The Immortal Game Read Free Page A

1322 by Rabbi Kalonymos Ben Kalonymos
    in 1375 by France’s Charles V
    in 1380 by Oxford University’s founder William of Wickham
    in 1549 by the Protohierarch Sylvester of Russia and
    in 1649 by Tsar Alexei
             
    But like the Talmud, like the theory of natural selection, like any organized thought paradigm that humans have found irresistibly compelling, chess refused to go away. Why were sixty-four squares and a handful of generic war figurines so hard to erase from the human imagination? What was it about chess that drew simultaneous devotion and disgust, and sparked so many powerful ideas and observations over many centuries?
    This is what I set out to understand, through a close survey of chess’s history and a fresh look at the game.

PIECES AND MOVES

    For more details, see Appendix I: The Rules of Chess.

I.
    OPENINGS
    (Where We Come From)

When Sissa had invented chess and produced it to King Shihram, the latter was filled with amazement and joy. He ordered that it should be preserved in the temples, and held it the best thing that he knew as a training in the art of war, a glory to religion and the world, and the foundation of all justice.
    —ibn Khallikan, thirteenth century
    S TORIES DO NOT EXIST to tell the facts, but to convey the truth. It is said that in ancient India, a queen had designated her only son as heir to the throne. When the son was assassinated, the queen’s council searched for the proper way to convey the tragic news to her. They approached a philosopher with their predicament. He sat for three days in silent thought, and then said: “Summon a carpenter with wood of two colors, white and black.”
    The carpenter came. The philosopher instructed him to carve thirty-two small figurines from the wood. After this was done, the philosopher said to the carpenter, “Bring me tanned leather,” and directed him to cut it into the shape of a square and to etch it with sixty-four smaller squares.
    He then arranged the pieces on the board and studied them silently. Finally, he turned to his disciple and announced, “This is war without bloodshed.” He explained the game’s rules and the two began to play. Word quickly spread about the mysterious new invention, and the queen herself summoned the philosopher for a demonstration. She sat quietly, watching the philosopher and his student play a game. When it was over, one side having checkmated the other, the queen understood the intended message. She turned to the philosopher and said, “My son is dead.”
    “You have said it,” he replied.
    The queen turned to the doorkeeper and said, “Let the people enter to comfort me.”
    The annals of ancient poetry and weathered prose are filled with many such evocative chess stories, stretched over 1,400 years. Over and over, chess was said to have been invented to explain the unexplainable, to make visible the purely abstract, to see simple truths in complex worlds. Pythagoras, the ancient mathematician heralded as the father of numbers, was supposed to have created the game to convey the abstract realities of mathematics. The Greek warrior Palamedes, commander of troops at the siege of Troy, purportedly invented chess as a demonstration of the art of battle positions. Moses, in his posture as Jewish sage, was said to have invented it as a part of an all-purpose educational package, along with astronomy, astrology, and the alphabet.
    Chess was also considered a window into other people’s unique thoughts. There is the legend of the great medieval rebbe, also a cunning chess player, whose son had been taken away as a young boy and never found. Many decades later, the rebbe was granted an audience with the pope. The two spoke for a while, and then decided to play a game of chess. In their game the pope played a very unusual combination of moves that to any other opponent would have been astonishing and overpowering. But the strange combination was not new to the rebbe; he had invented it, in