Chess King and Queen European Art Set in 22
On the third Th of this past March, when many art galleries beyond Manhattan were holding openings, 75 people milled virtually the Viewing Gallery on West 17th Street, sipping wine, eating cookies and occasionally glancing at the confetti-similar landscapes on the walls. Alittle later seven p.g., two elegantly dressed immature women, 1 wearing simply black and the other all white, from their gloves and their dresses to their flapper wigs, emerged from a unisex rest room and took their places on opposite sides of a chessboard. They planned to play two games, at the brisk step of 25 minutes a side per game. They shook hands, and the woman in the white wig began by confidently advancing her queen pawn 2 squares and depressing the chess timer next to the board. The crowd nodded approvingly. "I would not have given up chess," a disheveled human being in his 60s said in a stage whisper, "if my opponents had looked like this."
The woman in blackness was Jennifer Shahade, 22, the 2002 U.S. Women's Champion and the strongest American-born female person chess player in history. Her opponent was xix-twelvemonth-one-time Irina Krush, who immigrated to the United States from Ukraine in 1988 before she turned v, the historic period at which her father taught her the game, and at 14 became the youngest U.S. Women's Champion ever. Although the two chess stars are friends—they were teammates at the 2002 Chess Olympiad, in Bled, Slovenia, and classmates at New YorkUniversity— they are also violent competitors, and at the fine art gallery the gloves came off.
Shahade responded to Krush's queen-pawn opening with a provocative defense known every bit the Grünfeld, favored by the legendary 1972 globe champion, Bobby Fischer, and current world number one, Garry Kasparov of Russia. Black (Shahade) goads White (Krush) into placing pawns in the middle of the lath, normally an of import goal, but Black figures that she tin undermine White's middle with well-placed blows from the flanks. Here the plan failed because Shahade overlooked the fact that Krush could (and did) win a key middle pawn. Later, Krush infiltrated Shahade's position with her knights earlier launching a decisive mating attack. You could sense Shahade's desperation as she struggled to shelter her male monarch. While she pondered the position, she leaned over the board, and the women's heads almost touched. She cradled her face in her easily—a characteristic posture she shares with Kasparov—and squeezed so hard that her fingers left cherry-red marks on her cheeks. She squirmed in her seat and twisted her anxiety in her black boots. There was no defense, and she resigned on the 42nd move.
"This actually sucks," she said to me after she got upward from the lath. "All your close friends show up to drink wine and enjoy themselves, while you lose in front of them." Xx minutes later she had composed herself and sabbatum down for the second game. This time she had the advantage of moving first. She advanced her king pawn ii squares, a more ambitious opening than Krush had employed in the first game. Shahade needed to win to even the score, and she planned to press Krush from the onset. Krush did not shy away from the battle, and steered the game into what aficionados recognized as an obscure line of the Richter-Rauzer variation of the Sicilian defense. The two players after positioned their kings in contrary corners of the board and launched all-out assaults on each other's monarch.
Krush's set on netted her 2 pawns, and she could have won immediately by sacrificing a rook, merely Shahade fix a trap on the 30th motility. If Krush misjudged the position and made a seemingly natural pick that offered the exchange of queens, Shahade could win a knight—a decisive material reward— through four unproblematic moves. At classical tournament chess, where each thespian tin can take iii hours for a game, Krush would presumably never autumn for such a trap, but here, with time running out, it was possible she would get wrong. The potent chess players in the audition, fifty-fifty with vino in them, knew what was happening. "It'due south Jennifer's only chance," whispered her brother, Greg, two years her senior and a world-class player himself. He turned nervously abroad from the board, as if staring at it might jinx his sister'due south subterfuge. Krush savage for the swindle and, unlike her emotional opponent, saturday there poker faced as she lost the knight and, subsequently, the game.
It was almost ten p.m., and the spectators started chanting "tiebreak! tiebreak!"—hoping that the two cerebral gladiators would play a sudden-death blitz game (five minutes a side) to determine the winner. Just Krush had a late-night appointment, and Shahade, who was tired and tuckered, seemed content to call it a tie.
"People sometimes ask me if chess is fun," Shahade told me later. " 'Fun' is not the word I'd apply. Of course I enjoy information technology, or I wouldn't play. Merely tournament chess is not relaxing. It's stressful, even if yous win. The game demands total concentration. If your mind wanders for a moment, with one bad motion you tin can throw away everything you've painstakingly built up."
Until the 19th century, women were not welcome in chess clubs in Europe and America. In the mid-1880s, a club in Turin, Italia, immune the wives and daughters of its members to join them at the chessboard, a practice that was applauded by then-globe champion Wilhelm Steinitz. "This is as it should be," Steinitz wrote, "and we hope that this example will be followed by other chess societies, it being evident that, if we engage the queens of our hearts for the queens of our boards and if we can enlist the involvement of our connubial mates for our chessical mates, our intellectual pastime will be immensely benefited and volition laissez passer into universal favor." But change was slow: when women played in an international tournament for the offset time, in London in 1897, a commentator cautioned that they "would come nether swell strain lifting the leaded, wooden chess sets."
When I played chess in scholastic tournaments in the late 1960s and early '70s, female players were still a rarity, and the flea-infested chess parlors I frequented near New York City's Times Square were a world away from chic fine art galleries. Fifty-fifty though playing the game well was regarded as a sign of intelligence, chess had an ancillary reputation as the recreation of social misfits. Bobby Fischer was a national hero for wresting the world championship away from our common cold war rivals, the Russians, but he was inappreciably a model of how to lead a counterbalanced life. When a television talk-show host asked him what his interests were besides chess, Fischer seemed puzzled and replied, "What else is there?" In some other interview, he said that he wanted to brand a lot of money then that he could live in a business firm shaped like a rook.
Today, 3 decades later on, the game of kings has unmistakably surged in popularity. Writer Martin Amis, comedian Stephen Fry, magician David Blaine, model Carmen Kass, pugilists Lennox Lewis and Wladimir Klitschko, actorsWill Smith, Woody Harrelson, Susan Sarandon and Greta Scacchi, even Madonna and Sting, are all "woodpushers." "It's now cool to play chess," said Jennifer Shahade. "The game is finally shedding its paradigm equally a magnet for geeks." Shahade herself is a model of cool. Stuffed under the black pageboy wig she wore at the gallery match are flowing brown curls streaked blonde and crimson. She lives in a loft in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, 1 of the hippest areas of New York City, where Net cafés and nouveau-Thai restaurants accept displaced mustard and girdle factories. She likewise plays basketball, air hockey and Ms. Pacman.
Chess'southward popularity extends well across the celebrity set. Membership in the 64-year-old United States Chess Federation, the arrangement that sanctions tournaments and ranks players, has swelled to a record high of 98,700. Colleges such equally the University of Maryland, BaltimoreCounty, and the University of Texas at Dallas and at Brownsville at present laurels chess scholarships, and grade schools throughout the state include chess classes in their curricula. In New York Metropolis solitary, 36,000 children in 160 elementary and junior high schools are learning the fine points of the game from teachers paid by a nonprofit organization called Chess-in-the- Schools. Parents on Manhattan's Upper East Side have been known to pay $200 per hr to rent private chess tutors for their children.
Today more girls than ever before are learning the rules of chess, simply male players are still the norm at the highest levels. Of the roughly 1,200 members of the United states Chess Federation who are currently ranked as national masters or higher, only fourteen, including Shahade and Krush, are women. On the international chess excursion, top-ranked female players are too rare; of the 100 best players in the earth, only one is a woman: 27-twelvemonth-one-time Judit Polgar of Hungary, who is ranked number ten.
Even if the world of tournament chess is no longer an sectional male guild, there are obstacles for females. For one, earth champions have non ever put out the welcome mat. Bobby Fischer dismissed female players as "weakies," and Garry Kasparov, in a recent interview in the London Times, said that females are non generally capable of excelling at the game. "[Chess is] a mixture of sport, psychological warfare, science and art," he said. "When you wait at all these components, human dominates. Every single component of chess belongs to the areas of male person domination."
But Kasparov prides himself on being provocative. "You take to laugh," said Shahade. "You don't know whether he really believes what he is proverb, or is doing his usual affair of trying to become people riled upwards. And in a sense, who cares? All I know is that the chess globe has accepted and encouraged me. I've never personally experienced whatever kind of discrimination or roadblock because I was a adult female."
Irina Krush feels the same way. "If annihilation, being a woman is an reward," she told me. "You get more than invitations to sectional tournaments because yous're considered to be something of a novelty. Male players have sometimes claimed that I also have an reward because they are distracted by how I look. I don't buy that, though. When chess players lose, they always come up with excuses."
"If you find someone attractive," Shahade said, "you don't play worse. You buckle down and endeavour to play better because you want to impress them with your luminescence."
The chief impediment to more than women playing tournament chess seems to be cultural. "If yous're going to become very good at chess," Shahade told me, "yous have to pour yourself into it. In our club, we consider it weird if a male child is obsessed with chess, if he spends the bulk of his waking hours playing and studying the game. At present if a girl does that, it's not just weird, information technology's downright unacceptable. Women are usually discouraged from pursuing chess and other intellectual activities that require fourth dimension-consuming devotion. I was fortunate to have a mother who succeeded in the traditionally male field of chemistry. She's a chemical science professor at DrexelUniversity and an avid games actor—blackjack, poker, chess. There were periods in my life when chess was the most of import affair to me. Information technology'southward not that I did chess all day—I took time to be with my friends or to exercise—merely I justified the time with my friends and the do as being good for my chess. Today my life is pretty balanced. I admire Antoaneta Stefanova. She's a Bulgarian grandmaster who is only a couple of years older than me. She's the number 2 woman player in the globe. She's defended to the game just also has an agile life away from the board. She likes to party and to go out at nighttime between rounds at a tournament."
On a sunday afternoon early this past January, I joined Shahade in the offices of Chess-in-the-Schools for a plan called GirlsAcademy. One time a month, a couple of dozen girls, ages 9 through xiii, come together from beyond New York City for six hours of intensive pedagogy from Shahade and Krush. The two champions know that they are role models for girls who dream of reaching the college echelons of chess. Shahade spent the outset couple of hours showing the form moves from well-known games that strong women played against each other or, ameliorate yet, in which they defeated male grandmasters; her charge to the students was "Play similar girls!" She is particularly fond of Judit Polgar's games. The Hungarian'southward sharp, take-no-prisoners way has claimed the scalps of the world's leading men, including, this past September, Garry Kasparov'southward—sweet revenge because that Kasparov had once described Polgar equally a "circus puppet." "I honey her uncompromising approach," Shahade said. "Just when you think the position is sterile, she stirs up complications by sacrificing a piece and launching a blistering attack. Information technology's awesome."
Shahade favors assuming, tactical play herself. She grew up in Philadelphia, where she learned chess at the age of 6 from her father, Michael, a four-time champion of Pennsylvania. She was also inspired by her brother,Greg, who became a national master when he was 14 and six years later on earned the prestigious Samford fellowship for the country'south nigh promising chess player under 25. Jennifer's big interruption came in 1996 at the so-called Insanity Tournament at the venerable Marshall Chess Club in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. "It'southward a crazy effect," she said. "Yous play, I think, nine games. You play all night with the rounds starting at odd times similar 2:11 a.m. and iv:23 a.m. I was about to turn sixteen and I managed to get information technology together and exercise well with no slumber." She came in showtime and joined her begetter and blood brother every bit a certified national primary.
Of the three, Jennifer is the about aggressive role player, something you wouldn't guess from her soft voice and the balletic way she carries herself when she is not huddled over a chessboard. "Past comparison, I play similar a existent wuss," her male parent told me after. "My mode is more than positional, accumulating tiny advantages until I win in the endgame. She goes for the jugular immediately and reaches positions that are so complicated they requite me a headache to look at. I don't know how she does it. Even Greg, whose play is much sharper than mine, doesn't take the kinds of risks Jen does."
That afternoon at GirlsAcademy, Shahade shared with her students ane of her ain disappointments at the chessboard. It is a game from the concluding round of last year'southward Olympiad in Bled, where teams from 89 countries competed in the women's segmentation, and the Usa was in medal contention until the final rounds. "You tin can always learn a lot from your losses," she told the students. She set upwards the key position from her match with Ukrainian Inna Gaponenko and explained what went wrong. "I had a choice of two ways to capture. I could have taken with the pawn or the rook. If I took with the rook, it would lead to a draw. I took with the pawn and quickly lost. Taking with the pawn was a radical misjudgment. Why did I do it? In that location was probably a psychological reason. Before, I thought I had stood meliorate in the game, so I didn't desire to settle for a depict and admit that I hadn't been able to press my reward.
"I also learned from Bled that I didn't take enough stamina," she said to the students, a curious confession from a woman who fabricated her mark in the Insanity Tournament. "I won v of my starting time vi games, merely then, sadly, I had a big slump so that I ended up with 6 wins and v losses. I'm used to American weekend tournaments in which four or five rounds are crammed into two or 3 days. The Olympiad lasted two weeks. I can play chess 12 hours a solar day for a weekend on sheer adrenaline so crash, just I can't sit at the lath with meridian concentration for days at a time." She told me later that she is running, lifting weights and shooting baskets to build upwards her stamina. Most of the world's top players have strenuous exercise routines to balance their sedentary chess playing. Bobby Fischer jogged regularly long before it was fashionable to practice so, and Garry Kasparov pumps iron, swims and rows as part of his chess training.
Toward the end of the afternoon, Shahade's and Krush's students came together for articulation instruction. Krush had fix up a position on an oversize demonstration board in front end of the room. She asked the girls to study it and so pair off and play the position out, with chess clocks ticking every bit if this were a tournament. Later on the girls would compare their moves with those of the chess titans who had played the original game. Shahade glanced at the demonstration board and, feigning indignation, exclaimed, "That position was never reached by a woman!"
The position that Krush had chosen showed the board later the 16th move of a famous 1895 game betwixt Wilhelm Steinitz and a High german master named Curt von Bardeleben. On White'south 17th movement—which the girls were asked to observe— Steinitz boldly sacrificed his queen pawn and then that a path would be cleared for his knight to join in the chase for the Black king. Eight moves later, von Bardeleben was so disgusted with the position of his exposed monarch that he simply disappeared from the Hastings, England, tournament hall and never returned. Steinitz and so awed the spectators who had gathered around with an elegant continuation in which he forced checkmate in 10 moves.
When Krush showed the class the actual game, the girls marveled at the depth and beauty of Steinitz's mating attack. What Krush didn't tell the students was the fate of the two men. Steinitz somewhen went mad, claiming that he had played chess with God over an invisible telephone line and beaten him. And von Bardeleben, in 1924, leaped to his death from a window. His self-defenestration was emulated by the most famous fictional chess player, Luzhin, in Vladimir Nabokov'south novel The Defense.
That chess has a long history of association with obsession and eccentricity is not part of the Chess-in-the-Schools curriculum. When a educatee in i of Shahade's other classes asked her whatever became of Bobby Fischer, she responded, "Never mind! Allow's just appreciate his games!" (A fugitive from American justice considering he violated economic sanctions confronting the former Yugoslavia by playing a 1992 tournament at that place, Fischer reportedly lives in Japan. He condones the violence of September 11 and rants on talk radio virtually the "world Jewish conspiracy.")
During a break at GirlsAcademy, Shahade put aside the remains of a big tossed salad. She had eaten none of the sun-dried tomatoes, which were scattered beyond the bowl. Krush eyed the salad dregs, and Shahade offered them to her. "Why didn't you consume the tomatoes?" Krush asked. "Are you trying to poisonous substance me?"
"Y'all never know," Shahade playfully responded.
"It would be a good trick," said Krush. "I wonder if anyone has ever tried it—making their opponent sick just before an important match."
Later that week, Shahade and Krush joined 56 other chess players in Seattle for the 2003 U.S. Chess Championship. Shahade was the defending women'south champion, and Krush wanted a shot at the title, which she had earned once before, in 1998. When Shahade won in 2002, information technology was the first time women and men had played together in the 157-yearold national tournament. No female player had ever qualified to enter the championship, and in 1937 a separate women's division was created, in which female players competed among themselves for the title of U.South. Women's Champion. In 2002, the women'due south partitioning was dissolved, though the championship remained. Shahade, who did non face any women in the tournament, notwithstanding became U.South. Women's Champion by achieving the highest score of all the women. At the players' meeting before the 2002 tournament, some men had complained that the participation of women would dethrone the quality of the play, but Shahade proved them wrong. In the very first round, she disposed of Gennady Sagalchik, a Brooklyn-based grandmaster who had been specially vocal in objecting to the inclusion of women.
"I was delighted to shell Sagalchik, but not because he was existence sexist," Shahade said later on. "I didn't call up he was. I didn't think he was speaking well-nigh me—I knew I would give the men a fight, and he probably knew that besides—but near some of the other, lower-ranked female players. I was glad to beat him considering I had a design of reaching good positions against grandmasters, getting nervous, and making inaccurate moves to let them skid abroad."
Even Shahade is not entirely convinced that having a coed championship is in the all-time interest of women's chess. While the summit-ranked women are strong plenty to requite the men a good fight, or even beat them, the lower-ranked qualifying women are weaker than the weakest men. "Is it good for a young woman's conviction and chess career if she has a horrible result in the U.S. Championship?" asked Shahade. "Maybe it would be better for her to play in an all-women's result? But I tin also argue the reverse—that it is motivating to play in a championship with the country'southward all-time players, and that women will get better equally a result."
The 2003 tournament was more than difficult for her. After a slow offset and a seventh-round victory, she plant herself tied for first amidst the women and, therefore, in a skillful position to retain her championship. Her brother was also competing in the title—the first time since 1969 that siblings had played in the contest at the same time—and he, besides, had an of import victory in the 7th round.
During the tournament, the 2 Shahades prepared for their opponents in different means. Each evening at about 10, they learned whom they would face the side by side afternoon and whether they were going to have white or black. Before going to bed, Jennifer would turn on her notebook PC and search through a database of more than two million chess games for those played by her opponent. She'd scan the relevant games and brand a quick decision every bit to what sequence of opening moves she idea would give her adversary the most problem. Merely she would salve the bulk of her study for the morning. "I tin sleep better," she told me, "after I select the detail opening. Otherwise, I'll toss and plough and mull over information technology during the nighttime."
Greg'southward approach was less disciplined. He routinely went to bed at four in the forenoon and rose just minutes before the one:thirty p.grand. round. He, too, possessed a PC with two meg chess games stored on it, but his database manifestly got less utilise than his sister's. He used his laptop to play kung-fu chess—an Internet activeness game in which multiple chessmen blitz frontward every bit fast as yous can motion them—at which he is the world'southward number one role player. He too kept busy with a Sony Playstation, a Television flavour's worth of "The Simpsons" on DVD, and a Trip the light fantastic toe Dance Revolution Pad (an electronic dance mat), all of which he had brought from New York. I happened to occupy the hotel room next to his, and on the dark earlier the final round, when he could have been preparing for one of his toughest opponents—15-year-sometime Hikaru Nakamura, who a month later would pause Bobby Fischer's 1958 tape as the youngest American grandmaster—I awoke at 4 a.chiliad. to the sound of Bart Simpson's voice and Greg laughing loudly.
"How's the Nakamura training going?" I shouted through the wall.
"Not well," said Greg. "I haven't started nevertheless."
After ten days and 9 rounds of classical chess, in which some of the games lasted more than five hours, the main tournament had concluded. Greg Shahade, who lost to Nakamura, ended with an fifty-fifty score. Alexander Shabalov, a 35- year-old Riga-built-in grandmaster from Pittsburgh, was the new U.S. Chess Champion, and Jennifer Shahade and Krush found themselves tied with a tertiary woman, Latvian émigré Anna Hahn, for the women'southward title. The adjacent twenty-four hours, the three played a round-robin match of speed chess (xv minutes per side per game) to decide the winner. "I departed from my usual, more methodical style of preparation and tried to study every opening nether the sun," Shahade said. "I knew it was a crazy, stupid thing to practise—you can't mayhap master numerous opening lines in one evening—but I couldn't help myself. I wanted to be prepared for anything they might play, and then all night I dreamed about the possibilities." Shahade arrived at the board nervous and exhausted, and lost her meet with Krush. Hahn, 27, whose lower national ranking made her the underdog, managed to beat out both of them and walk off with $12,500 and the title. "Anna is 1 of my friends," Shahade said, "simply losing the play-off was non one of my happiest moments."
Shahade had graduated from NYU only a calendar month before the title, and in Seattle she was in a reflective mood virtually what she was going to practice with the rest of her life. "I majored in comparative literature," she told me. "Information technology'southward a toss-up," she joked, "nearly whether comparative literature or chess will be more useful in paying the hire. I'm struggling right now with how much I want to make the game the focus of my life. I love chess, but it'southward the height of decadence. The positions yous accomplish in a well-played game are beautiful, merely the beauty is inaccessible to those who haven't mastered the game. At that place are many good reasons to teach kids chess—it helps them learn to concentrate, to recollect alee, to meet that their actions take consequences, to cope with defeat, and to exist gracious in winning—but the game itself doesn't have a lot of social purpose. You can sympathize if someone is spending 16 hours a day trying to cure a disease or to write a novel, but to play better chess?" Shahade besides remains clashing about the game from a feminist perspective: "Chess is patriarchal—I sound similar a college student—information technology's a war game, a zero-sum game that rewards ruthlessness, not cooperation." Yet she is fatigued to its intensity, and equally a charismatic female in a largely male endeavor, she is enough of a novelty that she might exist able to make a decent living from the game by giving lessons, exhibitions and motivational speeches; by publishing books and instructional videos; and past endorsing chess-playing computers.
Shahade also likes the arts—photography, painting, writing— and hopes to forge a career that melds them with chess. She has a contract to write a book about women in chess, and she has created a series of campy photographic self-portraits that play with the idea that a woman can be both a sex activity goddess and an intellectual. In these photographs, Shahade has fabricated herself up to look like a vampish Marilyn Monroe. She wears a pink wig, pink gloves and a slinky pink dress. She appears ready to party, but closer examination reveals she is reading a book with a pinkish cover called Secrets of Chess Tactics. It'southward a classic Russian text that is serious even by the brainy standards of chess literature.
Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/chess-queen-87073362/
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