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Chessville
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In the travels he recounts, the author meets chess author and teacher Bruce Pandolfini, pundit Mig Greengard, author (Chess Bitch) and master Jennifer Shahade, master and president of the United States Chess League Greg Shahade, Chessbase’s Frederic Friedel, and grandmasters Garry Kasparov, Joel Lautier, Nigel Short, Yasser Seirawan and Maurice Ashley – to name just a few of the cast of characters that populate King’s Gambit. The tales the players tell, and the stories and reflections that Hoffman weaves around them make for a remarkable page-turner of a book. Anyone who has fallen into the thinking that chess is boring trap needs to get hold of King’s Gambit quickly. A frequent topic throughout the book is the discussion of the impact of the stress associated with playing chess, especially the purported link between chess and insanity. Does chess drive us mad, or keep us sane? Resolving this matters deeply to Hoffman, and because it matters to him it quickly matters to the reader, who may wonder at first where are we going with this? The author recounts his adventures as he grapples with memories of his father and the time they spent together:
Hoffman lived with his mother – his parents divorced when he was 12 – in Connecticut during the week, and visited his father in Greenwich Village on the weekends. The book is full of the old man’s outrageous escapades and a slow accumulation of disappointments for the young and growing older Paul as he reluctantly realizes that his father is not the person he thought he was, and needed him to be. This is not done in the modern “emo” style suitable for recounting on “Oprah” but rather in the manner of someone who, having been encouraged by his pals to play the Jerome Gambit, perplexedly counts up his pieces after a half-dozen moves… One does not have to be the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, who wrote of Paul Morphy’s tribulations, to gather that the pawn cast off in hopes of obtaining exciting play in the King’s Gambit of the title – 1.e4 e5 2.f4 exf4 on the board – is symbolically the author himself. You have to give squares to get squares, Bobby Fisher said; then again, he believed that the King’s Gambit was busted… When Hoffman later writes of Claude Bloodgood, an incarcerated murderer, chess hustler, and proponent of the unorthodox Grob, 1.g4, (“We look for cheap instantaneous gratification. We don’t like to work,” said one of the opening’s practitioners), he is dismissive and disdainful of those who play such “dishonest” chess, those grobsters:
Alas, Hoffman Senior was a grobster. In chess and in life, chess and life coexist. To run to the former to escape the latter, one indeed, risks madness. Chess has many such case studies, as Hoffman reports. He has no desire to join the crowd, yet the game’s siren call will not let him go. Not every player that the author encounters in King’s Gambit is of the fool-‘em-and-bamboozle-‘em or the rip-their-head-off-and-go-bowling-with-it schools of chess play (although he never seems to meet a dull chessplayer; novelists take note). Meeting Canadian champion Pascal Charbonneau is both reassuring and unnerving for Hoffman: the guy is so, so, well – normal. Hanging around Charbonneau and soon-to-be grandmaster Irina Krush is almost therapeutic for Hoffman and his view of the Royal Game, as if Voltaire’s Candide had suddenly stumbled over a 2500-rated Dr. Phil. Or the re-animated grandmaster (and psychoanalyst) Reuben Fine, if you will. (It is interesting to see that Hoffman casts himself as Charbonneau’s “chess therapist” later on in the book.) Of course, when Hoffman accompanies his new-found chess-friend to Tripoli where the 2004 FIDE World Championship knockout tournament takes place he quickly enters a bizarre world that even Alice in Through the Looking Glass might not have envisioned. While Charbonneau battles on the 64 squares, Hoffman tries to take it all in. A chess game with Muammar Gadhafi? Sure, why not – if the author can survive the Libyan security forces long enough. Play the old favorite, the King’s Gambit – but be sure to offer a diplomatic draw, regardless of the position. A chat with FIDE president Kirsan Ilyumzhinov? Sure, maybe chess is a gift from other planets, as the man suggests. Maybe no Israeli player came to Tripoli because he’s upset because his neighbor’s cat or dog died. Yipes! Maybe FIDE’s insistence on drug testing is a good thing after all… And did I tell you about Hoffman’s early game against Nicholas Rossolimo, or the time when he studied Bent Larsen’s games and prepared a theoretical novelty that he then sprang on the grandmaster in a simultaneous exhibition? King’s Gambit is a rollicking good read. I checked the online Oxid thesaurus for synonyms to make sure I got that word right:
Yep, that’s about right. King’s Gambit has a lot of information in its Annotations (footnotes) chapter at the back of the book, as well as a listing of Source Notes and an Index. There are many people you know – chess players and non-players alike – who would be fascinated by King’s Gambit. Get yourself a copy. Or get them a copy and borrow it back. They’ll understand, once they’ve read it.
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The Chessville
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King’s
Gambit tells of author Paul Hoffman’s return to, and subsequent personal
journey through, the always fascinating, often mind-bending, frequently
mesmerizing, and occasionally baffling world of chess. Hoffman is well
equipped to tell this story: he has written several books, including
Wings of Madness and the widely acclaimed The Man Who Loved Only
Numbers; he was editor at Scientific American, editor in chief of
Discovery magazine and president of the Encyclopedia Britannica;
and he has written about chess for The New York Times, The New
Yorker, Smithsonian and The Wall Street Journal. He
is also an avid Class-A-near-Expert rated player.
