The Immortal Game Read Online Free Page B

myself a young intellectual—told friends that I was a nonconformist. Still, chess didn’t enter my orbit until a friend insisted that I learn it during our senior year. That I did, and proceeded to play a score of games with him over a few weeks’ time. It must have made a powerful impression. I never got very good, but I did briefly surrender my mind to chess consciousness. To this day (twenty years distant), I have a clear memory of sitting in the back of a tourist bus on a spring school trip to Washington, D.C., my mind vaguely wandering through a chess game I’d recently played, and then strangely—involuntarily—imagining myself as a chess Knight and examining my possible moves: from where I sat in the bus, I could move up two rows and over one seat to the right or left, or up one row and over two seats…
    It was a creepy feeling, this sensation that chess could redefine how I saw the outside world. I stopped playing chess shortly thereafter, at least partly due to this strange event. (Imagine my sense of déjà vu twenty years later when I read from Marcel Duchamp’s letter to a friend: “Everything around me takes the shape of the Knight or the Queen….”) Without any family encouragement or group of chess friends, I dropped the game, found other things to do with my time, and didn’t happen to run across it again until my mid-thirties.
    Was I avoiding chess out of fear—or due to a lack of innate ability? Or was it simply that I had a full life and I never found myself in a chess-playing crowd? One thing seems certain: falling into chess is rarely a casual affair. Whether you’re five or thirty-five, the game tends to repel those who aren’t attracted to its particular brand of strenuous mental effort. Serious converts to the game usually have some powerful motivation—perhaps unknown to them—for investing in the game at a particular time in their lives.
    In the late summer of 2002, something—I wasn’t quite sure what—brought me back to the game. Was it the need for an emotional escape pod from 9/11 and the expectation of another New York attack? Was it a primal desire to forge a connection with my semifamous ancestor? Or was it just a simple need to carve out some leisure time with friends? Kurt, an old college pal who had also never really played before, proclaimed in solidarity that he, too, would take up the game. One small problem was that Kurt lived in Chicago and I lived in Brooklyn. We agreed to try a little experiment: every day at noon, we would convene online for a short, timed game.
    We were both pretty lousy, of course, though Kurt seemed consistently one beat quicker than I was; under time pressure, he could still make reasonably well-considered moves, while I frequently choked. It seemed obvious to me that Kurt’s well-oiled, methodical mind would soon leap past my neural cobwebs and we would no longer be well matched. My only hope was to seek some expert help. At the Brooklyn Public Library, I dove into some beginner guides by Bruce Pandolfini and others. I read about openings, tactics, and strategy, and learned to avoid some of the very dumbest moves.
    Many of the books and Web sites also featured guided tours through celebrated chess games from history. Like football teams studying films of old games, the astute player could potentially pick up a lot of strategic insight by following these legendary contests. “When one plays over a game by a fine technician,” declared chess author Anthony Saidy, “one receives a sense of rightness and the impression that the master has penetrated very deeply indeed into the workings of the chess pieces.”
    One contest in particular, from the mid-nineteenth century, immediately captured my imagination: the legendary Immortal Game, a game so surprising, so brilliant and full of life, that it drew the admiration of everyone from novices to the game’s greatest champions. After 150 years, the game continued to fascinate and amaze the global