Frank Brady - Endgame

He’d play over the magazine’s featured games assiduously, following the exploits of eighteen-year-old Boris Spassky, the chess comet who’d won the World Junior Championship in 1955. He also studied the games of Mark Taimanov, the 1956 champion of the Soviet Union—and a concert pianist—who introduced novelties in opening play that Fischer found instructive. Thumbing through copies of each edition, Bobby made a mental note of which openings being played around the world won more games than others and which seemed too unorthodox. He also noted the games that ignited his interest toward further exploration. The games of the masters that he discovered in Shakhmatny became his models; later, some of these masters would emerge as his competitors.

At the Four Continents, Bobby bought a hardcover Russian-language copy of the Soviet School of Chess for $2. A classic of contemporary chess literature, it had been issued as a propagandistic treatise to highlight the “rise of the Soviet school to the summit of world chess [as] a logical result of socialistic cultural development.” Even as a teenager, it’s likely that Bobby was able to separate the not-so-subtle Soviet attempt at indoctrination from the sheer brilliance of the games and what he learned from them. He was in awe of the acuity and the rapid, intuitive understanding of the Soviet players, inarguably the best in the world at that time. When Bobby was fourteen, he gave an interview to a visiting Russian journalist from Shakhmatny v SSSR (Chess in the Soviet Union) saying that he wanted to play the best Russian masters, and elaborated: “I watch what your grandmasters do. I know their games. They are sharp, attacking, full of fighting spirit.”

Bobby browsed and shopped at the Four Continents for years, and nothing attracted him more than a book he’d heard spoken about in almost reverential whispers: Isaac Lipnitsky’s Questions of Modern Chess Theory . For chess players, the book became an instant classic the moment it was published in 1956, and copies were scarce. A chess-playing friend, Karl Burger, ten years older, who went on to become a medical doctor and an international master, first told Bobby about the tome, feeding the boy’s imagination about the wisdom it contained. Bobby was eager to read it but had to place a special order through the Four Continents. Only months later did it arrive, poorly printed on cheap paper and filled with typographical errors.

Bobby cared nothing about the book’s physical appearance, though. He pored over the pages, as if he were a philosophy student attempting to understand Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason . He struggled with the Russian and continually asked his mother to translate some of the prose passages that accompanied the annotations of the moves. She didn’t mind at all and was, in fact, delighted that he was learning some Russian. For his part, Bobby was astonished at how much insight he absorbed from the book.

Lipnitsky stressed the connection between commanding the center squares of the board and seizing the initiative through the mobilization of the pieces. It’s a simple notion, almost rudimentary, but accomplishing this in an actual game can be quite difficult. Lipnitsky didn’t just fling concepts at the reader, but rather gave clear and logical examples of how to do what he recommended. In his own games Bobby began employing some of Lipnitsky’s suggestions and adopted a plan called the Lipnitsky Attack when playing against the Sicilian Defense. Years later, he’d quote Lipnitsky’s precepts in his own writings.

After spending perhaps an hour in the Four Continents in pursuit of the best in current chess literature, Bobby would cross the street to the Dickensian shop of the phlegmatic Dr. Albrecht Buschke, where he sought an entrée into the past. The shop was located deep within the innards of an old office building that, one hundred years earlier, had been the Hotel St. Denis, the place where Paul Morphy, America’s unofficial World Champion, had stayed when he played in the First American Chess Congress. For Bobby, the building was a totemic destination since it also contained the offices of the U.S. Chess Federation, housed in what had been the St. Denis’s bridal suite.

Buschke’s lair was no larger than a small bedroom. It smelled of mold, was redolent of antique paper and bindings, and was permeated with a perennial gray cloud from Buschke’s cigar. Used chess books were everywhere, hidden in every conceivable crevice, many stacked from floor to ceiling or on top of chairs, or weighing down and bending the shelves. Some were haphazardly strewn across the floor; none seemed to be in thematic order. If a customer questioned the proprietor about a book’s price being too high, he had the perverse habit of saying, “Oh, I’m sorry,” erasing the price that had been penciled in, and autocratically adding a new one that was higher!

Bobby pored over Buschke’s holdings for hours, looking for that one book, that one magazine, that one luminous game that might lead him to enlightenment. And he bought some books that were many decades old, such as Rudolf von Bilguer’s Handbuch and Wilhelm Steinitz’s Modern Chess Instructor . The serendipity of finding a book he hadn’t known about was delicious, as was the pleasure of discovering the expected—a book he knew he wanted if only he could find it in Buschke’s labyrinth.

Bobby’s funds were meager, but the good doctor would often give him a discount price, a policy he shared with absolutely no one else. When Bobby won the U.S. Championship, Buschke gave him a $100 gift certificate, and he took months to select his gift books, picking nothing but the best.

From Buschke’s, Bobby would sprint around the corner to the University Place Book Shop, just a pawn’s throw away. The store had a chess collection—at prices lower than Buschke’s—combined with a specialization in Caribbean and radical literature. It was at that store that Bobby met a short man named Archie Waters, who wasn’t only a chess player but also the World Champion of a variation of draughts called Spanish Pool Checkers, played for money in Harlem and other urban neighborhoods. Waters, a journalist by profession, had written two books on the variation, both of which he presented to Bobby—eventually, he’d teach the boy the intricacies of the game and become a lifelong friend. Bobby obligingly studied Waters’s books and other checkers books, but he never entered a tournament. He enjoyed checkers but found it far less of a challenge than chess. The only thing the two games had in common, he said, was the board of light and dark squares.

Within the chess world, Bobby at fourteen was something of a celebrity, and the general media were also finding his anomalous background good copy for their publications: a poor kid from Brooklyn who seemed interested only in chess, carelessly—or certainly, casually—dressed, talking in monosyllables, and beating the most renowned adepts of the day. Each story generated more publicity, and Regina, while conflicted about her son’s prospects, tried to help Bobby by capitalizing on the attention. Her oft-quoted statement that she’d tried everything she could to discourage her son from playing chess “but it was hopeless” had been blurted out in an offhand moment in an attempt to deflect the blame she was receiving for not broadening him. The truth is, she knew that Bobby’s self-chosen raison d’être was to become the world’s best at chess, and like any mother wanting her child to achieve his dreams, she supported him, ultimately becoming his pro bono press agent, advocate, and manager.

From that point forward, there wasn’t a tournament Bobby played in or an exhibition he conducted that wasn’t pre-ballyhooed by a press release Regina sent to the media. She also compiled the addresses and telephone numbers of the major radio and television stations, newspapers, and magazines in New York City, and if her press release didn’t work in generating coverage, she called, wrote personal letters, or—like a true stage mother—visited the newsrooms to promote her son. I. A. Horowitz, the editor of Chess Review , claimed that she was a “pain in the neck” for always appealing to him for more publicity for Bobby. She even tried to get on various radio and television quiz shows herself, hoping to bring home some money for being a successful contestant. She was pre-interviewed for television quiz shows such as Top Dollar and Lucky Partners , but despite her high intelligence and erudition she was never chosen.