Chess: A Personal History

I've just finished reading "The Immortal Game" by David Shenk. It's a brief history of chess set against the backdrop of the so-called Immortal Game played on June 21st  1851 in London between Adolf Anderssen (White), a famous player and informal world champion of the mid-19th century, and Lionel Kieseritzky (Black), another strong player of the day. It's an interesting approach: drip feeding the moves to the reader over the course of the various chapters while at the same time expatiating upon the historical, psychological and cultural aspects of chess in general.

A brief discussion of the moves involved in this famous game can be found on WikiBooks. Unfortunately for Kieseritzky, he died not long after playing this game. To quote from the book:

Kieseritzky ... would forever carry the moniker “Immortal Loser.” Upon returning home to Paris ... he was soon forced to fold his failing chess magazine as he struggled with his finances and his health. He died in a Paris mental hospital in 1853, just two years after his loss in the Immortal Game. He had no money to his name. No one in the chess world contributed to give Kieseritzky a decent burial. No one stood by his grave.

This got me thinking about my own chess history and I've chosen to document a little of my story here. Oddly, the story begins with my father when I was about eleven years of age. One day he decided that we should learn to play chess. I was agreeable. We went off in search of a former boarder in our house who was now living elsewhere but whom we remembered as having been a keen chess player. I can clearly remember him playing, some years before, against an opponent who was a boarder at my maternal grandparents' house. This would have been my earliest memory of a chess game.

My father and I never did find our former boarder. He had moved elsewhere. Regarding that other boarder who was English, he later returned to Britain but revisited Australia years later with an Irish bride in tow. By this time, I had learned to play chess and we played several games together when I was in my mid-teens. Back to the beginning and not long after our failed attempt to find the boarder, I somehow acquired a small fold-up chess set with magnetic pieces that included instructions as to how to move and thus I learned the basics of the game from this. My relationship with my father was never close and only worsened in my teenage years and I don't think he ever learned to play.

I can't remember the exact chronology but around 1964, the year that I was in Grade 10 of high school, I started to take the game very seriously. I purchased several books, amongst the first was Irving Chernev's "Logical Chess" of which I still have a physical copy. It's one of the very few books to survive from my youth. Up until the composition of this post, I'd not been able to find an electronic version of the book but happily I have now obtained one. It's been converted into algebraic notation whereas the original edition that I had used descriptive chess notation (P-K4 etc.). The latter was the most widely used notation in the 1960's and I found it quite difficult to adapt to the algebraic notation that came to dominant in the 1970's. It's as if my brain had been hard-wired with the classical notation but the algebraic to me lacked "magic". I felt there was something magical about 1. P-K4 whereas I felt nothing for 1. e4. Strange, I know, but there you have it.

There has been some criticism of Chernev's book in later years (read these forum comments on chess.com) but to me, at the time, it was a wonderful book and I pored over it in an effort to improve the quality of my play. My best friend at school also became interested in the game and during our remaining high school years we played a great many games. I subscribed to a chess magazine (the name of which eludes me) and I read other chess books including Lasker's "Common Sense in Chess" and "My System" by Aron Nimzowitsch. This was an exciting time for chess. Bobby Fischer's star was on the rise and the supremacy of the Soviet chess machine was being challenged.

Grandmaster Yuri Averbakh

During my year at University (1967), I remember watching a simultaneous exhibition by the well-known Russian grandmaster Yuri Averbakh. This was my first ever time seeing a grandmaster in action. He is still alive believe it or not, aged 96. I've included a photo of him here in his prime rather than one of him as he now looks. My friend from school also attended University but he was beginning to show signs of the paranoid schizophrenia that would overwhelm him in the early years of the next decade. His interest in chess was declining and I guess my initial enthusiasm had faded as well. I did play correspondence chess on and off for a couple of years in the early 70's which was quite tedious because a letter needed to be posted for each move. For most of the decade however, I just played in a desultory fashion.

For some reason, in the early 80's I joined a local chess club and enjoyed a brief flush of fame when our team headed off one evening to play a rival team. The team size was eight as I recall and we were comprehensively beaten 1.5 to 6.5 with all players beaten except for me, who secured a win with the white pieces playing a Ruy Lopez, and another team member who managed a draw. Not longer after that I headed off with my family to Britain and while travelling around there, my interest in the game was rekindled. I remember buying a copy of Reuben Fine's "Basic Chess Endings" and studying it very enthusiastically.

What I lacked over the years since my schooldays was a regular opponent and it was only between 1985 and 1987 that I become friends with a German guy who enjoyed chess and Stratego. On many Friday nights during that time, I would drop by his unit and we would enjoy wine and nibbles while playing firstly a few games of Chess before finishing up with a game of Stratego. I remember he bought what must have been at the time one of the first electronic devices capable of playing chess. I knew that the limitations of such devices were most glaring in the end game and so, on the few occasions that I played it, I usually managed to win by simplifying as quickly as possible into an advantageous end game. However, I much preferred my human antagonist and I have fond memories of that period and all the wine-sodden games that we played together.

At various times during my high school teaching career I've supervised school chess teams but that usually involved driving the students to the opposing team's venue or hosting the opposing team at our school. The students who signed up for the team could already play and I didn't really spend much time teaching them about chess. With the advent of computers and later smartphones, I played many desultory games against my electronic adversaries but it was only after retiring in 2015 that I found I had a lot of spare time and my enthusiasm for chess was rekindled. I became aware of the extensive resources available online for playing chess, improving one's level of play and just finding out more about the game in general. An interest in learning about the personalities and styles of the leading players of the day had characterised my early association with chess and now more than 50 years later, that same interest had been rekindled. I've come full circle.