Chess

One of the four books I brought along to Walker's chess tournament this weekend, the Ohio high school championship, was Stefan Zweig's novella entitled, simply, Chess.  I had read about it at Farm Lane Books and probably some other blogs, too, but as usual I can't remember which ones.  Anyway, it sounded like a good addition to my chess tournament book pile, a kind of psychological thriller that had to do with a game of chess.

I pulled it out at the end of the first evening, when I was looking for something new to distract me from the nail-biting end of a long game that eventually turned out to be a draw.  It took me twenty or thirty minutes to read the entire novella, and afterwards I had time to sit there amid the empty tables set with chessboards, still waiting for the outcome of one of the last three games in the room.

One of the things I've said about chess recently that earned me the stern, nodding agreement of my resident chess expert is that it's a little bit like law, in that if you know the precedent, you can use that to win.  The resident chess expert (I'm using the term "expert" in a technical sense, as he's now rated 2065 by the U.S. Chess Federation and therefore falls into that category; only "master" is higher) reads a lot of books about chess, so he has an advantage over other young players who may have had more experience playing games.  He can look at algebraic and other kinds of chess notations and picture a chess game, and he's learned to see the results of many possible moves all the way to the end game.  This is fairly routine for chess players at his level.

So when I read Zweig's story about a man who, in solitary confinement by the Gestapo, finds a chess book and teaches himself to picture the board and all the possible moves by players on each side, it did not strike me as terribly odd.  That it drives him to a state he calls "chess poisoning" did strike me as a little odd, but perhaps not under the circumstances.  The interest of the book, for me, ended up being in its historical significance, not in terms of what it had to say about chess.

There were a couple of interesting and, I thought, accurate observations for laypeople:
"I learned to understand the subtleties of the game, the tricks and ruses of attack and defence, I grasped the technique of thinking ahead, combination, counter-attack, and soon I could recognize the personal style of every grandmaster as infallibly from his own way of playing a game as you can identify a poet's verses from only a few lines."

This is certainly true, even at the high school level; each player knows his opponents and has studied their moves in previous games.  Sitting in a room with high school chess players yesterday, I overheard a conversation that included the information that "so-and-so usually opens with King's Indian," which is a series of moves that has its own name and methods of counter-attack.

The other interesting bit, for me, was one that echoed my situation as I read the passage:
"But to be perfectly honest, the gradual development of the situation was something of a disappointment to us laymen, as it is in every real tournament game. For the more the chessmen became interlocked in a strange, intricate formation, the more impenetrable did the real state of affairs seem to us. We couldn't tell what either of the opponents intended, or which of the two really held the advantage. We just noticed individual pieces being advanced like levers to break through the enemy front, but we were unable--since with these first-class players every movement was always combined several moves in advance--to see the strategic intention in all this toing and froing."

I was told (by other players) that the draw at the end of the day was slightly disappointing for Walker, since he had a "superior position" for most of the game and was "ahead on time."  His opponent, however, did not make any mistakes.

The only thing I can ever tell about Walker's game when I walk into the tournament room is that if he's walking up and down and smiling, he has a--sometimes momentary--advantage.  If he's sitting down holding his head in his hands and looking stern, it's business as usual. As in poker, good players put on a "chess face." And parents try to strike the right balance between supporting the tournament play and letting the players alone.

Walker played good chess all weekend.   He drew with the highest-rated player (a 12th-grader who speaks Russian to his chess teacher) and they were both in a 5-way tie for first, which was decided according to an arcane and precise method of "tie-breaker" points, according to which the 12th-grader came in first, and Walker came in second. His friend who went into this tournament with the exact same rating and who shares the Ohio 10th-grade championship with him, came in third. Walker has an embarrassingly big trophy and is happy because he played well, winning four games and drawing two.  

After the awarding of the trophy, we went out to dinner with the family of Walker's chess student, Joe, and Walker replayed one of his games at the restaurant table to show Joe what happened and why.  Then we drove home, and Eleanor played a song from the musical "Chess" in Walker's honor so we could all sing along: "one town's very like another when your head's down over your pieces, brother."