Searching for Bobby Fischer (6 page)

When played beautifully, chess goes on, hour after hour, with the tension of a baseball game tied in extra innings. But unlike baseball, the tactics involve such complicated ploys and feints, the crafting of such devious illusions, that what appears to be a tie is often no such thing. In even the sleepiest of games, the player must consider the possibility that what looks like a draw may be the artful precursor of a decisive, crushing attack. After minutes of painful stillness, he will move a piece, then bound from the board as if suddenly unchained. During one such break, Asa Hoffmann chatted with friends. “I’ve got him thinking,” he said referring to Gurevich, who had been agonizing over his move for more than an hour. “Maybe I’m gonna win a pawn.”

Hoffmann, the son of two lawyers, grew up on Park Avenue,
went to Horace Mann and then to Columbia until he dropped out “because I became a chess fanatic.” He is one of the most active tournament players in the country, participating in about two hundred tournament games a year and earning a consistent two thousand dollars annually from all these competitions. “My family would be real proud of me if I were a baseball player and made a couple of hundred thousand a year,” he said, “but they’re ashamed of me because I’m a chess player. I’m forty-one, and they’re still asking me, ‘When are you going to get a job?’”

To make ends meet, Hoffmann hustles chess games for a couple of dollars each. “The chess-hustling business is bad. It’s down with the economy, and O.T.B. and Lotto have hurt.” He is a great speed player, generally thought to be the most savvy and successful of the chess hustlers, and makes about one hundred dollars a week this way. “It’s not a good game for a gambler,” he explained, “because chess players are too rational and conservative. You have to find a true compulsive who happens to play chess—someone who’s essentially masochistic and enjoys being humiliated. One of my best customers was a rabbi. He would come in to play me wearing a yarmulke and would say a prayer in Yiddish. While I beat him, he cursed and screamed, begging me to have mercy on him. I’d tell him, ‘What a fish you are. I’m gonna crush you.’ I took a lot of money from him. Unfortunately, he’s dead now.”

A few minutes later, Gurevich resigned and walked quickly from the front room. “I wasted him,” Hoffmann said matter-of-factly. “It was a classic psych job. Before we started playing, I said something about his old girlfriend. I set him up.”

At the next table Joel Benjamin moved the white queen forward three squares, and after considering for a moment, his opponent reached a hand across the board to resign. The position seemed much the same as it had an hour before. The pieces were all engaged and balanced against one another, but both players knew that in six or eight moves something terrible would happen to black; it was inevitable.

Immediately the two men began to analyze. “If only you hadn’t put the bishop on e7,” Benjamin said sympathetically. “I think you had winning chances.” “Yes,” the loser answered softly. For young
players particularly, losing is terrible—a chaotic, vulnerable moment, a glimpse of ultimate limitations.

“I used to play against Bobby Fischer all the time,” said Asa Hoffmann, taking a break from a backgammon game. “I lost hundreds of games against him for two dollars. I was Fischer’s fish.”

BOBBY FISCHER MOVED
like a phantom through the broken-down rooms. Everyone had a Fischer story. One player said he’d gotten a letter from Fischer three weeks ago but wouldn’t let anyone read it. A grandmaster who played in the front room was supposed to have just returned from a two-month visit with Fischer in California, but he walked away without a word when asked about it. Bobby is the libido of the game, a chess player who could call a press conference tomorrow and play a game for a million dollars.

“During the Fischer period, it wasn’t chess that turned people on,” said Joel Benjamin. “It was Fischer. He was a lunatic, and at the same time such a great player that he could beat the Russians single-handedly.”

Slightly built and wearing gold-rimmed glasses, Benjamin has the look of a young librarian, but his speech is full of willfulness, sharp judgments and more than a few Fischerisms: “Sometimes during a match you get a bad feeling about a person. Mannerisms affect you. The way someone moves a piece is important. If a player bangs down the pieces, I know he’s an idiot and it makes me want to tear his head off.”

Benjamin, who learned how to move the pieces when he was eight while watching the Fischer-Spassky match on television, acknowledged that if the economic realities for chess players were different, he probably wouldn’t have bothered going to college. “It worries me that chess players in this country can’t make it,” he said. Still, when he graduated from Yale, he devoted himself to the game, winning the U.S. championship in 1987. “My goal is to be world champion someday,” he said, just as Fischer had said thirty years ago in Washington Square. “I dream about it.”

AT ELEVEN O
’
CLOCK
on the last night of the Greater New York Open, all but the final game was finished. The winner of this one,
which was in its sixth hour, would take the four-hundred-dollar first prize.

Joel’s father sat waiting while Bill Goichberg tallied the results. His son’s biggest fan, Alan Benjamin is the chess coach at Madison High School in Brooklyn, where he is also a history teacher. When Goichberg finished, Benjamin would drive Joel back to New Haven; he had been driving his son to and from chess tournaments since Joel was a young boy.

Joel ended up with two wins and two draws, which tied him for third place, but because he had to share the one-hundred-fifty-dollar purse with four others, he ended up losing money after paying his entry fee and expenses for the weekend.

“This was a special tournament,” said Goichberg. “Normally I can’t afford to pay prizes like this. It’s been nearly a year since we’ve had a four-hundred-dollar first prize here. New York doesn’t seem to support chess.”

Meanwhile there had been a mishap in the dimly lit back room where Joel was analyzing a game with several other masters. The single working toilet at Bar Point had finally given out, and the floor was awash; Coke cans, broken glass, soggy candy wrappers and wads of toilet paper floated on the putrid rug. A young woman in shorts tiptoed across the room, ineffectually spreading newspapers over the mess.

A brilliant Russian emigré grandmaster sat with Joel and two other masters at a nearby table, demonstrating an original opening variation he’d just used in a game. He talked theatrically with sweeping gestures, as if he were lecturing at Moscow University. Soon Joel began shuffling the pieces, trying to decide if there was a line he liked better. The men took turns, and the chess pieces skidded and darted as if they were on ball bearings. The four men had been playing chess for two days, but they couldn’t stop. Their eyes flashed and blinked, looking for new combinations and possibilities. No one seemed to mind, or even to notice, the plaster falling off the walls or the slop underfoot.

6

TRAINING FOR MOSCOW

D
uring the summer of 1984, before the first Karpov-Kasparov championship marathon, Josh and I had our own titanic struggle. We were away from New York, and I was his only available opponent. I was planning to leave for Moscow in September to write about the match and to visit Russian chess schools with Josh, so I wanted him to be in top playing form. But he greeted my daily suggestions for games with a preference for fishing or spearing crabs. I was a persistent nag and occasionally justified myself by playing through testy dialogues that might have taken place between Chris Evert and her father when she was a young girl and didn’t want to practice. But after hundreds of games that he didn’t want to play, Josh fell into a state of sullen torpor. Time and again his king stood languidly on the back rank, indifferent to the march of my passed pawns.

By the time we had received our visas for the Soviet Union, I had lost all confidence in Joshua’s ability to play chess at all. A visit to Washington Square Park confirmed my fears. Josh took on all comers while looking at the pigeons and squirrels. He lost his pieces with a melancholy smile, as if thinking, What does the loss of a bishop mean in the larger scheme of things?

I was feeling nervous about the trip to the Soviet Union for a variety of reasons. Josh had never been away from his mother before, and after the past summer he and I were angry at one another. In the days before we left, Bonnie reminded me so often to take care of him that I was beginning to doubt that I could. How
was I going to interview Russian grandmasters and at the same time keep track of his toy cars and make sure he was drinking enough milk? Besides covering the championship match for
Chess Life
, Bruce Pandolfini, who was going to travel with us, and I were planning to meet Russian chess teachers and to arrange games between Josh and talented Russian children. But our player was suffering from ennui. Russian chess educators would be scrutinizing my kid while he looked out the window.

AS THE DC
-8 shook and roared down the runway to begin the first leg of our flight, Josh looked up from his Snoopy book and announced, “Off to Russia.” He had no idea where Russia was; it might have been Philadelphia. At the time, he didn’t seem to understand the difference between a country and a city.

Bruce suggested a game on his pocket set. Josh shrugged; he wasn’t interested. Soon the stewardess gave him a puzzle book in which numbered dots created figures, and he immediately tried to talk Pandolfini into tracing dots with him.

I began to read a chapter of David Shipler’s book about the Soviet Union,
Russia: Broken Idols
,
Solemn Dreams
,
*
dealing with what he perceived to be the illusion of collectivism throughout the society. I had trouble concentrating; it was difficult to relate Shipler’s drab Russian factories and schools to my fantasy of Russia. Like many other Americans’, my impressions of the Soviet Union had been manufactured from such diverse sources as Tolstoy’s novels, James Bond movies and endless foreboding articles in the
New York Times
. Russia was catchwords such as “Cold War,” “Raskolnikov,” “vodka,” “Kremlin,” “Bolshoi,” “KGB,” “Anna Karenina,” “Iron Curtain,” “gulag.” I was half expecting to see forests of missiles and peasants driving horse-drawn sleighs.

IN THE WEEKS
preceding our departure I had spoken to Russian defectors with harrowing stories and sad, urgent requests that I try to track down relatives and friends. In certain instances I would have to make these contacts surreptitously from phone booths on
the street because the hotel phone would be bugged, and use a code name for the American defector so that I didn’t compromise his mother or girlfriend. I got the impression that a third of the Soviet population must be employed to listen in on phone calls or to open mail. Although very poor, some of these men had brought expensive gifts for me to smuggle to their relatives and friends—presents conveying the fatuous message that life in the United States was all leisure and luxury: fancy tape recorders, radios, cameras, digital watches, pens with digital watches, computers. Had a customs man searched through my underwear he might have decided that I was a secret agent for Crazy Eddie. There was something sad and distasteful about my baggage of high-tech trinkets.

I WAS ASKED
by one Soviet defector to try to locate a Jewish friend, Soviet chess champion Boris Gulko. I was told that Gulko would be willing to discuss the politics of Soviet chess, as well as the problems of Jewish chess players in the Soviet Union. It was rumored that Gulko and his wife, a Soviet women’s champion, were being held under house arrest. “To find Gulko, you’ll need to contact a man I know who is a well-known grandmaster, an expert in the endgame,” said the Russian American, who gave me a name and a Moscow phone number. “He is also a KGB agent, but don’t worry, he is totally corrupt. The first day you meet him, give him a present worth fifteen or twenty dollars—a digital watch, maybe. Don’t expect him to speak candidly at first. Most likely he’ll seem apathetic. But I know this man, and you’ll have aroused his curiosity. He will suggest dinner. During this meal present him with pornographic books and magazines; then the chances are he will arrange for you to meet Gulko.”

In case this approach didn’t work, the man gave me the name of a second grandmaster to bribe with a few digital pens; he wouldn’t be as expensive. He cautioned that I must never mention the name of the second grandmaster to the KGB grandmaster because they were enemies.

LEV ALBURT
,
A
top Soviet grandmaster who defected to the United States in 1979 and became the highest-rated player here the following
year, described the politics of Soviet chess to me. Alburt is an engaging conversationalist who, like the great European players of the nineteenth century, combines his genius for the royal game with aristocratic taste and manners. He is a charming, urbane man with an appetite for fine food, history and world politics as well as for chess. From across the room he could pass for a youthful Charles Boyer.

“In the Soviet Union,” Alburt said, “chess is supported by the government, and since Stalin’s time they have used victories in international chess tournaments to propagandize the notion that the best minds flourish under the Communist system.” Alburt speaks so quietly that I found myself leaning closer to him. Talking about Soviet chess with him was at once intimate and unsettling—a little like falling into a John le Carré novel. “They will go to great lengths to get the most from their players,” he continued. “For example, sometimes during my matches I was wired and tested for blood pressure, heart rate, galvanic skin response and other things. I was given amphetamines and tranquilizers on the days of important tournaments. Perhaps you don’t realize that when Karpov plays in a big tournament he has the help of forty, sometimes fifty, aides. They do everything from analyzing positions and performing physical therapy to providing sophisticated psychological profiles of opponents. Karpov has a doctor on hand to regulate his medications. During the match against Korchnoi he was so exhausted that they had to give him high dosages of amphetamines, which saved him in the end. Karpov has used hypnotists to try to distract his opponents. He has the use of a computer in Moscow that can calculate endgame positions more accurately than any grandmaster who ever lived. Without the advantages of his political connections, I doubt that Karpov would be a stronger player than, say, Joel Benjamin.”