Life in the foothills of chess
Sasha Chapin – All the Wrong Moves (Doubleday, $24.95)
Quest books have a particular appeal to journalists – quests provide a ready-made spine and structure for an extended narrative, which can otherwise be tricky for journos used to writing short pieces – and chess quests seem to have a particular appeal, especially in the US with its rich and distinctive chess eco-system. J C Hallman’s The Chess Artist, Paul Hoffman’s King’s Gambit and Fred Waitzkin’s Searching for Bobby Fischer immediately spring to mind, mixing memoir, travelogue and an often double-edged immersion in chess.
Sasha Chapin’s All the Wrong Moves now joins this club, and a most enjoyable roller-coaster it is. Chapin was in his late 20s when he was seriously bitten by the chess bug – he had previously played a little at school – and spent two years chasing the usual dream of chess mastery. He is in fact completely useless (at least by the standards of those who read this magazine). He is not explicit about his rating in the book and doesn’t give any of his games in full, but a quick bit of research shows that in the tournament with which his two-year immersion ends, the Los Angeles Open of 2017, his Fide was just 1390, though he played in the under-2050 section of that event and scored a creditable 2/5 to finish in 34th place out of 48 competitors.
But as so often with these quest books, you are not reading for the quality of the chess or in the expectation that the author will suddenly discover the nirvana of chess mastery. I produced my own quest book, The Rookie: An Odyssey through Chess (and Life), in 2016, and when I set out four years earlier I confidently believed I could reach an elo of 2000. I managed 1740 and even that is now dropping. As Chapin quickly comes to realise, it’s tough for late starters and tougher too if your brain isn’t configured in the right way and your powers of visualisation are poor, as he says his are.
The real attraction for the reader – and indeed the writer – is that the chess world is peopled by fascinating characters and that this world does indeed encompass the entire world. Chess is played everywhere, so the quest can take you wherever your imagination desires and your budget allows. Chapin starts playing with chess hustlers in Kathmandu; holes up for months in Bangkok and plays one disastrous game in the Bangkok Open, losing in 15 moves, before withdrawing; has an equally catastrophic experience in Hyderabad, losing most of his games and getting what sounds like dysentery; and finally achieves a redemption of sorts in Los Angeles.
The writing – very Americanised, very informal (with far too much use of “sort of” and “kind of” – will not be to everyone’s taste, but for the most part I was carried along by its bravado and willingness to takes risks. Chapin writes about his teenage drug-taking, his wacky schooling, his vigorous pursuit of sex – he knows he has become a chess nerd when he turns down an amorous opportunity in Bangkok because he is in the middle of an online game – and falling in love. It is really a rite-of-passage book, with occasional interludes involving the Grünfeld and the French Defence.
He is a good phrase-maker. The blesséd Magnus is “a low-budget version of Matt Damon”; travelling is “a fun substitute for an identity”; and “chess is sort of (sic!) like acting: top people make money, second-rate people teach, and everyone else receives spotty compensation at best”. He also displays acuity and self-awareness, as when he is debating what sort of player he wants to be – complicated and idiosyncratic or resolute and defensive … he changes from week to week. “Now, looking back, this inconstancy seems impossibly silly,” he writes. “I was like a child who couldn’t draw a house with crayons deciding whether to be more like Jackson Pollock or Francis Bacon.”
Chapin is not bad at extended descriptions either. Sometimes he overreaches, in that North American posh-magazine-meets-creative-writing-class way, but when he pulls it off it’s memorable. His summing up of elite-level chess is funny and accurate: “Top-tier tournaments are calm, buttoned-down affairs, sponsored by energy companies or banks, taking place in spacious, teal-carpeted venues … Assured, charcoal-blazered and regal in their bearing, the stars of the game are followed across lobbies by the chess press gang, a strange micro-community that watches their movements closely, whether in London, Qatar or Baku. Closing ceremonies typically feature jazz combos and plastic cups of cheap prosecco. In terms of atmosphere, these events are halfway between Wimbledon and a spelling bee.”
I also greatly enjoyed the walk-on part accorded to grandmaster Ben Finegold, who coaches Chapin over the course of a month in St Louis. Finegold also features in my book, and I found Chapin’s portrait of this larger-than-life (in every sense) figure spot on. Finegold is funny, scabrous and full of excellent advice: never resign; beware the lure of blitz; avoid blunders and you’ll be fine; don’t sacrifice; never play f3; don’t get emotional – it’s just a game. Chapin, in the chapter drawing on his time in St Louis, mentions that Finegold offers to tell him the “secret of chess”. This is not disclosed at the time and of course you wonder what it is. Then, when he goes to the beach after his final tournament in Los Angeles (he loses his last two games but it’s mostly fine), Chapin does at last disclose the secret – and it’s a zinger. If I had adopted the philosophy Finegold advocates, I would definitely have got my Fide rating up to 2000. I may yet!
One caveat about his time in St Louis, where I also spent time for my book. Chapin describes the city as very dangerous and makes it sounds like you will be attacked at any moment, but I found it unthreatening – not just the upscale area where chess philanthropist Rex Sinquefield’s club and museum are based, but downtown, too, which is where I stayed and happily walked around, sharing my nightly pizza with people living on the street. Chapin says weapons are banned on the city’s metro system. My recollection is that the signs say they can be carried, but not visibly displayed, which visitors may or may not find reassuring.
As a dabbler in chess who vows that the Los Angeles Open will be his farewell to the sport, Chapin is not a wholly reliable witness. His preface, in which he aptly suggests that it is hard to explain to outsiders the attraction of a game that involves “two nerds staring at a collection of tiny figurines”, is distinctly offputting in this regard. He swallows whole the canard that 600 million people play chess; indeed the headline of the preface is “The 600 million” and he doubles down on the contention that this number of “souls” are captivated by the game. But, however much publishers and authors of chess books aspiring to reach a broad market might like to believe it, the 600 million figure is no more than a piece of Fide propaganda designed to pull in sponsors. Numbers of tournament players and the audience for online broadcasts suggest that the real figure of aficionados (as opposed to people who vaguely recall how the knight moves) is far lower.
I would also quibble with his contention that Albert Einstein was a chess obsessive. Einstein played chess but disliked many aspects of the game, whose goal he said was “to beat the opponent by applying different tricks and deception”. Chapin should read Einstein’s foreword to Jacques Hannak’s biography of Emanuel Lasker, where he makes clear that he felt chess to be largely a waste of his friend Lasker’s considerable intellect. Chapin is also rather simplistic in his brief excursion into the life of Marcel Duchamp, greatly underestimating him as a player – he was good enough to play for France in olympiads in the 1930s – and treating him as a victim who gave up art for chess, failing to understand that Duchamp always disliked the commercial art world and saw chess as a source of freedom precisely because it meant nothing.
Chapin may not be the trustiest of guides on some of the peaks of chess history, but he is very good at describing life in the foothills, and while I could never take his “obsession” totally seriously – he only competed for two years and didn’t play in many tournaments – the brief journey is winningly described and often very funny. Who, after all, could resist the tremendous opening line of chapter 1: “Anyway, like most people, I became obsessed with chess after I ran away to Asia with a stripper I’d just met.” Or indeed his description of an epiphany in a toilet at the disastrous tournament in Hyderabad: “There’s definitely something humbling about squatting over a hole in a distant nation, with your loved ones far away, and your lagoon-like thighs hanging before you, and the mosquitos hovering around you, waiting for the right moment to pump you full of malaria, while a young boy outside is thwarting your plans, wondering why you were stupid enough to cross the globe just so he could trounce your inadequate handling of the London System.” We’ve all been there.
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