The evolution of cheating in chess

An entertaining survey of a problem with a surprisingly long history.

James Burke interviews Bobby Fischer on the eve of his match against Boris Spassky

This is gold dust. James Burke interviews Bobby Fischer on the eve of his 1972 world championship match against Boris Spassky.

Despite the intermittent attempts to paint Fischer as an obsessed eccentric, he comes over as intelligent and personable. And of course he spent a lot of his time studying chess: it was his profession. Do we think top golfers are eccentric because they spend their time practising golf?

Fischer's confidence turned out to be justified, yet before this match he had never beaten Spassky. They had met four times, with two of the games being won by Spassky and two ending in draws.

The Joy of Six 1273

James Crouch argues that the greatest challenge the Conservative Party faces is a lack of unity among both its members and its remaining voters.

"In their speeches to this week’s Labour Party conference, Rachel Reeves mentioned it only briefly and in passing, and Keir Starmer not at all. It’s absurd, especially as the guiding theme of both speeches, as of the government’s entire incoming communications message, is that of the dire inheritance bequeathed by its Tory predecessors. Brexit can hardly be excluded from that reckoning." Chris Grey says there’s still little sign Britain has accommodated itself to Brexit or has any idea how to do so.

"It’s night. I’m trying to sleep. I’m so tired. But a voice says, 'What time is it?'. It’s half two, Mum, go to sleep. Half an hour later again, 'What time is it?'. Mum, it’s night, that’s why it’s dark. Please be quiet and let me sleep. 'Oh, okay.' Ten minutes later, 'Mick, put the light on for me'. My brother Mick hasn’t lived in this house for over 40 years! Again, I calm her down. But it only lasts for a bit, and finally at quarter to four I give up on this night, get out of bed and start the day." Anna Schurer talked to a carer and describes her life in her own words.

Andrew Anthony reviews a new book on Elon Musk's destruction of Twitter.

"It was a seminal moment in chess history, comparable to the 1945 USA v USSR radio match when the Americans, quadruple Olympiad gold winners in the 1930s, were crushed 15.5-4.5 to launch 45 years of Soviet supremacy, interrupted only by Bobby Fischer." Leonard Barden on India's dominant performance in the chess Olympiad.

Jon Hotten remembers Graham Thorpe: "His professional life was stellar, but other parts were hard, perhaps impossibly so, and there’s a deep and abiding sadness to that."

The latest connections from our Trivia Desk

These just in.

In her London Review of Books review of Barbra Streisand's memoir My Name is Barbra, Malin Hay records:

By the time she returned home her ‘path was set’, and she arranged to graduate early from Erasmus Hall High School (where her classmates included Neil Diamond and the chess champion Bobby Fischer, who dressed ‘like some sort of deranged pilot’).

Did he really dress like that? When Fischer burst on to the international scene aged 15, he dressed like any other American teenager of the Fifties and wore a T-shirt. A few years later, he agreed to fly over to record a programme for the BBC because he had calculated that the schedule would allow him enough time to be measured for a Savile Row suit.

Certainly, he was well turned out for his world championship match against Boris Spassky - there was no sign of a deranged pilot then.

******

At the start of his biography of Noel Coward, Oliver Soden writes:

Violet Coward doted on her son. He was blond-haired, blue-eyed, disarmingly bright, and he showed signs of being musical, reaching tiny fingers up to the piano in the parlour of the Cowards' semi-detached house, known as "Helmsdale", at 5 Waldegrave Road in Teddington.

Violet and her husband, Arthur, had befriended the local celebrity Robert [actually Richard] "R. D." Blackmore, bestselling author of Lorna Doone, and he agreed to become godfather to their child, sending a carriage drawn by a white pony to trundle the boy, resplendent in his Victorian skirts, around the streets of the prosperous Middlesex suburb.

But this was not Noel: it was his older brother Russell Arthur Blackmore Coward, who died, aged six, the year before Noel was born.

Because I think I already knew about Neil Diamond and Bobby Fischer being classmates of Barbra Streisand, R.D. Blackmore being the godfather of Noel Coward's brother is our Trivial Fact of the Day.

Later. As well as correcting my and Oliver Soden's errors, Richard James tells me that R.D. Blackmore and Noel Coward's father were both chess players.

Chess, Freud and paranoia: Another column for the JCPCP

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Another of my Sighcology columns for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy. There are three more posted on this blog, covering private schools, Davids and mental hospitals.

More about the JCPCP on the Egalitarian Publishing site. 

Reuben Fine could have been a contender. When Alexander Alekhine, the reigning world chess champion, died in 1946, the game’s authorities announced a tournament involving the world’s strongest players to find the new champion. And Fine, along with three Soviets, a fellow American and a Dutchman, was among the six players invited.

Fine, however, declined to take part, arguing that the conditions favoured the Soviet players. He soon dropped out of elite chess altogether, preferring to concentrate on his career as a psychotherapist.

As an orthodox Freudian, Fine took a particular view of chess. Bill Harston, writing Fine’s obituary for the Independent in 1993, explained:

Drawing heavily on the earlier writings of Freud's biographer Ernest Jones, Fine supported the view that chess is an embodiment of the Oedipus Complex, with the father-figure King ('indispensable, all-important, irreplaceable, yet weak and requiring protection') and powerful mother-figure Queen providing the elements for the player to enact his parricidal fantasies. The pieces, according to Fine, are mostly phallic symbols.

His writings have been widely quoted to explain the dearth of strong women chess-players and the absence of homosexuals at the highest levels of the game.

******

In 1972 an American player broke the hegemony that the Soviet Union had established after Alekhine’s and won the world chess championship. That was Bobby Fischer, whose match with Boris Spassky in Reykjavik acted as a symbol of the Cold War and put game on the world’s front pages.

Fine wrote a book about Fischer and his achievement. In it he revealed that for many years ‘chess players approached me with the request to try to help Bobby out of his personal problems. In spite of his genius, he was socially awkward, provocative, argumentative and unhappy’.

In fact, or so Fine wrote, he had already tried to help Fischer. Bobby’s mother had consulted him soon after her son had won the US Junior Championship at the age of 13:

He came to see me about half a dozen times. Each time we played chess for an hour or two. In order to maintain a relationship with him, I had to win, which I did. ... My family remembers how furious he was after each encounter, muttering that I was “lucky”.

Hopeful that I might help him to develop in other directions, I started a conversation at one point about what he was doing in school. As soon as school was mentioned, he became furious, screamed, “You have tricked me,” and promptly walked out. For years afterward, whenever I met him in clubs or tournaments he gave me angry looks, as though I had done him some immeasurable harm by trying to get a little closer to him.

******

Dr Fine might have got on better with Fischer’s opponent in the match that won him the world title, because Boris Spassky’s reminiscences of first encountering chess are pregnant with Freudian meaning – as the psychiatrist said of Basil after staying at Fawlty Towers, “There’s enough material here for an entire conference.”

David Edmonds and John Eidinow wrote in Bobby Fischer Goes to War:

In the summer of 1946, Spassky passed his days watching the players in a chess pavilion "with a black knight on top" on an island in Leningrad's river Neva. "Long queen moves fascinated me," he recalls. "I fell in love with the white queen. I dreamed about caressing her in my pocket, but I did not dare to steal her. Chess is pure for me." 

Spassky had learnt how the pieces move by watching older children play when he was sent to an orphanage during the Siege of Leningrad. When he was back home, his first trainer used to feed him as well as teach chess. He remembered those summer days in the chess pavilion:

He had thirteen kopeks for his fare and a glass of water with syrup to see him through until the last streetcar carried him home. His feet were bare. "Soldiers' boots were my worst enemy."

Chess can be a great escape.

******

Bobby Fischer never defended his world title. The conditions he insisted upon proved unacceptable to the game’s authorities as they would have given him an unfair advantage over his challenger. So Fischer walked away from chess.

His only return to the game came in 1992, when he and Spassky played another match. Fischer won again, but neither player was the force he had been 20 years before. Over those two decades there had been worrying reports about Fischer’s mental health, and this second match caused him further problems. It was held in the short-lived Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which was under United Nations sports sanctions, and the United States issued a warrant for Fischer’s arrest. He was never to return there.

This did nothing for his state of mind and his raging paranoia was exposed to the world by his reaction to the terrorist outrage of 9/11: 

"[I hope] the country will be taken over by the military – they'll close down all the synagogues, arrest all the Jews, execute hundreds of thousands of Jewish ringleaders."

It was Iceland, the scene of his greatest triumph, that stepped in to offer Fischer asylum, in both senses of the word. He died there in 2008.

******

I could conclude with the words of Bill Hartston, who was briefly Britain’s best chess player at the start of the Seventies and later became a journalist and then a star of Gogglebox: “Chess doesn't drive people mad: it keeps mad people sane.” But maybe chess isn’t a good occupation if you have a tendency to paranoia, as you spend your life encountering ingenious people who are plotting your downfall.

And paranoia about professional chess was never confined to Bobby Fischer nor obviously unjustified. There were those in 1946 who wondered whether the Soviets had murdered Alekhine to hasten the crowning of their first world champion, while Reuben Fine’s doubts about the ensuing tournament appeared justified when one Soviet player contrived to lose all four of his games against another.

Garry Kasparov visits Bobby Fischer's grave

Bobby Fischer's victory over Boris Spassky in their 1972 match in Reykjavik put chess on the front pages of the world's newspapers. And, though Spassky was always his own man, the contest was seen as a symbol of the Cold War.

Fischer never defended his title, and his life was to become a long descent into paranoia. He and Spassky played a second match 20 years after their first - Fischer won this too, but neither player was the force he had been,

The match was played in the short-lived Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which was under United Nations sporting sanctions. For this reason, the United States issued a warrant for Fischer arrest. He was never to return there.

Eventually it was Iceland that stepped in to offer Fischer asylum, in both senses of the word. He died there in 2008.

This film shows a later world champion, Garry Kasparov. visiting Fischer's grave. 

Writing this, I realise that these two players represent two strikingly different kinds of chess genius. 

Fischer's play was so clear and logical that he made you feel that you could play that way too, whereas Kasparov's brilliant sacrifices seemed to come out of a clear blue sky. You had to play over his games more than once to work out what had happened.

Kasparov held the world title for 15 years, which is one reason I rank him above Fischer. But I wonder if their two different kinds of genius can be found in other fields - the arts as well as sport?