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Najdorf or Grünfeld? [1]

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Date: 2025-03-08

Probably everyone reading this already knows Donald Trump is one transactional pile of garbage. It’s not just that he wants a big piece of the pie, he also wants everyone else to have a tiny slice of the pie or none at all.

Negotiation expert David Honig explains that Trump is always looking to do distributive bargaining, which ends with very clear winners and very clear losers. There is no room in Trump’s world view for integrative bargaining, in which the parties reach mutually beneficial agreements. Instead of fighting for the biggest piece of one pie, maybe we agree to make more pies together. But that can't happen with Trump at the bargaining table.

Honig explains these concepts very well, always explaining the jargon that he uses. But he ended the article with a somewhat belabored and confusing chess metaphor.

From a professional negotiation point of view, Trump isn't even bringing checkers to a chess match. He's bringing a quarter that he insists of flipping for heads or tails, while everybody else is studying the chess board to decide whether it[‘]s better to open with Najdorf or Grünfeld.

This should not distract us from Honig’s main point, which is that Trump, the purported author of The Art of the Deal, is actually a very lousy negotiator due to his very limited understanding of the actual art of the deal.

Still, I figure some of you who have varying degrees of understanding of chess might be a little curious as to what the Najdorf and Grünfeld opening strategies actually entail and what those have to do with negotiating. So I’m writing this article.

Chess is not really about negotiating. You win at chess either because your opponent made some silly mistakes that you capitalized on (which doesn’t happen much at the grandmaster level) or because you were able to get in a position in which there’s no way for your opponent to avoid checkmate except by resigning (which happens very frequently among grandmasters).

At the beginning of the game, White has twenty possible first moves. There’s not much to study the board for. The first move could be chosen at random. If White is a much better player than Black, he or she will win regardless of the opening. Conversely, if White is a worse player than Black, he or she will also win regardless of the opening.

Among players of equal ability, the opening is likelier to be decisive to the outcome of the game. Rather than study a board in its starting position, the world’s best players are much likelier to study the old games of their upcoming opponents.

Most players don’t choose their first moves randomly. Playing White, players tend to begin the game with the move notated “1. e4” in the so-called “algebraic” notation. The White pawn in front of the White king moves two spaces forward. This is called, not very creatively, the king’s pawn opening.

Maybe the game will then progress to “the Najdorf,” but at this point in the game there’s not much to study. The game could just as easily progress to something other than “the Najdorf.”

Regardless of White’s first move, Black has twenty possible first moves to choose from. But now that White has made the first move, Black has some context for choosing a move. Some moves will make a hell of a lot more sense than others.

Black could choose to move the queenside bishop’s pawn forward two spaces. The game so far would be notated “1. e4 c5,” or we could write “1. … c5” to make it clear we have already given White’s first move earlier in the text. This move is called the Sicilian defense. We’re not at Najdorf just yet.

Now suppose White moves the kingside knight towards the center of the board. We add “2. Nf3” to the game transcript. This is the open Sicilian (the closed Sicilian is 2. Nc3).

Perhaps worried about losing that bishop’s pawn, Black decides to support that pawn with the queen’s pawn forward one space, 2. … d6. We’re still in the open Sicilian, we’re still not at Najdorf.

Then White sends the counterpart queen’s pawn forward two spaces, 3. d4. White is not giving that pawn up: if Black decides to play 3. … cxd4, White can respond with 4. Nxd4. We’re still in the open Sicilian, we’re still not at Najdorf.

Then Black decides to start getting Black knights into the game with 4. … Nf6, threatening to capture White’s king’s pawn. So White plays 5. Nc3, discouraging Black from playing 5. … Nxe4.

Suppose that instead of playing 5. … Nxe4, Black decides to give up a little momentum by moving the queenside rook’s pawn forward one space, 5. … a6. This defines the Najdorf variation of the Sicilian defense.

Miguel Najdorf, one of the very first international grandmasters recognized by FIDE, was not the first to play these moves as Black nor even the first to win a game as Black after this opening, but he was apparently the first to get fairly consistent results, beating many players with this opening. In a game against Bobby Fisher in Bulgaria, however, Najdorf resigned after Fischer's 24th move.

The move 5. … a6 is a waiting move. The rules of chess do not allow a player to skip a turn for any reason, but they certainly allow players to make moves of seemingly no strategic significance. Black is waiting to get a better idea of what White might be thinking.

Maybe this does have something to do with negotiations. Sometimes you just have to wait and see what the other side is after. Didn’t Tony Schwartz write in Trump’s The Art of the Deal that you should never be in a hurry to make a deal?

FEN: rnbqkb1r/1p2pppp/p2p1n2/8/3NP3/2N5/PPP2PPP/R1BQKB1R w KQkq - 0 6

Our game transcript so far should look like this:

1. e4 c5

2. Nf3 d6

3. d4 cxd4

4. Nxd4 Nf6

5. Nc3 a6

Sometimes chess moves are said to “transpose.” Suppose our game transcript so far instead was

1. d4 c5

2. Nf3 d6

3. e4 cxd4

4. Nxd4 Nf6

5. Nc3 a6

Only e4 and d4 are switched around. It’s a little harder to justify why White doesn’t play dxc5. At first this looked like a Benoni defense, but with 5. … a6, the board looks the same as the diagram above.

I chose this particular transposition because I was looking for the latest path to the Najdorf that could diverge to the Grünfeld defense. The best that I could think of for that is the rather offbeat opening 1. d4 d6 2. Nc3. The Grünfeld defense more usually unfolds thus:

FEN: rnbqkb1r/ppp1pp1p/5np1/3p4/2PP4/2N5/PP2PPPP/R1BQKBNR w KQkq - 0 4

1. d4 Nf6

2. c4 g6

3. Nc3 d5

Ernst Grünfeld was one of Najdorf’s older contemporaries, more active in the first half of the 20th Century. Grünfeld made a name for himself with ideas that ran counter to prevailing chess dogma at the time.

Bobby Fischer played the Grünfeld defense as Black a few times with mostly good results, but it looks like Fischer never got to play the old grandmaster the opening is named after.

Judging by the games cataloged on ChessGames.com, Bobby Fischer played the Sicilian Najdorf a lot more frequently than the Grünfeld defense. But he played other Sicilian openings much more frequently.

Much more relevant to chess and negotiation is what happened when Kasparov created the Professional Chess Association (PCA) while Karpov stayed with FIDE. There was a disagreement, and it was eventually resolved and Kramnik became the undisputed world champion as the PCA’s players went back to FIDE. But that’s a story I’ll delve into another day.

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