Asri-unix.151
net.chess
utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!menlo70!sri-unix!mclure
Mon Nov 30 02:37:17 1981
The Eyeball Gambit
The following article was written shortly before Karpov defeated Korchnoi
to retain his World Championship title. It is one of the best humorous
columns on chess ever written (in my opinion and a few others).
n013 0748 13 Nov 81
BC-BAKER-COLUMN
(Commentary)
OBSERVER: The Eyeball Gambit
By RUSSELL BAKER
c. 1981 N.Y. Times News Service
NEW YORK - I know I ought to be rooting for Viktor Korchnoi to beat
Anatoly Karpov, but I'm not. I don't care which one wins, even if
they are playing for the chess championship of the world.
I know Karpov is a Commie hero of Soviet chess and Korchnoi is a
Russian defector who hates everything Lenin stands for. Obviously you
can't root for Karpov. A Karpov victory for communism could encourage
the Pentagon to start a multibillion-dollar program to develop the
supersonic, invisible-to-radar chess board. I can't afford it.
But then Korchnoi doesn't make my pulse pound either.
For one thing, Korchnoi strikes me as a bad sport. When Karpov is
fidgeting about where to move his bishop, Korchnoi says things like,
''Quit squirming, little worm.''
Is that any way for a chess player to talk? In baseball, a game that
encourages more rudeness than chess does, the batters spend most of
their time walking around spitting, but you never hear anybody tell a
batter, ''Quit spitting, you big lout.''
What really bothers me about Korchnoi, though, is that he wears
reflector sunglasses to the chess board. You know those sunglasses?
You look into them and see two small reflections of yourself right
where somebody else's eyeballs ought to be.
Korchnoi's reflector sunglasses are designed to upset Karpov's
concentration, and if Karpov is like me, they do the job. When I see
somebody in reflector glasses, I always assume he intends to do
something terrible and hopes to escape without being recognized.
It would be hard to play my best chess while wondering if the other
guy will shoot me for playing pawn-to-king-4. I'd complain to the
umpire about dirty pool, or maybe off-color chess.
Of course, not being Russian, I don't really understand chess. Maybe
threatening eyeglasses are all part of the game, like throwing toilet
paper onto the field is part of baseball. The Russians may be just as
outraged about toilet paper on the ball field as I am about menacing
shades at the chess board.
During the World Series I kept hearing somebody quoting Prof.
Jacques Barzun to the effect that nobody can understand the heart and
mind of America without first understanding baseball. Maybe the
Russians would understand us a little better if they could grasp the
principle of toilet paper on the baseball field.
I'm sure I could understand the Russians better if I understood
chess. I read a novel by Leonid Andreyev once about some Russians
waiting to be hanged, and one of the condemned passed the time by
playing chess in his head.
The exquisite thing about his punishment seemed to be, not that they
were going to hang him, but that they wouldn't give him a chess board
during his final hours.
This didn't stop him. The final triumph was his. He played game
after game against himself. In his head.
Have you ever tried playing chess in your head?
While waiting to be hanged?
If you're like me you can't even play chess on the kitchen table
while waiting to be fed without losing your queen after the seventh
move.
If I were waiting to be hanged, I wouldn't even be able to play a
decent game of hop scotch in my head.
Everybody finds deep meaning in the Russian passion for chess. It's
supposed to tell us something important about Russians, but all it's
ever said to me is that Russians are gluttons for despair.
Chess is the only game ever devised in which luck plays absolutely
no part. If both players play correctly, neither one can win. Chess
games can only be lost. There are no winners, only beneficiaries of
the other fellow's mistakes.
This makes it also the most depressing game ever devised. Every
loser is the architect of his own doom. He can see with painful
clarity the points at which he destroyed himself with his own
dumbness, laziness, clumsiness, arrogance, etc., etc., etc.
The player across the board may fancy himself a conqueror for a
moment, but when his blood pressure subsides he knows he simply
benefited from an act of self-destruction. Next time he may destroy
himself.
You have to have a lust for despair to enjoy chess. It's always
reminding you that you are digging your own grave. Or waiting to be
hanged, like the fellow in the Andreyev story. He was finally hanged.
In an American story, Lady Luck would have slipped him a hand full of
aces as he mounted the gallows, and he would have cashed them in for
a commutation.
Maybe that's what Korchnoi is trying to manage with the spooky
sunglasses. Trying to introduce the luck factor into the game. At
last report he was behind, 5 games to 2. Maybe he should switch to
Scrabble.
nyt-11-13-81 1046est
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