21 Qxf7 + Kh8

22 Rh6 e3

23 White resigns

Chess players are sadists. Many of us were abused as children by our parents and, as we must honour them, we take it out on scapegoats. My youth idol Alekhine beat his wives and suffered attacks of violence. Once he lost a game he destroyed some furniture in his hotel and occasionally threw his king across the room. And it was Alekhine himself who said: ‘During a chess tournament a master must envisage himself as a cross between an ascetic monk and a beast of prey’.

An American journalist asked the former champion Spassky, of style influenced by Alekhine, if he believed that the young Seirawan, then the promise of the United States, would conquer the crown. Spassky replied that he doubted it, and added that to become world champion it is necessary to be a kind of bird of prey, a potential murderer: a gift that not all chess players have. In no other game or sport do players speak of ‘killing’, ‘destroying’ or ‘breaking’ the opponent as in chess (remember my quoted diary: ‘I had always wanted to kill Marco with a queen sacrifice’). The type of chess player Spassky refers to sometimes plays in order to engender the morbid pleasure of seeing his opponent bow down. In 1971, a year before being crowned world chess champion, Bobby Fischer (1943-2008) responded to Dick Cavett during a television show: ‘The greatest pleasure? When you break his ego’ referring to the opponent’s ego; and there are those who have said, with some hyperbole, that Fischer had the mentality of a killer.

Unscrupulous psychologists insert electrodes into the rats’ pleasure centres in the brain. They are then conditioned to push a button for ultra-rewarding stimulation. Electrode-implanted rats become addicted to infinite pleasure; so much so that they stop eating and, when they put a metal floor where they will receive a strong electric shock if they step on it, they gladly do so in order to touch the button and artificially masturbate their neurons. What does the torment matter if what is pursued is the absolute glory of that moment!

The players I know appreciate my electric chair metaphor. They say it’s accurate to illustrate the gambit that we do in life when we play in tournaments. Like me, they have suffered horrors in a gambling room that sometimes looks like a torture chamber. But the apparent masochism of faithfully subscribing to the next tournament is inexplicable to them. These gambling addicts, with no insight about what they did to us as children, must have a huge motive for revenge that compels them to hunt down a metaphorical king. We cannot attack those who gave us life. But in the game we can crucify our opponent from time to time.

Categories
Autobiography Chess

The human side of chess, 6

3 Tort – Norgaard

Fuck chess!

After playing three months at Club Mercenarios, this was the first time Jesper Norgaard, a Dane who fathered children with a Mexican woman, lost. In the end, everyone shook my hand, which filled me with satisfaction, especially the congratulations from Héctor Busto. Even the now deceased Ricardo Ramírez Honey published the game in the newspaper. But that is not the reason for picking it up here, but the agonies that I wrote down live during the game. My second retirement from tournament chess in my thirties (I had retired for the first time in my twenties) can be traced to this pseudo-victory.
 

TOURNAMENT ‘DEL PAVO MERCENARIOS’
Time control: 2 hours / 45 movements
November 12, 1992

1 e4 e5

2 Nf3 Nc6

3 Bb5

The Ruy López Opening is Jesper’s favourite, but here I am the one who plays white.

3 … a6

4 Ba4 Nf6

5 O-O Be7

6 Bxc6 dxc6

7 Qe1!?

The twice-postponed exchange variation surprised Jesper. The idea is to prevent the black pin Bg4.

7 … Nd7

It was not good 7 … Bd6 for 8 d4, with initiative. With the textual, which is the one recommended by theory, white recovers the time he lost by changing his ‘Spanish bishop’.

8 d4 exd4

9 Nxd4 O-O

10 Nc3 Ne5

Instead, Marcel Sisniega played 10 … Bf6 against Roberto Martín del Campo in the first game of the Closed National Championship, played three months after my game with Jesper, and won in thirty-five moves.

11 Nde2 Bc5

The Encyclopedia of Chess Openings analyses up to this move, and evaluates the position as equal play. The rest was our improvisation.

12 Kh1

The idea is f4-f5-f6 with a strong attack. Months later the story reached my ears that in a chess event held in Ciudad Juárez, Jesper was asked about this game and that he had replied he had fallen in ‘a laboratory move’. But it was not like that. I only knew religiously as far the encyclopaedia goes.

12 … f5

Jesper used half an hour of his time on this move because he knew he was in trouble. At postmortem he commented that he disliked 12 … Qh4 for 13 f4, which according to him would have led to an inferior endgame. Unlike Marco (‘I’m short fuse’ he told me the last time I saw him, in the sense that he exploded for anything), Jesper commented on the postmortem without any apparent discomfort.

13 f4 Ng4

14 e5 Be6

15 h3 Ne3

16 Bxe3 Bxe3

17 Rd1 Qe7

18 Rf3 Ba7

Two bishops against two knights! But if Black cannot activate them, they are badly parried due to the passed and protected pawn.

19 Rfd3 Kh8

20 Nd4 Bc4

21 R3d2 Rae8

Black’s last moves prepare the liberating …g5 that never came.

22 Qg3 Bb6?

23 Nxc6!

Jesper later told me he didn’t see it. On a blank sheet that I hid behind the score sheet of some games of this tournament, I wrote the agonies that I suffered in the live game. The idea was to calm me down, understand the situation and temper my nerves. On the sheet I wrote: ‘(11:19 PM). Having played 23 NxBP makes me the bitch nervous. That nasty! Fuck chess if this is what it does to me! What does it matter to me even if I have a clear advantage…!’

23 … Qc5

24 Nd4 Qb4

25 b3 Bf7?

In the postmortem Jesper explained to me that, since he looked bad positionally, he preferred to lose another pawn in order to complicate the game. But on the loose sheet during the live game I wrote: ‘(11:34 PM). Again after 25 PQN3: Stress, when discharged, makes you see visions!’ And it is that the chair in which I was sitting when facing Jesper was like an electric chair. It was as if it gave ‘shocks’ but I had to remain seated if I wanted to win.

26 Nf5

‘The stress continues at 26. I know it’s crucial that…’ and here I stopped writing because my opponent played:

26 … Bg6

27 Nd5 Qa3

28 Ch4 Bh5

29 Nf3 Ba5

30 c3 c6

31 Ne3 Bxc3

32 Nc4

This knight manoeuvre gave me the victory but I suffered a lot in finding it because I was in time trouble.

32 … Qb4

33 Rd7 Re7

From now on, I will call the chess programs that I had, Fritz and Chessmaster, ‘the machine’, which in this position analysed 33 …Rf7 to which a winning 34 Qg5 would also come, although without the next attack on the King:

34 Qg5 Rxd7

35 Rxd7 Bf7

In my home analysis the machine analysed 35 …Bg6, which could also have been followed by 36 Nd6. At this point the now-deceased Luis Vaca, who presided over the Mercenarios and whom I highly esteemed, called his friends with these words: ‘The Jesper-Tort game is very, very tough!’

36 Nd6 Bg6

The summoned onlookers made an exclamation: the attack on the King was overwhelming. If Black had defended himself with 36 …h6, 37 Qf5 would come.

37 Rd8 Qxf4

Jesper made a curious gesture of displeasure at this moment when we had all Mercenarios players on top. The truth is that they were fascinated by blood and wanted to see him lose. But I suffered more, although in this position it seems laughable, because I was forced to deliver a proper coup de grace and not screw it up, with the very little time on the clock I had.

38 Qxf4 Rd8

39 Nf7 + Bf7

40 Qxf7 h6

41 e6 Black resigns

Although I won, what no one found out and that I only now confess, is that the victory cost me dear. In my diary the next day I wrote down my agonies, although I will edit the comments on the moves to focus on the psychological aspect, and will correct some syntax:

How tough! There were moments of confusion and suffering and, obviously, of ‘ghosts’ like that Qd1 that I saw but the knight prevented it… Very annoying. It was no use writing down my agonies during the game, which was supposed to relieve stress. What did relieve me somewhat was talking to Jorge Aguirre, talking about anything. I hope that for the next game I don’t get like that. It is clear that the cause of stress is the duty to win in an advantageous position and the paranoia of making a mistake. But it’s mostly ‘self-consciousness’ by onlookers that triggers stress. How will I avoid it in the next game?

Speak? Talk to onlookers? ‘How was your game?’ for example—or whatever, whatever to lower the excruciating stress! I wish there was therapy for this. I wish I was as calm as Romanishin [a Ukrainian GM I saw playing in an international tournament], I wish I was a laid-back! But that’s opposite to the spirit of the chess player, the opposite to the spirit of the fighter. I still have to try something or it’s pure masochism every tournament.

The funny thing is that when I thought I was wrong by not taking the Bb6 I relaxed. Maybe it’s because it loosened my tension as I no longer had a perfect game. Perhaps perfectionism causes stress because the paranoia of making a mistake comes. Or maybe it was that I had already talked to these guys…

What a strain relief once my rival gave up! Alejandro Tirado (who yesterday called those in my book about Cuba ‘worms’) watched the game for a long time. Afterwards I felt that he was envious that I had defeated the number #1 player. He had lost his game. Also after …QxP; QxQ I made a pause which contributed that my win be appreciated by the onlookers. It’s funny how at home I like to remember that they saw my attack and victory, but that at the time it was an extreme torment. The sign is changed. The torment becomes glory.

I played the game in the only tournament I have ever won: a club tournament. The memory still comes to me perfectly that when I got home after my decisive victory over Argentine Silvio Pla, three rounds later, with which I secured the first place, I slept the quietest and sweetest night I had slept in a long, long time. Excited, I signed up for the next club tournament. But my victories were still expensive. It’s amazing how chess players keep their emotions to their souls. I have come to the conclusion that it is perfect nonsense to approach chess from a purely logical viewpoint. The heavy intellectual analyses of chess literature not only fail to reflect our inner life: they are misleading to know what’s going on in our little heads. Only if the confessions of the players were written and published would we get to the core of the game.

In my diary I underlined in red my comments about a miniature that I inflicted on Willy de Winter in the first round of my second tournament in Mercenarios:

I lost this game a hundred times in my inside, paranoid insides!

What should I do?

I’m a failure as a chess player…

Today’s suffering was incredible: the greatest stress of all that I’ve experienced. I’d have accepted a draw on any move!

Note the ‘I am a failure as a chess player’. After playing with de Winter I had played ten games on Mercenarios, and except for a single draw I had won them all. None had defeated me. But I was right: these agonies screamed at me, over and over again, that I was in no way a tournament-playing guy, and augured something ominous for my competitive future.

The Spanish writer Fernando Savater stated in an interview: ‘I think that the great secret of chess, what makes it so superior to other logic games, lies in its tremendous intensity. This game compromises the ego of the person. A card player may feel affected because he has lost a lot of money, but he has not bet himself, which is what the chess player does. In this sense, chess can be dangerous’.

Wise insight! To Javier Anaya of the Mercenarios I owe the comparison of chess with mountaineering, where horrors are also suffered although mountaineers continue to climb mountains. I will be told that the comparison is defective since in mountaineering you risk your life and in chess ‘only the ego’. I disagree, and the best answer I can think of is to weigh the following anecdote.

There was Keres, called ‘the champion without a crown’ playing a tournament in 1944 in Estonia in the middle of the world war when an air raid sent everyone fleeing to the shelters. Those who saw him stay asked him in amazement if he wasn’t afraid. Keres replied: ‘I am hardening up my nerves for the World Championship fight’. The torment of sitting in a kind of electric chair at an important chess event causes more stress than the fear of bombings!

One last comment on the total lack of communication between fans. No one at the club realised that my victory over de Winter had been Pyrrhic. In the autistic bubbles in which they live locked up, between players it isn’t politically correct to speak about a lost soul. From the outside we appear to be scientists engaged in a game of pure logic. The truth is that when we play we twist in the magma of emotions. The colour of chess is not the black and white that onlookers see: it’s scarlet red.

After my game with de Winter in my second tournament at Mercenarios, a tournament appropriately called ‘Guerra y Paz’ (War and Peace), in the next round I beat Jesús Casillas. Interestingly, when I was aware that I had made a hideous mistake in that game, my nerves magically calmed down. The experience with Casillas and an identical one with René Sánchez, the only one who had obtained a draw from me until then, suggests that it’s precisely the desire for perfection, to want to play as flawlessly as the algorithms of a computer, which causes the crisis in the chess player. We have to understand that human beings do not have silicone minds. We are creatures of emotions. There is no such thing as ‘Mr. Chess Spock’, not even the world champion. It is known how nervous Kasparov was in his games with Anand for the World Championship, and let’s not talk about Ivanchuk.

After my game with Casillas, which I won only thanks to a very human mistake he made, my tortured invincibility in Mercenarios evaporated. Jesper Norgaard was the first to snatch a point from me in a very close duel that ended at 2:30 in the morning. Those still present at that time, engrossed to see the then invincible fall, congratulated the Dane as they had congratulated me when I won the previous tournament. In the next round something worse came: ‘the shortest game I’ve played in a tournament’, Roberto González, my opponent, told me. I resigned in the middle of the opening because of a crude trap that he tended to win my queen. That would be the beginning of the great collapse of my level of play both in that and in the following tournaments that I played in ’93.

Although with some exceptions, as can be seen in the next game.

Categories
Autobiography Chess Child abuse

The human side of chess, 5

2 Tort – Colín

The park that welcomed me

This game was played in the park where I played chess in the Colonia del Valle in Mexico City, very close to where I lived with my grandmother. This park welcomed me in my teens when I fled from extremely abusive parents and school. It was a different place than the public parks where the outcast underclass used to take refuge to play chess and dominoes. It’s true that when I was repudiated by my parents I found myself as marginalised as the underclass, but in Las Arboledas Park there was a cultural level very different from that of the parks with the tents in the centre of Mexico City. It was there, in this park for middle-class people, that I really learned to play chess.

FRIENDLY GAME
Las Arboledas Park
(ca. 1985)

1 e4 e5

2 Bc4

This was my favourite move in the park. I won countless games with 1 PK4, PK4; 2 BB4, as it was written then in the descriptive notation (as opposed to the algebraic notation that I use in most of this book). The idea was not to play the hackneyed lines of the Bishop’s Opening, but the gambit that ensues after 2… NKB3; 3. NKB3, NXP; 4. NB3!? whose theory no one knew. In this game Marco Colín eluded the gambit and simply transposed to the Two Knights Defence, so he came out unharmed from the dangers of this opening.

2 … Nf6

3 Nf3 Nc6

4 d4

When I made this move Marco complained that it was a prepared book line. The advantage of friendly games over tournament games is that you can unleash your emotions; you can even curse and there is no rule against it.

4 … Nxe4

5 dxe5

Here Marco exclaimed: ‘Bishop takes pawn, check!’ in the sense that he had seen the threat. ‘Damn brother!’ Only Marco called me with the pleonastic nickname ‘El hermano brother.’

5 … Nc5

6 Nc3 Be7

7 Nd5 O-O

9 O-O Ne6

8 Nxe7 +

I remember that I was worried about the bishop on c5 and wanted to eliminate it as soon as possible.

8… Qxe7

10 c3 b6

11 Bb3 Bb7

12 Re1 Rd8

Since I wrote down this game from memory only when I got home, I don’t remember if the order of the last two moves was correct. Did I play the rook first and then the bishop?

13 Nd4 Rfe8?!

When Marco played this I was surprised. I thought that because of my next move he had to exchange knights. At postmortem he told me he didn’t want me to join my pawns. But he should’ve taken the knight (Kasparov says that when he manages to bring a knight to the f5-square he already feels won). As in the previous game, I didn’t use computer systems to analyse this game. What I write down here were the memories of what I was thinking during the game in the mid-eighties, without outside help.

14 Nf5 Qc5

15 Qh5!

If now 15… Nxe5; 16 Rxe5, winning.

17 … g6

16 Ch6 + Kg7

17 Qf3 Qe7

18 Qg3 Kh8

19 Ng4 d6

One of the Arboledas players, Antonio Galán, who had been watching the game, told me alone when we were walking in the park while Marco reflected: ‘NB6 and pélas!’ although I had already seen this move before he told me. In Mexico this expression is used when a person has been left out of something, for example, eliminated from a competition: ‘Pelas!’ Antonio used the expression in the sense that he saw the black’s defence collapsing. In Spain the pélas colloquialism means something very different: money, as in the neighbouring country to the north it’s colloquially said buck instead of dollar.

20 Nf6 Nxe5

Otherwise a very dangerous attack on the king would come.

21 Nxe8 Rxe8

22 Bxe6! Qxe6

It took me a while to reassess this new position. (Although clock games weren’t played in the park unless they were blitz games, this and others that I played with Marco, Antonio and Enrique Legorreta were virtual tournament games.) Marco then indicated that he intended to play 22…Ng7 if I hadn’t taken the knight from him.

23 Be3

The game is technically won, but this was a trap Marco missed.

23 … c5?

24 f4

Marco made an angry exclamation and shook his head. The interest that we both had invested in the game was considerable because we hadn’t played for a long time with each other.

24 … Nc6

Marco was still flustered and visibly pissed off when he made this last move.

25 Bd4 + Nxd4

26 Rxe6 Nxe6

27 f5!

If this one survived among the countless games I played in the park, it was because of something that caught my attention. As I noted in my diary many years ago: ‘I had always wanted to kill Marco with a queen sacrifice right in this position a few moves later. Synchronicity?’, referring to Jung’s theory. Although I am now sceptical of that theory, the coincidence is interesting: one of the reasons that prompted me to score this game.

27 … Ng7

28 f6 Nf5

29 Re1

I remember Marco’s shock when he saw this move.

29 … Be4

30 Qf4 d5

31 g4 Nh4

32 Qh6 Nf3 +

33 Kf2 Rg8

34 Re3

I thought about this a lot, making sure that after:

34 … Ne5

I immediately made the following pseudo-sacrifice of queen to surprise the old friend:

35 Qxh7 +

Marco removed both his king and my queen from the board as a sign that he was resigning. He was so outraged by the defeat that we barely commented on the postmortem, and at a fast pace he headed for the subway station División del Norte while, naively, I wanted to talk to him after not seeing him for so long. But to be fair I must say that the next day, after his severe moods he confessed to me ‘You played very well!’

Regardless of the game above, it hurts that other games that I played with Marco and those in the park have not been preserved. How I would like to have, for example, that ‘historic’ game in which, playing both blindfold chess, I beat Gerardo Brauer in 1978: a game that merited a bet between my admirers in the park and those of Gerardo. I would also like to be able to reproduce, at home, that five-hour game when I beat Enrique in front of his girlfriend, or those that I beat Gilberto Rangel in a match that he and I played at my grandmother’s house, or the Volga Gambits that with the black pieces I played against Fernando Pérez Melo until he devised a good reply to the defective gambit. (Although he came from the underclass, Fernando had a very good taste for art cinema. I remember that he liked Andrei Rublev when the Russian Embassy premiered it in Mexico.) Only Antonio took the trouble to transcribe some of the games he played in the park. Thanks to his initiative I was able, twenty years after it was played, to reproduce one of the games that Antonio played with Gilberto; although he didn’t want to give me the score sheet of another one where I beat him with white when, from attacking to his queenside, I suddenly switched to a kingside attack. Instead of reproducing his game with Gilberto that he provided me, I would like to say a few words about
 

This friend who never was

We men are supposed to be very tough, like the tough guys in Hollywood movies: that we don’t cry and that we face our problems alone. This code leads men to seek comfort in gambling, alcohol, a drug, or another artificial balm to alleviate the internal sting. Gilberto, one of the park’s children who threw himself the most on Caissa’s skirts, had a permanent scar on his face caused by a dish that his mother had thrown at him. His friend Roberto, a good-looking, fair-haired lad who also went to the park, had been raped by a priest of the Catholic church on Avenue Cuauhtémoc on the corner of Concepción Beistegui street.

I never knew of anyone who approached Gilberto to talk about the abuse he had suffered at home. The player is able to sit in front of his opponent for years without knowing anything about his life. The purpose of the chessboard between these tough guys is to function as a kind of isolation barrier, and I would like to confess what happened to me when I wanted to break that code of isolation between players. Like Gilberto, what I needed back then was a friend who could listen to me about the huge problem I had at home. But I had none, and when I dared to bring up the subject with Antonio he went to complain to the others that ‘we all have problems’, in the sense that my position was self-centred. As the gossip reached me, Antonio added that he was a friend of mine ‘just to talk about chess’.

If he really said that, he was wrong. I was not self-centred. The proof is that Antonio’s family problems with his brothers were not so serious as to prevent him from pursuing a career. Mine or Gilberto’s were so big that we were left without a profession. The fact that such an elementary reality, one of those that between women so well communicate with each other, is impossible to communicate between men speaks very badly of the player’s psychology, so well portrayed in Dostoevsky’s tale. Precisely because our society forbids us men to mourn, or to have an intimate confidant, Roger Bayde, another of our friends from the park, committed suicide. Like Gilberto, Roger had had a traumatic past with his mother since his childhood, but no one listened to him. Although I’m not sure, it seems to me that the Department of Psychiatry at UNAM, the university where Roger worked, prescribed him psychotropic drugs instead of offering him the ear that he so badly needed.

Roger’s story is not an isolated case in the troubled kingdom of Caissa. Iván used to visit the cabin whose photo appears in the Introduction. This friend became psychically disturbed due to parental abuse (once I spoke to him on the phone he exhibited all the symptoms of ‘word salad’: the peculiar way some people labelled as schizophrenic speak). On one occasion we saw how a man with a hat dragged him by the hair while taking him out of the cafe of the old Gandhi Bookstore: the only time I saw his father. If so he mistreated him in public, how could he not do it in private (his brother shot himself dead in front of his father)?

I could mention other cases of chess players who, like Iván, Roger, Gilberto and Fernando were beaten by their parents and their lives were shattered. But it is unnecessary. Rather, and although very belatedly, I would like to answer the friend who never was: What would I give so that there would be a little more communication between men. And a little less chess…

Categories
Autobiography Chess

The human side of chess, 4

1 Grushka – Tort

A beautiful game

If I kept this game it is because I showed it to the poet Jaime Sabines in a 1981 letter, a copy of which I still have. I had played several games of chess with Sabines at his house. In times when my parents’ treatment had spoiled my future, I believed that, being the governor’s brother in Chiapas, he would help me find a job.

Carlos Grushka, the opponent in this only game that I kept from my first tournaments had been, the previous year, youth champion of his country and later he would be Argentine runner-up; he represented Argentina in four Olympics, drew with Karpov and beat Larsen.

I have no interest in analysing this game with the computer system, which didn’t exist then. The analyses that I transcribe are those that appear in my letter to Sabines, when I was twenty-three years old. The poet, by the way, didn’t reply to my letter. But some time later I went to see him in Chiapas in search of work: something that constantly fails us players who were marginalised by our families.

 

CLUB ‘EL ALFIL NEGRO’, FIDE TOURNAMENT 1981

Time control: 2½ hours / 40 movements

CATALAN OPENING

1 Nf3 Nf6

2 g3 d5

3 Bg2 Nbd7

I hadn’t studied this opening, so I improvised according to my own sense.

4 d4 e6

5 O-O Be7

6 c4 O-O

7 Nbd2 c5

8 b3 b6

9 Bb2 Bb7

10 Rc1 Rc8

11 e3 Rc7

12 Qe2 Qa8

13 Ne1 cxd4

14 Bxd4 Bb4

Threatening 15 … Bxd2 and 16 … dxc4, leaving a weak and isolated pawn on an open file.

15 Nef3 dxc4

16 Nxc4 Rfc8

17 Rcd1 b5

18 Nce5 Nxe5

19 Bxe5 Rc2

20 Qxb5 Ng4

21 Ne1

If 21 Qxb4 Bxf3; 22 Bxf3 Qxf3 threatening both 23 Nxf2 and taking the bishop.

21… Bxg2

22 Nxg2

He played that because 22 Nxc2 would lose a piece.

22… Nxf2!!

I have forgotten many moves, games and even opponents that I’ve faced over the board, but will never forget this great knight move. Grushka wasn’t expecting it.

23 Rxf2 Rxf2

24 Nf4

If he took my rook, the check of my other rook would be deadly.

24 … Qf3

25 Qd7

Had he taken my bishop, 25 … Qxd1 would also be fatal.

25 … Rcc2

26 Qd8 + Bf8

27 White resigns

Grushka got upset when I wanted to comment on this game as a postmortem. It’s obvious that his defeat didn’t match the image he had cultivated with his friends from the Club Mercenarios who had brought him to the tournament. After this game, in a raid that some young members of the Mercenarios gave me, Manuel López Michelone, with whom I would also play in that tournament, said something in front of me of bad taste. I was in the back of the car savouring my victory. Manuel, who was in the lead, said to his friends: ‘Who knows why Grushka lost’. It was as if the triumph wasn’t due to how I played, but to something mysterious!

Fortunately, friend Gerardo Brauer congratulated me and made very favourable comments on my plan to have brought the queen to square A8 to double my rooks on the C-file, which gave me a good development in addition to the beauty of an attack on the king from the corner of the board. Not all chess players are able to recognise that the other simply played well. But what stuck me the most that night was what another member of the Mercenarios told me, who was driving the car. He did it with the best of his intentions, but it hurt me. He told me that he had met my mother and that he ‘liked her very well’. I was speechless. I didn’t even smile. It was precisely she who had caused the abuse at home: something that Mario Guevara couldn’t know, and in fact in 1981 I didn’t even live with my mother but with my grandmother. I couldn’t communicate it due to the taboo of never criticising the parents, so I kept quiet among these young chess players and about the rest of the raid I don’t remember anymore.