Garry Kasparov Featured in NY Times Magazine

Garry Kasparov featured in The New York Times Magazine

In "Garry Kasparov, the Man Who Would Be King" (August 6, 2014), Steven Lee Myers does a great job of laying out the complex political landscape faced by the former world champion as he seeks the presidency of FIDE and, ultimately, to support opposition to Putin.  A must read for chess players.

Obama's Impossible Chess Game

I have commented before on the way Barack Obama is portrayed as a "chess master" on the world political stage (see Obama as Chess Master and Obama as Chess Master, Part Two). Today GM Kevin Spraggett points us to a spate of images (to which we add one from yesterday's Daily Telegraph) that show Obama playing chess under nearly impossible conditions: against multiple opponents, as the clock winds down, his head nearly engulfed in smoke, and with the board stretching forth interminably before him. Yet in all of these images he retains his composure, even while performing a handstand. Do you think, maybe, we are expecting a little too much of him?

Obama as Chess Master, Part Two

This week, Spiegel Online published an interview with Henry Kissinger (see "Obama Is Like a Chess Master") that featured the following headline-grabbing exchange:

SPIEGEL: Do you think it was helpful for Obama to deliver a speech to the Islamic world in Cairo? Or has he created a lot of illusions about what politics can deliver?

Kissinger: Obama is like a chess player who is playing simultaneous chess and has opened his game with an unusual opening. Now he's got to play his hand as he plays his various counterparts. We haven't gotten beyond the opening game move yet. I have no quarrel with the opening move.

As I noted in "Obama as Chess Master," the association of Obama with chess in the discourse of international relations contrasts sharply with the more primitive games (such as poker and Monopoly) associated with his predecessor. US foreign policy no longer seems driven by ideological brinksmanship but instead seems guided by objective and intelligent strategic maneuvering. The White House no longer hides its cards, but instead makes its moves openly on the world stage for all to see. Kissinger is clearly troping on the chess vs. poker theme I have been following for several years, and he elevates the praise of Obama implied by the "chess master" metaphor by pointing out that the President is "playing simultaneous chess" and trying out "an unusual opening." Kissinger, of course, is famous among chess players for having made an 11th hour call to Bobby Fischer that got him to participate in the 1972 World Championship match in Iceland. Even if he opened his conversation with Fischer by saying, “This is one of the worst chess players in the world speaking to the best,” Kissinger is surely regarded as a master of strategic maneuvering and a brilliant chess player on the world stage. So this is high praise indeed for Obama.

That Obama met with opposition leader and former chess World Champion Garry Kasparov during his recent visit to Moscow is still more evidence of the objective and complex type of game he is playing. As ChessBase points out, he is the first president since Bill Clinton to meet the Russian opposition leader during a state visit.

Obama as Chess Master

I knew that someone would eventually write a column like Bob Herbert's "The Chess Master" (The New York Times, February 9), presenting Barack Obama's rational political strategy as equivalent to brilliant chessplaying. Not surprisingly, Herbert is not the first to make the comparison: "Chessmaster Obama's Plan for a 60-Seat Super-Majority" is only one of many that I turn up with a quick Google search. It seems that there is a new game in town, and one that contrasts sharply with the primitive, bullying, dangerous, risk-taking, and self-centered gamesmanship of the previous administration, as I have commented on in "Texas Hold'em," "Chess and Diplomacy" and "US-Russian Diplomacy as Monopoly vs. Chess." I hope Obama's middlegame and endgame are as strong as his opening.

U.S.-Russian Diplomacy as Monopoly vs. Chess

For the past two years, I have been following a series of stories that depict U.S. - Iranian diplomacy as the story of poker-playing Americans trying to out-bluff Iranian chessplayers (see Texas Hold'em and Chess and Diplomacy). Spengler of the Asia Times suggested recently that the growing U.S. conflict with Russia (especially since the invasion of Georgia) might be understood by recognizing that "Americans Play Monopoly, Russians Chess":  

What Americans understand by "war games" is exactly what occurs on the board of the Parker Brothers' pastime. The board game Monopoly is won by placing as many hotels as possible on squares of the playing board. Substitute military bases, and you have the sum of American strategic thinking.

America's idea of winning a strategic game is to accumulate the most chips on the board: bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, a pipeline in Georgia, a "moderate Muslim" government with a big North Atlantic Treaty Organization base in Kosovo, missile installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, and so forth. But this is not a strategy; it is only a game score.

Chess players think in terms of interaction of pieces: everything on the periphery combines to control the center of the board and prepare an eventual attack against the opponent's king. The Russians simply cannot absorb the fact that America has no strategic intentions: it simply adds up the value of the individual pieces on the board. It is as stupid as that.

As Spengler writes elsewhere:

A deadly miscommunication arises from this asymmetry. The Russians cannot believe that the Americans are as stupid as they look, and conclude that Washington wants to destroy them.

As Business New Europe's "Moscow Blog" suggested, expanding on Spengler's metaphor:

Washington may genuinely see the Czech/Poland-based anti-missile system... as simply another hotel and really has no aggressive intentions towards Russia. However, for the chess-playing Russians it was an incredibly aggressive move on the US's part, as it points directly at the king.

Whether or not chess thinking governs Russia's moves in the conflict, there is no question that the invasion of Georgia has impacted the world of chess.  As Dylan Loeb McClain reports in The New Yorks Times:

Nine of the 64 women who qualified for the women’s world championship, being held in the Russian city of Nalchik in the Caucasus, did not appear at the start of the tournament on Thursday in protest of the war. The nine, including six from Georgia, were disqualified.

Sloan vs. Truong, et al.

Sam Sloan's lawsuit (mentioned here last month) has received its first reply with the preliminary to a motion to dismiss filed by Proskauer Rose LLP on behalf of Truong et al. Other than the failure in parallel construction at the end of the first paragraph, it looks like a pretty solid argument from the defense.

Daniel Johnson's "White King and Red Queen"

Daniel Johnson's White King and Red Queen: How the Cold War was Fought on the Chessboard, reviewed quite favorably today by David Edmonds at the Times Online (with an extract) and recently by Sally Feldman ("Check Republics") at New Humanist, is the latest in a long line of culturally and historically informed books on chess, which includes David Shenk's The Immortal Game (reviewed here last year), Paul Hoffman's King's Gambit (which is great and I've been meaning to review it forever), Michael Weinreb's The Kings of New York (also great, with a review half-written), J. C. Hallman's The Chess Artist, and Edmonds and John Eidinow's Bobby Fischer Goes to War. I imagine Johnson's will be a very fine addition to this mushrooming literature, and better (in my view) than Edmonds's own book focused on the Fischer-Spassky match, which seemed satified merely to retell (albeit in excellent detail) the story of the 1972 World Chess Championship, with little in the way of cultural context.

I've referenced Johnson's work here before, and likely some of the current book derives from his excellent essay "Cold War Chess" (also in PDF) in Prospect, which was mentioned here in connection with NM Scott Massey's 2005 lecture on Moscow 1925. He also had one of the earliest reviews of Kasparov's How Life Imitates Chess (see "Garry Kasparov's Deadly Game"), which--like Josh Waitzkin's The Art of Learning, Bruce Pandolfini's Every Move Must Have a Purpose, and Peter Kurzdorfer's The Tao of Chess--analyzes the meanings of the game for the PowerPoint crowd. Though these books are also interesting in their way, I generally prefer my chess analysis to go a little deeper than that, and Johnson's writings show that he has an impressive ability to do just that. I look forward to getting my copy for Holiday reading.

Kasparov on Bill Maher

Kasparov's book tour continues, also serving (it appears) as a public relations campaign to solidify Western support behind his bid for the Russian presidency. It almost makes you glad that Kasparov has given up chess, since that means he is more likely to appear on TV. His appearance on Bill Maher's show went much better than his mock-interview with Colbert. But both appearances made me recognize the accuracy of Paul Hoffman's portrait of him in King's Gambit as a pugilistic interlocutor, always out to win an argument--or to turn ordinary conversations into arguments to be won. In this case, it served him well and he ruled the board according to ChessBase, Maher's guests, and even Maher himself. I'm curious to see if he can sustain this level of play into the endgame.

Sloan vs. Truong / Polgar

I have not wanted to discuss this case, but it has become so newsworthy that it would be wrong not to mention it, especially as it will likely cast a pall over the US chess scene for some time to come. As you have probably already heard, Sam Sloan has filed suit against Paul Truong, Susan Polgar, and the USCF, seeking to void the recent election, reinstate his own position on the board, and hold new elections due to election fraud. That fraud amounts to the Trulgar camp making a number of misrepresentations, including: posing as Sloan and others on the internet to post highly defamatory statements about Sloan and other candidates and concealing the marriage of Truong and Polgar from the electorate (both of which appear pretty much proven). You can read the lengthy, sometimes rambling, and artfully written filing online (also available from Sloan's website). It is worth reading for some of the interesting facts, opinions, and speculations it reveals. Some may wish to balance that by also reading Bill Goichberg's assessment of Sam Sloan and his character.

Dylan Loeb McClain has done an excellent job of covering the story for The New York Times and in his Gambit weblog:

• Chess Group Officials Accused of Using Internet to Hurt Rivals
• Interview with the USCF President
• The Lawsuit Against Polgar and Truong, et. al.
• The Lawsuit Against Polgar and Truong, A Closer Look

Other worthwhile commentary and coverage around the net includes:

• Slime Spillover by Mig Greengard at The Daily Dirt (with extensive commentary)
• Let no one say I threw the first rock by DG at the BCC Weblog
• Polgar / Truong Caught Redhanded by Braden Bournival

"The Tsar's Opponent" in The New Yorker

For those who wonder about the status of Garry Kasparov's campaign for the Russian presidency, David Remnick's "The Tsar's Opponent: Garry Kasparov takes aim at the power of Vladimir Putin" (The New Yorker, October 1, 2007) makes an excellent and informative read. I am always intrigued by the way that chess becomes conflated with politics (see here, here, and here for instance), and Remnick's analysis is often quite astute in this regard. I was especially struck by the following aside about the way that chess championship matches are always mapped onto concurrent political situations in the public imagination:

Like heavyweight championship bouts, matches for the world chess championship have a way of taking on political meaning. Bobby Fischer’s psychodramatic match with Boris Spassky in Iceland, thirty-five years ago, was a Cold War epic (of a particularly neurotic type). In the popular press, it was not enough to say that Spassky failed to contend with Fischer’s brilliant and unpredictable openings; more comprehensibly, it was a triumph of American ingenuity over a sclerotic Soviet bureaucracy.

In 1984, when Kasparov made his first bid for the world title, the political drama was purely Soviet. The regime was in its last year before perestroika. Konstantin Chernenko, a career apparatchik, directed the imperium from his sickroom. His senescence was a symbol of the regime. The market stalls and store shelves were bare. The technological age had arrived—but not in the Soviet Union. Karpov, the world champion, was an exemplar of the Brezhnev-Andropov-Chernenko “era of stagnation,” an obedient member of the nomenklatura. As a player, he was a defensive artist, whose style, like Kutuzov’s in war, was to absorb and smother attacks and then destroy his confounded opponent. Like Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, he was a living symbol of official Soviet achievement.

Kasparov represented a new generation. At twenty-one, he was ironic, full of barely disguised disdain for the regime. He was a member of the Communist Party until 1990—his chess ambitions required it—but no one saw him as subservient. Rather, he was cast, in his challenge to Karpov, as a champion of the young and of the outsiders. His chess style was swift, imaginative, daring—sometimes to the point of recklessness. Karpov painted academic still-lifes; Kasparov was an Abstract Expressionist.

The full text of this wonderful article is available online at The New Yorker's website along with a 22-minute audio clip ("His Next Move") from Remnick's interview with the former chess champion.

Karna Small Bodman

Karna Small Bodman, who worked at the White House during the Reagan administration, has two recent novels with chess-related titles. They may interest readers who enjoy political thrillers.

Kasparov vs. Putin

Every week at the club, one of our members asks me when I think former World Champion Garry Kasparov will turn up dead like the many Russian journalists we are hearing about in the news. I hope that never comes to pass, though he is surely risking a great deal. The New York Times has a good story in today's paper titled "Kasparov, Building Opposition to Putin One Square at a Time" (more permanently available in the International Herald Tribune). Kasparov reveals that since the famous incident where he was attacked with a chessboard, he now travels with bodyguards to ward off similar crazy people. But he has a realist's (some might say "fatalist's") view of his chances of surviving an assassin's attack. As he says in the Times piece: "If the state goes after you, there’s no stopping them.”

A student of Botvinnik's, Kasparov has approached chess as he approaches life, with as much objectivity as he can muster. As he says: "I am absolutely objective ... I think we can lose badly, because the regime is still very powerful, but the only beauty of our situation is that we don't have much choice." I continue to be impressed. So long as the regime does not sweep the pieces from the board in anger to end the game, I think Kasparov has the best chance of anyone to win it.