Why do so many chess players resist society’s demands that they take precautions against the pandemic?

Stephen Moss

Are chess players naturally libertarian? Given that many players – often men of a certain age, sedentary, not very fit, sometimes large of stomach, with a passion for beer and fried breakfasts – are in the vulnerable group for Covid, and indeed quite a few people from the chess community in the UK have succumbed to the pandemic, you might think there would be an across-the-board (in every sense) commitment to vaccination, mask-wearing and other anti-Covid measures.

But you would be wrong. I heard from one club official that when he raised the subject of mask wearing at a committee meeting just before the return of OTB chess, he was mocked for mentioning the possibility of playing in masks. People just wanted to get back to the board as if nothing had happened, despite the fact that thousands were still being infected and hospitalised and hundreds dying every day.

The discussions on the English Chess Forum have been instructive. The respected chess arbiter – and decent player – David Sedgwick started a thread labelled “Facemask openings”. “I am looking for an opening repertoire for games where I am obliged to wear a facemask and therefore want to get the game over quickly one way or another,” he wrote. “Does anyone have any suggestions? Dubious but not hopeless gambits or counter-gambits are one obvious possibility. So are lines which more or less force the opponent to acquiesce in a draw.”

Other contributors did have suggestions, including the rude (a not uncommon phenomenon on the forum) “play your usual stuff”. But what was interesting, to me at least, was that no one seemed to question Sedgwick’s premise: that mandatory mask-wearing was an imposition that should be resisted, or at the very least mocked by playing a style of chess that would guarantee as quick a finish as possible.

There is a huge thread on the forum called “Chess life returning to normal” – it currently runs to a whopping 159 pages – and while there are some naysayers who argue that we are still gripped by a pandemic and have to tread very warily, mostly you sense a desperate desire to return to the world we knew pre-Covid – a world without restrictions, and, in the case of the libertarian chess wing, without masks or Covid passports or any of the paraphernalia of what they would see as the nanny state. People calling masks “nappies” is a sure sign of this privileging of personal freedom over public safety.

In the US last spring, this battle between the health lobby and the libertarians found a lively focus in chess. The famous Marshall Chess Club, on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village, banned members who had not been vaccinated against Covid from using its historic premises and said you could only play there if you could show you had been vaccinated – if, in other words, you carried a vaccine passport.

The club’s stringent policy led to demonstrations outside the venue, a lovely townhouse bequeathed by former US chess champion Frank Marshall. The demos were organised by longstanding member Anthony Kozikowski, who considered the banning of anti-vaxxers to be authoritarian. While some of his fellow members were trying to play quietly inside the club, Kozikowski led a raucous rally against the restrictions in the street outside, and in response the Marshall revoked his membership for five years.

“I am heartbroken that I have been thrown out of this club,” the New York Post reported him as saying (shouting actually) at one of the demos he led, “but I would be thrown out of this club 10,000 more times if that’s what it takes to stop vaccine passports in this country. I will not live in a country of vaccine apartheid.” The club president, Noah Chasin, was unabashed. “Our sincere desire lies in ensuring the safety of the club for the greatest number of people,” he wrote to members, “and at this time we believe that guaranteeing an environment exclusively for vaccinated people is the most prudent way to begin the transition back to business as usual.”

It is a classic battle between liberty and those who argue that liberty can sometimes become licence. You are not free, say those who demand tight restrictions and precautions, to put the health of others at risk. Chess is uniquely a game that pits healthy 17-year-olds against vulnerable 70-year-olds, and, worse, puts them in close proximity for three hours or more. Yet chess players, who you might think would be alive to the dangers of being dead because of Covid, are often among the foremost opponents of what they see as the heavy hand of state bureaucracy.

The question is why. Chess is a game with carefully laid down rules and conventions, built up over hundred of years, so players are clearly not anarchists, even if their awful behaviour at the board can sometimes veer towards to anarchic. But chess players are also natural rebels. When I was researching my book The Rookie, I played at the Marshall Club and in Washington Square Park. Chess in New York, indeed throughout the US, is aggressive and money-oriented, with lots of trash talking. Many of the players, especially the hustlers in the squares and parks, are tough nuts who are set apart from conventional society. Chess, certainly in the US and I suspect elsewhere in the world, is the preserve of rebels and free-thinkers, contrarians and trouble-makers, who have disconnected themselves – or perhaps were already disconnected – from conventional life. They are living life on the margins, and see every action of the state as an imposition.

I would like to claim this as a profound observation which I arrived at entirely on my own, but it was really prompted by reading Arnold Denker’s amusing memoir, The Bobby Fischer I Knew, on an Amtrak train from St Louis to a tournament in Chicago. “As I mentally rummage through the years and try to capture with memory’s eye the great players of the last several decades,” wrote Denker, “I find one characteristic common to almost all of them: a bitterness about and rebelliousness against the inequitable social and economic conditions of the real world … For them, playing the royal game was a purely personal statement against social injustice.” The royal game, in other words, is actually the plebeian game: cast out of the “real” world, chess players have created their own world, an esoteric, enclosed landscape in which they have mastery.

In the memoir, Denker tells a funny story about the chess and poker hustler Jacob Bernstein, one of a rich cast of characters active on the New York chess scene from the 1920s to the 1950s, a period summoned up evocatively by Denker, a US champion who died at the age of 90 in 2005. Bernstein was at a Woodrow Wilson-for-President rally. “Mr Wilson, is it true that if you’re elected, every man will have work?” asked Bernstein. “Yes”, replied Wilson. “But Mr Wilson, I don’t want to work!” Spoken like a true chess pro, many of whom have spent their whole lives scraping a living from the 64 to avoid the rigours of more conventional labour.

Alexander Cockburn, in his 1974 book Idle Passion, made this rejection of convention explicitly political. “Chess is par excellence the pastime of a disinherited ruling class that continues to crave political domination but has seen it usurped. Just as, in psychoanalytic terms, chess is a way of sublimating oedipal conflicts, so, in social terms, it is a device for sublimating political aspirations; the empty omnipotence exercised by the player over his pieces is consolation for lost power.”

Now, it is fair to say that parts of Idle Passion are rather pretentious, and some may choose to write off Cockburn’s psychoanalytically inclined musings as twaddle. But I find that phrase “empty omnipotence” telling. Chess players are often hugely intelligent people who have decided to devote a large chunk of their lives to shuffling wooden pieces around a board. Albert Einstein berated world champion Emanuel Lasker for wasting his mathematical genius doing just this. Dutch grandmaster Hans Ree countered by insisting that chess was a game “beautiful enough to waste your life for” – a bitter-sweet conclusion if ever there was one.

Chess players have either made a conscious decision to opt out of conventional life or they feel as if society has excluded them, done them down in some way, is a hostile force from which they must protect themselves. Either way, they are marginalised and see the 64 squares as a form of protection. It is little wonder that when society fights back and demands they obey the norms of conventional living, they resist the routine restrictions they are being asked to accept. Their whole life has been lived in opposition to normality, and they are not about to start conforming now. The only norms they are interested in are GM norms.

A provocative article in Chess Magazine attempts a starkly revisionist reading of the world champion’s match against Bobby Fischer in Reykjavik in 1972. But should we take the extraordinary claim that he never intended to win the match seriously?

Stephen Moss

The latest issue of Chess Magazine contains a fascinating/diverting/ridiculous (delete according to your view of whether the arguments really stand up) article about the 1972 world championship match between Boris Spassky, the suave Russian champion, and Bobby Fischer, the abrasive American challenger. The event is of course the foundation stone of modern chess: certainly in the UK where the match, which was a global news sensation, inspired a generation of players who propelled England to No 2 chess nation in the world behind the Soviet Union.

Next year is the 50th anniversary of that unforgettable match, which has already spawned countless books, films and even a musical – Chess, by Tim Rice, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus. There will no doubt be plenty more coverage next year when we relive the match all over again. The fact that this defining event will not go away is double-edged: it’s great for the game to be in the news, but less desirable that all the general public really know about chess derives from a 50-year-old contest and a deranged chess genius who barely played after he won the title and died more than a decade ago.

But back to the article in Chess Magazine. The writer, Stewart Player, who as far as I can see does not appear to be a chess historian of any standing (apologies to Mr Player if his oeuvre has unaccountably passed me by), argues that Spassky was far from disappointed to lose. Indeed, Player goes further than that; he says “Spassky had no intention of winning the match”.

Player’s argument is that Spassky didn’t prepare properly, bent over backwards to accept Fischer’s ever more extreme demands regarding conditions – including, Player says, “agreeing to play game three in a janitor’s broom cupboard” – and was above all concerned that the match was played to a conclusion, so he got his cut of the fee. “The main thing as far as Spassky was concerned”, says Player, “was that the match went ahead and that he must not lose his erratic opponent.” He argues that Spassky was already planning to leave the Soviet Union and anticipated “lucrative return matches” once he was based abroad. Player cites in his support an incendiary quote from former world champion Mikhail Botvinnik alleging that Spassky “threw” the match, but I would like to know the provenance of this. There is no footnote giving the source or context in which Botvinnik made the alleged remark, nor is the original Russian given. It doesn’t feel quite right: do Russians even talk about “throwing” a match? Something may have been lost in translation, and we surely need to see the original text for this crucial – and perhaps rather un-Botvinnik-like – allegation.

Player suggests that Spassky had a carefully worked out game plan – just not for this match! “By proving pliable and not antagonising Fischer,” he argues, “the likelihood of future million-dollar ‘title’ matches would remain, as in subsequent interviews both Spassky and Fischer talked about rematches outside FIDE jurisdiction. And these would be in the US, with Las Vegas the most oft-quoted venue.”

So, fascinating, diverting or ridiculous? Not quite fascinating because Player’s evidence is thin and rather circumstantial. He says at one point that Spassky’s long-time coach, Igor Bondarevsky, may have split with him because Spassky told him it was his intention to grant concessions to Fischer. But not a shred of evidence is offered to back up this claim. Player is just guessing that “in an argument, in his [Spassky’s] cups”, such an admission might have been made. Sorry, that’s at least one might too many. Such bold revisionism needs something more substantial to back it up.

Since I have chosen to write about Player’s article, I suppose I am admitting that the re-reading of the match is not wholly ridiculous. Clearly, Spassky did not prepare hard enough; did offer Fischer too many concessions in terms of conditions – perhaps giving the challenger a psychological edge; did miss Bondarevsky; perhaps thought too much about money rather than focusing entirely on beating Fischer, who on the strength of their previous encounters he may have underestimated; may even already have been thinking of life outside the Soviet Union – he moved to France in 1976 and became a French citizen in 1978. But all this is far from proving Player’s central contention that Spassky “had no intention of winning the match”. Let’s then file the piece under the non-committal heading of “diverting”.

David Edmonds, co-author with John Eidinow (whose name Player misspells) of Bobby Fischer Goes to War, is not willing to be quite so charitable. He dismisses the new reading of the match out of hand, and is not best pleased that Player damns his and Eidinow’s book with faint praise, calling it “very useful on Spassky’s background … while never straying too far from the routine narrative”. “There is absolutely nothing there,” Edmonds tells me, “not a single piece of evidence. My initial reaction is to be surprised that they [Chess Magazine] have given this claim column inches. This should be making international headlines if true. What a scoop! Presumably he has a response from Spassky?” Spassky, of course, is incapacitated by a stroke, and has made no response to Player’s claims.

“The idea that the best way to maximise his future income was to lose is risible,” Edmonds argues. “Why would there be more money on offer for a rematch if he was the challenger rather than the champion? His [Spassky’s] income, following defeat, took a predictable hit. He had also seen what had happened to Taimanov after losing to Fischer. Why would he risk that?” Fischer beat Taimanov 6-0 in the Candidates quarter-final in 1971 – a humiliating reverse that the Soviet authorities believed must have had a “political explanation”, leading them to reduce Taimanov’s salary and ban him from travelling overseas.

Edmonds insists his and Eidinow’s book was far from routine. “The standard narrative until our book was that Spassky, though indeed a gentleman, was a Soviet stooge,” he tells me. “That’s how he’s presented in most of the press coverage and the books that emerge in the immediate aftermath of the match. Our interviews and Soviet documents revealed the tensions in the Soviet camp and the authorities’ dissatisfaction with him.”

Edmonds says that if the claim that Spassky “had no intention of winning the match” was true, then even now Spassky should be looking for a publisher for a tell-all memoir. “If Spassky was really so motivated by money, ” says Edmonds, “then he could sell this story, even today, for a skyscraper high pile of dosh.  It seems to me to be pretty irresponsible to make the sort of claim this article makes without a shred of evidence.”

I asked Richard Palliser, editor of Chess Magazine, about Player’s piece. He doesn’t go quite as far as his author in suggesting Spassky never intended to win, but he does believe there were psychological factors at play that could have undermined Spassky before and during the match. “My take on the piece wasn’t that Spassky threw the match,” Palliser tells me, “[but] rather that he wasn’t too unhappy to lose. [I] suspect he still fought tooth and nail in every game, but at the back of his mind was the realisation that losing would have some benefits. Surely every chess player has been there at some point?”

Perhaps the crown was weighing rather too heavily on Spassky’s head. Might he have been seeking the freedom to go back to being an ordinary chess player, rather than a standard-bearer for the Soviet system? It may be that the book we need most of all to mark the 50th anniversary of the epic encounter in Reykjavik is a comprehensive biography of Spassky, one that examines his true motivations back in 1971-72. What did he really want out of the match? How did he see the future? Did he underestimate Fischer – his preparation was indeed woeful and discounted the possibility that Fischer might play 1. d4 – or was he subconsciously willing his own destruction and that of the Soviet chess machine, perhaps even of the Soviet Union itself? So many millions of words have been devoted to Fischer. Now we need to pay some attention to his adversary in that magnificent, myth-laden match.

Boris Spassky vs Robert James Fischer

The famous 13th game of the world championship match showed each player striving to win. Spassky gave up a pawn to obtain space and mobility. Fischer used a tactic to exchange queens and reach an ending where he had a preponderance of queenside pawns and then sacrificed a bishop to march these pawns forward. Spassky stoutly defended the complex and unbalanced endgame until he had to make a crucial decision which way to check Fischer’s king. It was a 50:50 decision with four minutes to play four moves, but the path he chose allowed Fischer to break through.

World championship match, Reykjavik, Iceland, 13th game, 10 August 1972
Alekhine Defence: Modern, Alburt Variation (B04)

A talk through video by Antonio Radić (Agadmator) gives more details on the game.