The Gambit of Life
I have begun watching the Netflix series called The Queen’s Gambit. It is a series set, like so many others of interest to me these days, in the 1960’s and it centers around chess. It is the story of a global chess Grandmaster by the name of Beth Harmon who is the orphan of a mathematics professor and a very troubled mother with a great deal of intellect. She is raised in a remote orphanage not unlike the orphanage in The Cider House Rules. She learns chess from the recluse custodian and very quickly (at the age of nine) excels in a way that becomes obvious to her mentors. She gets addicted to pills (like Zanex and Lithium) in big green capsules that she and all the girls in the orphanage are given until the state intercedes and bans them. These drugs help her create a fog that enables her to see further into the future on the chess board. She goes on to struggle with drugs and alcohol, but always advancing through the male-dominated world of world-class chess. Her nemesis is, of course, the Russian, and eventually she ends up in Moscow in her second match against the world’s foremost player.
I have always enjoyed movies about chess, like Searching For Bobby Fisher. There is something about the cerebral game that makes it more interesting in absolute terms than any other movies about games. Poker probably comes next with movies like Rounders at the top of that list. Everything else (including blackjack) is downhill from there, not necessarily based on the stories being told, but on the basis of the game itself. What I like about chess is that it requires so little to play and yet with sixty-four squares on a board and opposing teams with sixteen pieces with predetermined movement restrictions, there are a vast number, but a finite number of moves that can possibly be made. While there is a psychological aspect to chess to be sure, it seems that cerebral capacity, in particular the ability to keep many permutations and combinations of moves in your head and thereby “see” a path to victory better and before an opponent might see a similar path or at least a path to escape, is at the heart of a profound capacity for success.
When you think about that and all the books written about opening and end-game strategies in chess, one would think that the game would eventually outwear its welcome and interest, but that is not the case. Over the 1,500 years that the game has been played, starting in India and working its way through Persia and the Arab Middle East and eventually, probably through the Crusades, into Europe, the game has mesmerized the thinking portion of the population…or at least the thinking portion that finds games intriguing. It is unclear whether sequential or random thinkers have an edge in chess and therein probably lies the basis for most of the great stories and movies that it breeds. The one thing that all chess players seem to have in common is that they have a lot going on in their heads one way or the other.
I do not recall who taught me chess, I don’t recall any particular mentor and I don’t recall ever playing with my sisters or my mother. But I do remember knowing how to play chess when I went off to Hebron Academy in 1967 when I was thirteen and starting high school. Hebron Academy in south-central Maine was a small prep school that was not quite in the A-class like Phillips Andover, Phillips Exeter and Choate, but it played many of those schools and others like them in the sports leagues. I tend to think of Hebron as being a lot like Welton or St. Benedicts in Dead Poets Society and The Emperor’s Club. We all took Latin as a requirement and learned Western Civilization like all prep school kids. There were mandatory sports every season (JV Football, Recreational Skiing and JV Tennis for me) but we could all join whatever other clubs we wanted. Those club choices and your room placement in the Freshman Dorm (Atwood Hall) determined your friends and, most-likely, the interests you pursued. For some reason I cannot recall, I joined the Chess Club, the Rocket Club and the Radio Club. These were both normal, mainstream clubs with a decent number of underclassmen members (Juniors and Seniors were too cool for clubs). It was during that year of my first foray into independence that I learned to play chess beyond the simple movements of the pieces.
It was at Hebron that I learned the most basic of chess strategies, The Scholar’s Mate, or better known as the four-move checkmate. Almost any school kid who ever played much club chess has encountered the strategy or tried the strategy. It is a classic Chinese finger-pull sort of thing. You can have fun capturing the flag from an opponent in a satisfying few moments, but if he or she knows the gambit, you are cooked because you can find yourself with an exposed queen and defending against the strategy is relatively easy if you see it coming. In fact, since we all learned it at the same time from Mr. Beauchamps, the gay English teacher (who knew about gay in those days?), I never even tried using it at Hebron.
When I moved to Rome the next year and started my Sophomore year at Notre Dame International Prep, one of the clubs I decided to join was the Chess Club. NDI was a lot less structured than Hebron and as a day-student, the lack of immersion meant that there was much less club participation in general. So, I think there were four of us in the club. These guys were quite a bit different than the guys at Hebron. Hebron specialized in the sons of the New England well-to-do who did not have the pull (meaning the parents) or the smarts (meaning the boys) to get into one of the A-list schools. NDI was a school of convenience. Boy’s whose parents were assigned to far-flung places from Asia to Europe, and especially the oil-rich Middle East, had to send them somewhere to school and the choices were Rome or Switzerland. Believe it or not, Rome was considered the more serious, educationally speaking, of the two. And of the various schools in Rome, St. Stevens was the Hebron, the Overseas School was the American High School (drugs galore in the 60’s), Marymount was the NDI for girls, and St. George’s was the British version of Hebron. NDI was sort of a good compromise school where the Brothers of the Holy Cross took teaching quite seriously and most of them played a mean game of chess. So there was no getting away with the Scholar’s Mate at NDI.
Many years later I was on a ski trip staying at my big ski house in Utah and had invited several subordinates. One of them brought his twelve-year old son who was very smart and very full of himself. He started bragging about his chess skills and kept goading me to play. I had no interest in playing with the likely prodigy, but it became rude to deny him a game, so I played him. The idea suddenly occurred to me that they might not be teaching the Scholar’s Mate in New Jersey middle school, so I decided to give it my first ever try. I got him and to say that he was flabbergasted would be an understatement. He asked for another game and I decidedly and repeatedly declined. I like to think I helped teach another young self-possessed overachiever a bit of humility. Such is the gambit of life.