Chess for the Rest of Us
by Evan Shultz
The Immortal Game, by David Shenk, continues the wonderful trend in non-fiction books that brought us the recent bestseller Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. For those who haven’t read it yet, Freakonomics technically is a book about economics; it just isn’t so much about money. Each chapter seeks to make a connection between disparate elements in order to illustrate an economic principle, which leads to headings such as “Why High School Teachers are like Sumo Wrestlers” or “Why Real Estate Agents are like the Klu Klux Klan.” Economics, they show, is the study of people and why they decide to do what they do, not the study of little green pieces of paper.
The Immortal Game offers a similar insight. In case anyone was fooled by the cover, it’s about the game of chess—as such, it’s shelved under “Games” in the local bookstore. Yet nowhere in the book are there any tips on chess strategy or where to find opponents. In the entire history of chess, the book only discusses six famous games in any depth, five of which appear only in an appendix. Mr. Shenk has no intention of writing about how to play chess; he wants to write about what chess has done — which, as it turns out, makes a far more interesting read.
As an example of this distinction: When chess first was invented, thousands of years ago in the Middle East, it was called chatrang and was played in the familiar way, excepting four differences:
– A pawn couldn’t move two spaces on its first move. (Yes, for the three French people reading this, that also meant there was no en passant)
– The bishop (then called the “elephant”) moved and captured by jumping two squares diagonally.
– The queen (then called the “firzir,” or “advisor”) moved and captured by moving one square diagonally.
– If neither player could checkmate the opponent’s king, one of them could still win by capturing all of his opponent’s pieces except the king.
The rule allowing pawns to move two squares developed after chess spread to Europe, probably in order to speed up the opening. The changes to the bishop and the queen were added all at once, most likely inspired (as are so many great game variations) by a combination of boredom and booze. Someone decided the bishops and queens should fly across the board, and this variant, at the time called “the Mad Queen Game,” became more popular than the original. So it came that when one courtier said, “Who fancies a game of chess?” all the other courtiers knew he referred to the Mad Queen Game. The variant subsumed the game. Later, the extra win condition was dropped because it was redundant. (If white has only a king left and black is down to his king and even just a pawn, checkmate becomes all but inevitable.)
The Mad Queen Game was the single greatest change in chess’s millennia of history—and David Shenk only gives it three pages, while Deep Blue and other chess computers warrant their own chapter.
Chess history includes other, less well-known rabbit trails that The Immortal Game doesn’t mention at all — from exotic oriental variants where captured pieces switch sides or players can gain a spare king by promoting their drunk elephant (no joke) to weird attempts at “modernizing” chess by adding a third dimension. Enthusiasts have invented four-player versions, most notably one called Double Bughouse that has become popular with professional chess players. Even chess puzzles have spawned odd children, including some that use make-believe pieces with odd rules and others that ask the reader not to discern the correct move but, for example, to logically deduce whether or not black has ever promoted a pawn to queen. All told, a lot of interesting-albeit-nerdish chess trivia could have made it into The Immortal Game but did not.
And for good reason: It’s all beside the point. The Immortal Game is less than three hundred pages long, and if it included all the stuff a game geek like me normally expects to find in a history of chess there would be no room for the elements that make this book so amazing.
The Mad Queen Game seems like a big change to us, but to those who saw it happen, Mr. Shenk points out, the change was little more than cosmetic. For hundreds of years before and after, chess and checkers were the only pure strategy games in existence; every other game was either a test of physical prowess or a game of chance.
The author makes no mention of Kreigspiel, a variation where players play without knowing where their opponent’s pieces are; but he goes into great length about the chess masters living in Kriegspiel’s era who could play a hundred games simultaneously — blindfolded all the while — and about psychologist Alfred Binet’s study of these feats of recall, which turned our understanding of human memory upside down.
The reason we should care about thirty-two abstract statues sliding around a checkerboard, the author demonstrates chapter by chapter, is that chess offers perhaps the best window to the human intellect mankind has ever discovered.
For theologians, Shenk writes, chess became a proof against fatalism. Here was a game where either side could win, and yet there was no room for randomness: The outcome was decided not by which player was born stronger or faster, nor by which way fate turned a falling die, but by each player’s willful choices.
The Immortal Game covers everything from the origin of chess in myth and legend to its modern military applications (which are surprising) and its re-emergence in high-school curricula, all in the context of the actual “Immortal Game,” a game of chess played in a little French café by two players on their way to a chess tournament, a game which turned out to be perhaps the most exciting battle ever played out on a chessboard.
(Read slowly. It is tempting to rush through the historical sections in order to find out what Black is going to do about White’s queenside knight.)
Cleared of the opacity that marks most chess commentaries, The Immortal Game’s “White Queen to f6; check” reads like something out of an Errol Flynn movie.
That David Shenk’s chronicle of chess’s 1,400 years makes the game interesting is an accomplishment. That in his hands it also is exciting, even to someone who has never played chess, is a miracle. The game of chess certainly deserves the title “immortal”; this short book of its history may deserve that title as well.
The Immortal Game
Author: David Shenk
Publisher: Random House
Date: October 2007
Available at: All major book sellers
Price: Hardback: $26.00 Trade Paperback: $14.95
