Kingpin Chess Magazine

Chess scene from ‘The Wire’

‘The Buys’ (2002)

D’Angelo Barksdale: Yo, what was that?

Wallace: Hm?

D’Angelo Barksdale: Castle can’t move like that. Yo, castle move up and down and sideways like.

Preston ‘Bodie’ Broadus: Nah, we ain’t playing that.

Wallace: Yeah, look at the board. We playing checkers.

D’Angelo Barksdale: Checkers?

Wallace: Yeah, checkers.

D’Angelo Barksdale: Yo, why you playing checkers on a chess set?

Preston ‘Bodie’ Broadus: Yo, why you give a shit?

D’Angelo Barksdale: Now look, check it, it’s simple, it’s simple. See this? This the kingpin, a’ight? And he the man. You get the other dude’s king, you got the game. But he trying to get your king too, so you gotta protect it. Now, the king, he move one space any direction he damn choose, ’cause he’s the king. Like this, this, this, a’ight? But he ain’t got no hustle. But the rest of these motherfuckers on the team, they got his back. And they run so deep, he really ain’t gotta do shit.

Preston ‘Bodie’ Broadus: Like your uncle.

D’Angelo Barksdale: Yeah, like my uncle. You see this? This the queen. She smart, she fast. She move any way she want, as far as she want. And she is the go-get-shit-done piece.

Wallace: Remind me of Stringer.

D’Angelo Barksdale: And this over here is the castle. Like the stash. It can move like this, and like this.

Wallace: Dog, stash don’t move, man.

D’Angelo Barksdale: C’mon, yo, think. How many time we move the stash house this week? Right? And every time we move the stash, we gotta move a little muscle with it, right? To protect it.

Preston ‘Bodie’ Broadus: True, true, you right. All right, what about them little baldheaded bitches right there?

D’Angelo Barksdale: These right here, these are the pawns. They like the soldiers. They move like this, one space forward only. Except when they fight, then it’s like this. And they like the front lines, they be out in the field.

Wallace: So how do you get to be the king?

D’Angelo Barksdale: It ain’t like that. See, the king stay the king, a’ight? Everything stay who he is. Except for the pawns. Now, if the pawn make it all the way down to the other dude’s side, he get to be queen. And like I said, the queen ain’t no bitch. She got all the moves.

Preston ‘Bodie’ Broadus: A’ight, so if I make it to the other end, I win.

D’Angelo Barksdale: If you catch the other dude’s king and trap it, then you win.

Preston ‘Bodie’ Broadus: A’ight, but if I make it to the end, I’m top dog.

D’Angelo Barksdale: Nah, yo, it ain’t like that. Look, the pawns, man, in the game, they get capped quick. They be out the game early.

Preston ‘Bodie’ Broadus: Unless they some smart-ass pawns.

 

Watch the clip here

1974 book The World of Chess by Anthony Saidy and Norman Lessing (p.115):

1990 book Chess An Illustrated History by Raymond Keene (p. 80):

North of the Border

The Prawn(1) fell madly in love with the Cat
And the Cat with the Prawn was smitten
And so they got married and soon begat
A lovely fluffy Pritten

But no one was there to tell them so
As they spoiled it with this thing and that,
That the Pritten as it became older would grow
Into a useless Prat

Jim Hayes

Note 1 This is an old Scots word for pawn. Sometimes young Scots use it also, as in ‘It’s a bra bricht moonlicht nicht and I’m prromotin’ m’prrawn’.

South of the Border

I swallowed a pawn last Sunday
Sure my language it was violet,
But it turned out right
The next club night
I got a passed pawn in the toilet.

Jim Hayes

First published in Kingpin 28 (Spring 1998)

The world of chess was plunged into controversy last night after the FIDE President, Kirsan Illunatic, unveiled his plans for a new system of deciding the world championship. Instead of the traditional 24 game match between champion and challenger, the title will instead be decided by a 5 minute blindfold kriegspiel knockout tournament to be held in Elista, the capital of the Russian republic of Kalmykia (President: K. Illunatic). The tournament, which will be open to any player with an international rating of 2005 who owns more than 2 hectares of yak-grazing land, will boast a prize fund of 500 million dollars, which is being put up by the sponsor, Kalmyk Enterprises Limited (Chairman and Managing Director: K. Illunatic).

At a press conference given in a Bedouin tent in central Kazakhstan last night, Illunatic denied that he was trivialising the world championship. ‘This will be a contest to find the best player in the chess world’, insisted the Yakshagger [surely flamboyant young FIDE President’? -Ed.]. ‘Whoever wins the title will have proved himself worthy to marry the youngest daughter of the Chief Elder of the Kalmyk Tribal Council (K. Illunatic) and I will personally present him with the traditional trophy of a stuffed yak’s head soaked in bull’s urine…’ [at this point the press conference was interrupted as the President was carried from the room by several men wearing white coats].

Kirsan Illunatic is 17.

I bought a book by Nimzowitsch
But to me it made no sense
For I thought that a prophylactic
Was a form of French Defence.

Jim Hayes

First published in Kingpin 28 (Spring 1998)

What is your earliest memory of playing chess?

As a child I admired my elder brother Dan very much. When he played football, I also went to the football club. He played table-tennis, and so did I. When he went fishing or camping with his friends, he let me join them. In 1973 a chess club opened in Huddinge, just outside Stockholm where we lived. My brother joined the club almost at once, in spring 1973. I had never played chess and was convinced that it was too boring. But my brother really liked playing at the club so I joined that autumn. There I was taught how the pieces move. From the very first day chess fascinated me. Still 26 years later I play for my native club.

What is your most memorable game?

I guess it is my first game against Korchnoi at Lloyds Bank 1982 where I made my first IM-norm. Korchnoi had been one of the players I had admired most because of both his enormous fighting spirit and the problems he had had in the Soviet Union. It was like a dream for me to play against him. He surprised everybody by taking more than an hour over his 5th move! So it was not so strange that we both (this is my bad habit) got short of time. Korchnoi launched an attack with his queen, rook and knight – the only pieces on the board – but left his own king exposed, which gave me a very dangerous counterattack. When Korchnoi offered me his knight I gladly took it, but then I could not escape perpetual check. A simple queen move, threatening mate in one, would have given me the full point! The fact that I, a 19-year-old-girl, had made a draw with World Champion challenger Korchnoi caused a sensation. After the game a huge crowd of players came over to analyse. For me to sit there opposite Korchnoi with all these famous grandmasters analysing my game was unbelievable.

What was your worst defeat?

I have had several stupid losses. In 1988, in a women v men match in Brussels, I managed to lose on time two games I was winning: against GMs Eric Lobron and William Watson. In the latter I had forced mate when my time ran out. Another bad one was in an open tournament in Stockholm 1979. First I had a winning position then I missed mate in one twice in succession before losing on on time!

Who is your all-time chess hero?

Now that I am grown-up I no longer have any chess heroes.

How do you relax?

I read a lot of books. I always take at least two or three to tournaments. My favourite authors are Ed McBain, Elisabet George, and Sjöwall and Wahlöo. I also like hot baths and jogging.

What is your greatest fear?

To lose a friend or relative. My mother died 1995 and I will always feel a hole inside me living without her.

Who is your favourite band/composer?

Beatles. They will never die.

What is your favourite record?

Pink Floyd’s The Wall. I loved listening to this record during a tournament in Gausdal, Norway, in 1983 at which I got my second IM-norm. Arnold Eikrem, the organizer, was a pioneer of international tournaments in Sweden and was very important for Swedish chess.

What do you consider to be your greatest weakness as a chess player?

I would be much more satisfied with myself if I could avoid time trouble. It has cost me so many points.

What is your greatest strength?

I keep fighting even in really bad positions and have saved many points in hopeless situations.

What is your most unappealing habit?

Being late. Whatever I do and whatever I try I somehow end up being late. And I do feel bad about it every time, because I don’t like having to wait for other people. But I am seldom late for games. I like to be on time and have a while to relax and feel the atmosphere before the game starts.

Which book would you take to a desert island?

Papillon.

What are your five favourite chess books?

Dvoretsky’s books are very good.

Timman’s The Art of Chess Analyses is a very enjoyable read.

Bronstein’s The Chess Struggle in Practice.

Alexander Kotov’s Think like a Grandmaster.

Chess Informant, because it is the book I use most.

How would you characterise your chess-playing style?

I base my choice of moves more on logical thinking than on intuition, and like to look for tactical solutions.

What is your favourite television programme?

Alone at home I do not watch television much but if I want to see something it is the news.

What is your greatest extravagance?

If I like something very much I buy it even though I know the price is too high.

Against which player do you have the worst results?

I am not sure actually. I have no problem recalling the opponents I have good scores against but do not remember as well the ones who beat me. Perhaps that is just human! It is true that my score against Maya Chiburdanidze is very sad. We have played many draws besides the 4 games, I think, I have lost. What is remarkable is that I have had good positions in most of the games. Once I had even a force mate, but she always escapes somehow.

What was your most embarrassing moment at the chessboard?

I am not very happy with how I reacted during time trouble in the last round of the Olympiad in Novi Sad 1990 when Sweden was paired with East Germany. I played on fourth board with the white pieces against Espig. I got a nice position and my opponent got into serious time trouble. When he had five minutes left his flag started to rise. But all of a sudden I saw that it was not going up any longer but down. I’m not sure whether I stopped the clock or just said ‘time’, but to my surprise neither my opponent nor the arbiter paid any attention to me. I did not have too much time either so I kept playing. But when I looked at the clock again I saw that his flag was far down and so I said ‘time’ again. The arbiter checked the clock and said that the time was not at all out. I could not understand this but decided simply to concentrate on the game. Afterwards, as we were reconstructing our scoresheets, I asked Hakan Akvist, the Swedish captain, for an explanation. He told me to calm down and in the end I realized my mistake. We were using an unusual clock where the player still has one minute left when his flag reaches the horizontal position; the flag then changes direction and goes down during the final minute. It had taken me the whole tournament to discover this. I won the game.

Which single thing would most improve the chess scene?

I do hope chess will be accepted as an Olympic sport. Its status would then grow considerably. The newspapers and media would have to open their eyes and give chess much more space. Several newspapers have recently withdrawn their weekly chess column, and we have no longer, as far as I know, a daily chess columnist in Sweden.

            There used to be a journalist who had a weekly five-minute chess slot on the radio. He used this very short time extremely creatively and it was a must for all chess players and even others. But one day the programme was stopped. They said that it was because chess did not belong on the Culture station, but the Sport station did not want the programme because it considered chess ‘culture’. Now it is very rare to see any kind of chess report on TV or hear anything on the radio. But chess is popular!

            Six years ago the best Swedish top players, except Ulf Andersson, played a tournament for TV. The seven programmes were each an hour long and drew an audience of between 100,000 and 400,000, which was very good. In Sweden chess is considered culture. The Federation prefers it that way because if chess were controlled by the Department of Sport there would be less funding. Chess has no real identity and no obvious place in the newspapers. For example, my column appears on the news pages.

In which particular tournament do you most like to compete?

The best is the annual ‘Ladies versus Veterans’ match sponsored by Joop van Oosterom. It is hard to find a tournament which is better organized – they have thought of everything. We are very well taken care of with excellent conditions, staying at the best hotels and always invited with our husband or wife. It is one of few tournaments where I get to see something of the host city as there are always excursions on the free days. With Guert Gijssen as arbiter the playing conditions are also perfect. The atmosphere is friendly and of course it is very nice to play against these old giants. Ever since they started to prepare with an evening singsong, with Taimanov at the piano, the Veterans have won each time!

            There was a really amazing open tournament in Sweden which ran for three years. Peter Hlawatsch did what other organisers can only dream about. Twice Anatoly Karpov arrived by helicopter, once dressed like a king. Another time Karpov and some other GMs opened the tournament by entering in a Viking boat, dressed as Vikings naturally. Hlawatsch organized a lot of enjoyable and sometimes crazy activities around his tournaments and the fact that the drinks were free was of course very popular with many players. I played only once but it is without doubt one of my most memorable tournaments. I hope Peter Hlawatsch will come back one day, but I am not convinced he will.

Who is the most irritating opponent you have faced?

Korchnoi, when I played him in Prague 1995.

Who is the most courteous person you have played?

I guess that is my friend Philippe Burki in Switzerland. I did not know him when we played in the first round in Lugano 1983. I lost surprisingly and Philippe was upset as he thought I had a complete winning position when I blundered. He was really sad for his ‘undeserved’ victory. I have never seen a victorious opponent react in such a way.

What is the most important lesson life has taught you?

Not to wait too long to do all those things I plan. You think there always will be time later, but one day it will be too late.

first published in Kingpin 31 (Autumn 1999)

 First published in Kingpin 13 (Spring 1988) 

Journalism

‘I tend to make the articles in The Spectator more wordy and The Times I make a little bit more lapidary in the style.’

Tunisgate

‘When I did my accounts after that event, I think I’d made eleven pounds profit.’

Being expelled from the BCF

‘I thought, the mere thought that they can even remotely suspect me is so insulting, I don’t want anything more to do with them.’

Miles’s article on Tunis

‘I was completely baffled by this.’

Golombek’s stroke

‘He ceased to be interesting afterwards.’

Relationships

‘If somebody really gets out of line I can be quite decisive in dealing with it.’

Business

‘I try to do things in ways that speed up efficiency, and sometimes this involves cutting corners.’

Staunton’s headstone

‘I found some quote from Shakespeare, but it didn’t quite work, so I rewrote it.’

Physical sports

‘I used to enjoy playing rugby . . . one could score tries while legitimately treading on the necks of one’s opponents.’

Training methods

‘The Lloyds Bank Masters 1981 was won in the King’s Head. It’s where I discovered Carlsberg Special Brew.’

Playing world champions

‘Smyslov I had trouble with. Petrosian I had trouble with. Tal, funnily enough, I didn’t have trouble with.’

Himself

‘I can be perfectly affable if I have to be.’

Kingpin

‘I don’t think I’ve seen one.’

(Source: unpublished interview with Raymond Keene by Jimmy Adams, Mark Huba and Sarah Hurst, 1998.)

First published in Kingpin 39 (Spring 2007) 

KING’S GAMBIT

A son, a father, and the world’s most dangerous game

 Paul Hoffman

Hyperion, 2007, 424 pages

Review by Sarah Hurst

Paul Hoffman hit on a great idea for a book, but I’m not sure that he was aware of it. By the end of King’s Gambit I’d finally worked out what the book should have been about: relationships between parents and children in the chess world. This is certainly a theme of the book, but too often it’s mentioned in passing rather than investigated in depth, and the topic could have given the book a structure that it sorely needs.

What more intriguing cast of characters could there be than Laszlo Polgar and his hot-housed daughters, Gata Kamsky and his thuggish father, Simon Webb (author of Chess for Tigers) and his drug-dealer son who stabbed him to death, Claude Bloodgood the correspondence player in jail for murdering his mother, Nigel Short and his young son who knows more about Greece than he does, or Jesse Gilbert and her father whose abuse was alleged to have caused her to plunge from a hotel window?

These are some of the stories that Hoffman alludes to, while placing his own troubled relationship with his father at the centre of the book. This is one of the most compelling aspects of King’s Gambit – partly because it will be completely new to the reader, whereas many of the chess anecdotes won’t be. His experiences with his father gave  Hoffman an ambivalent attitude towards chess and in fact he gave up the game as a young adult and only returned to it a few years ago. In the interim he became publisher of Encyclopaedia Britannica and the bestselling author of The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, a biography of eccentric mathematician Paul Erdös.

Hoffman’s parents separated when he was 12 and his father moved to Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, where he wrote sensational magazine articles and spent the rest of his time playing cards, billiards and table tennis as well as chess (badly). Hoffman’s father took him to the chess shop owned by Nicholas Rossolimo, who was also driving a cab at the time and drinking too much (not simultaneously). Hoffman beat the inebriated Rossolimo at chess and the grandmaster dropped his king into a bowl of broth in disgust. So already as a boy Hoffman learned that chess was personal.

Later Hoffman’s father felt threatened by his son’s chess ability and attempted to discourage him from playing the game by leaving an essay about Paul Morphy lying around for him to read. According to the author of the essay, Ernest Jones, chess is about Oedipal impulses and Morphy’s play in particular demonstrated his anal-sadistic aggression towards his father. “Staunton became the substitute father figure, Jones concluded, and when Morphy didn’t get a chance to sublimate his homo-patricidal impulses by buggering Staunton on the chessboard, his psyche collapsed.”

But, as I said, King’s Gambit isn’t really a book about parents and children. It’s a rather self-indulgent exploration of the oddities of the chess world, in which Hoffman gets to know various players and tries to understand what makes them tick. He befriends Pascal Charbonneau, the Canadian grandmaster who is dating Irina Krush, and in one of the highlights of the book, Charbonneau and Hoffman travel to Libya together for the 2004 World Championship. Hoffman wants to watch a professional player preparing for important games, but Charbonneau will do anything to avoid preparing for his bout with Etienne Bacrot, including analysing Hoffman’s own games.

Unsurprisingly, Charbonneau lost to Bacrot, but as MasterCard might say, the experience in Libya was priceless. As a journalist, Hoffman endured constant scrutiny from the not-so-secret police, who assumed he was a spy, especially since he kept requesting a meeting with Colonel Gadhafi. Meanwhile, Charbonneau explained how he used to get so sick before important chess or tennis matches that he’d throw up; this gave him something in common with Hoffman, who also suffered from various semi-psychosomatic ailments, including breaking out in hives after a stressful dinner with Kasparov.

Hoffman devotes some attention to women chess players, covering much of the same ground as Jennifer Shahade did in Chess Bitch. Kasparov’s views on women and chess are noted, and the story of his take-back against Judit Polgar is retold. Hoffman attends a demonstration match between Jennifer Shahade and Irina Krush at a Manhattan art gallery, where the players wore all-black and all-white, including wigs.

It’s clear that women bring glamour and excitement to chess, as they do in tennis. As for why they can’t usually reach the highest echelons of chess, every player has their own theory. As Shahade says, “I’m more interested in doing something about it than in debating hypotheticals.”

Also in relation to women’s chess – and with his own father’s distorted life story in mind – Hoffman takes a sceptical look at the biography of  Paul Truong, Susan Polgar’s manager. Truong claimed to have won Vietnam’s first National Junior Championship at the age of five, then to have escaped the country with his father by boat, surviving five attacks by pirates. The boat’s passengers ended up on a desert island, where they stayed for about six months before somehow making it to the United States. Hoffman asked Truong if he could talk to his father about the story, but Truong never gave Hoffman the contact information.

King’s Gambit features an extensive notes section at the end, and many of the notes tell stories that are as lively as those in the main text, ranging from the identity of Bobby Fischer’s father to the causes of famous chess players’ deaths. Hoffman continues to pursue his interest in the game on his personal blog at  http://paulhoffman.wordpress.com, where he writes entertainingly about chess events books. Having discovered the rollercoaster chess world for the second time in his life, he apparently hasn’t been frightened off yet.