Marc Esserman Book

[Adriene]

Onthe last Sunday in October, last year, four members of the Harvard Chess Club were huddled at the stone chess tables outside Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square. It was an unseasonably cold morning, and the Square was not yet bustling. The four woodpushers were playing a series of blitz games, in which each side had only five minutes per game, against chess master Murray Turnbull '71, a 52-year-old Harvard dropout who for the past two decades has spent every day from May through October at the table nearest the sidewalk, eking out a living by taking on passersby willing to wager two dollars a game. Turnbull had insisted that the Harvard match take place early in the morning so that it would not cut into his afternoon "business hours," when the Square was teeming with patzers eager to test their chess mettle. "One famous professor, who shall remain nameless, was a glutton for punishment," said Turnbull. "He could barely set up the pieces, yet he wanted to play again and again. Afterward I was able to treat myself to a fancy dinner."

Professor of mathematics Noam Elkies, Ph.D. '87, the chess club's faculty adviser, was the first to confront Turnbull. Elkies is no intellectual slouch, off the chessboard or on it. In 1993, at the age of 26, he became the youngest person ever to receive tenure at Harvard. He has also distinguished himself in the chess world by earning the title of master, which puts him within the top one percent of the 90,000 people who play in tournaments sanctioned by the United States Chess Federation. (There are two higher titles, international master and grandmaster, respectively, based on performance in international competitions.) But Elkies can be flippantly modest about his command of the royal game. "Being a chess master is nothing," he once told the Crimson. "It means that your ability is halfway between the average player and Kasparov"as in Gary Kasparov, the number-one rated player in the world. However, when it comes to solving chess puzzlescomposed positions in which you are asked to find a unique chain of moves to achieve a stated goal, such as "White to checkmate in five moves," or a contrived goal, such as "Black to self-mate" (to force an assisted suicide) in three movesElkies has few peers; in 1996 he won the world championship of chess problem solving.

Two dozen kibitzers gathered around Elkies and Turnbull, waiting for the hostilities to begin. To commence the match, Turnbull, a soft-spoken man with a red beard, pulled out a pink squirt gun and fired it into the air. Elkies reached out and made his first move, developing his king's knight outside his wall of pawns. It was a modest move, not as aggressive as the more customary advance of the king pawn or queen pawn. Turnbull responded by pushing a pawn forward two squares. The two men were off, their hands darting across the board, shifting pieces and pawns faster than the crowd could follow and banging the dual chess clocks that timed their moves. After a couple of minutes, Elkies had built up an imposing phalanx of pawns in the heart of Turnbull's position. He then captured one of Turnbull's knights, and would have won if he had had minutes to think, instead of seconds. But, after nervously glancing at the clock, he lost a piece of his own, and Turnbull defiantly marched his king to the queenside. When Elkies ran out of time, he lost the game.

Next up for Harvard was Daniel Thomas '05, then one of two chess masters in the freshman class. While Elkies was dressed in a hooded parka pulled tight around his face, Thomas, thin and lanky, wore only a light sweater and no socks. He was shivering as he responded to Turnbull's queen pawn opening with the classic Slav Defense. First Turnbull won Thomas's king pawn, then a bishop, and finally his queen. With Thomas's forces depleted, the end was inevitable. He shook his head and got up from the table. "I have an excuse," he said. "My feet are cold. I should have worn socks but I haven't done laundry in weeks." Losses are hard on the ego, and chess masters often try to explain away their defeats. Illness is the most common excuse, prompting more than one player to quip that he has never beaten a healthy opponent.

With half the match over, the best Harvard could hope for was a tieif it won the last two games. The burden fell on Marc Esserman '05, the other freshman master, a short kid from Florida, who was coiled over the chessboard like a cobra. His jaw was clenched, and the veins in his throat were pulsing. His head was bobbing. Esserman played the exchange variation of the Caro-Kann, a favorite of legendary world champion Bobby Fischer. He soon won a pawn and swapped off pieces to enter an advantageous double rook ending, but he made a few inaccurate moves under time pressure and the game petered out into a draw.

Esserman punched the air and berated himself for throwing away the win. His mother, who was in town for parents' weekend, patted him on the shoulder. "I'm always mad at myself if I feel I played stupidly," he said. (The history of chess is full of people who could not put losing behind them. William the Conqueror once smashed a chessboard over the crown prince of France. World champion Alexander Alekhine destroyed the furniture in his hotel room after a devastating loss. The great Aron Nimzovich climbed up on the chess table, dropped to his knees, and shouted to the heavens, "Oh Lord, why did I have to lose to this idiot?")

Now that Turnbull had clinched the match, the last game, against Christopher Chabris '88, a former president of the Harvard Chess Club, was anticlimactic. When Turnbull won Chabris's queen and then the game, he jumped up, fired his squirt gun, and raised his arms in a V. "Am I good or what?" he shouted. "That should be $100. I've had a long hard season, and it will be too cold after today to play until spring." The Harvard team handed him $10, and he retreated into Au Bon Pain.

"I've only been in Cambridge a few weeks," said Esserman, "and Turnbull has already won $24 from me. You can't compete with a professional blitz player. But I'll get him. I have all winter to practice."

In the 1775 Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson defined chess as a "nice and abstruse game, in which two sets of puppets are moved in opposition to each other." But anyone who has observed the Harvard Chess Club in action will know that Johnson was wrong. Chess is not the innocent recreation his definition depicts, but rather a passionate activity that brings out both the beast and the artist in those who play it at the highest level. "The only goal in chess is to prove your superiority over the other guy," said Gary Kasparov, who once proved his superiority in Sanders Theatre by playing eight games at the same time against strong opposition and winning all of them. "And the most important superiority," added Kasparov, "is the superiority of the mind. I mean, your opponent must be destroyed. Fully destroyed."

The Harvard Chess Club, founded in 1874, is one of the oldest chess clubs in the country. It was started by the generation of undergraduates inspired by the New Orleans prodigy Paul Morphy, the nation's first great player. Like Bobby Fischer, Morphy was a household name. His fragile countenance graced the box of a popular brand of cigar, his games were reported move for move on the front page of the New York Times, and his victories were praised in poems and orations by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Louis Agassiz.

Before 1880 there were no chess clocks. The first players at Harvard had to have Sitzfleish as well as brains. Many games lasted 12 hours, and it was not unheard-of for someone to spend a couple of hours on a single move. Once Morphy and Louis Paulsen, another strong American player, reportedly sat huddled over a chessboard for 11 hours without saying a word or making a move. Finally, Morphy lost patience, looked up from the board, and stared at Paulsen. "Oh," said Paulsen, "is it my move?"

The invention of the dual chess timer meant that official tournament games were speeded up to five or six hours, and that casual games could be played at the daunting time limit of five minutes per side. In the nineteenth century, the Harvard Chess Club apparently did not play face-to-face matches with other universities. Instead it engaged in correspondence matches: the entire club would collaborate on a single game played by mail at the rate of perhaps one move a week.

Harvard played its first correspondence game in February 1879, against the Boston Chess Club. The surviving score sheet is incomplete, so that it is not clear who won. Nine months later, Harvard played a second postal game, against a Mr. Everett of the Exeter Chess Club. The game lasted only 10 moves because "Mr. Everett here resigned on account of the death of his sister." Both games were notable because they featured a sequence of opening moves, called the King's Gambit, that is rarely played today except by a few romantics. The King's Gambit is a swashbuckling opening, favored by Paul Morphy, in which White tries to checkmate Black early in the game, without first sheltering his own king. Such a reckless attack often succeeded in the nineteenth centuryit might, for example, have been played by Harvard Chess Club member George Santayana, class of 1886when the art of defense was not as refined as it is now.

In the 1920s, Harvard started meeting other colleges for face-to-face competition, but found that some of them were short of players. "We are sorry it is impossible to bring more than four men," the University of Pennsylvania wrote to Adrien Gambet '25, president of the Harvard Chess Club. "If it would help arouse interest or aid you at all, one of our men is somewhat of a simultaneous player and would be pleased to play your 1st board and say nine others simultaneously. Our man has performed with surprising success on several occasions."

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