Chess Bitch: Women in the Ultimate Intellectual Sport Read online

  Sonja stayed in Buenos Aires after the tournament, rather than return to the continental bloodbath. She explained that she had become smitten with Argentina upon seeing the Argentinean flag with its two hands clasped in a decidedly anti-war gesture. Sonja was enamored with the culture of Buenos Aires, which she compared to that of Spain: It was “not only for the style of the buildings, but for the ways of the people” that she was smitten. The Spanish language suited Sonja’s romantic views, and she loved the Argentinean zest for life. The only thing she couldn’t comprehend was the Argentinean “mania for makeup,” which according to Sonja, afflicted many of the women.

  Sonja was not the only chessplayer to make such a drastic life decision. Many great European players stayed in Argentina after the event, most notably Grandmaster Moishe Najdorf, a Polish Jew, who escaped the Holocaust by staying on in Argentina. In the hopes of contacting his family still in Poland, Najdorf performed blindfold exhibitions, in which he played many opponents at once, without sight of the board. In 1941, he broke the former world record by playing forty-one at once. He hoped that this outstanding feat would gain international press and that his family in Poland would contact him. After the war had ended, he discovered that his entire family (wife, parents, child, and four brothers) had died in concentration camps. He then came back to Argentina, started calling himself Miguel, remarried, and made Buenos Aires his home till the day he died. It must have been overwhelming for a chess trip to turn into a permanent relocation. I can only suspect that the vivacious Sonja took it all in stride. She certainly mastered the Spanish language quickly. In fact, Sonja published both of her books in her new language.

  Some of the best tournaments held during the forties were hosted in Buenos Aires, due to the influx of strong Jewish European players. Graf played, usually finishing at the bottom of the cross-table, with Najdorf often at the top.

  During the spring of 1947, FIDE president and former World Champion Max Euwe was in Buenos Aires to play in the yearly Mar Del Plata round-robin. In placing a phone call, he got misconnected to a Mr. Vernon Stevenson, an American sailor. Stevenson happened to be fascinated by chess and in this misdirected phone call arranged a meeting that same afternoon with Euwe, who already had an appointment with his old friend Sonja Graf.6 So the three met. According to Euwe, there were sparks right away between Vernon and Sonja, who fell in love and shortly made plans to marry. The two moved to Hollywood, California, and Sonja became Mrs. Graf-Stevenson. Coincidentally, Sonja and Vera both married Mr. Stevensons. Sonja disappeared from the chess world for several years while she raised her son Alexander. She came out of retirement with a bang in 1957 by winning the U.S. Women’s Chess Championship. Sonja had not lost her dramatic flair, and New Yorker Allen Kaufman, who was a rising young player at the time, remembers playing casual games with her. “Sonja used to enter tournaments with two bulldogs. She would play chess with me, banging down the pieces and shouting, ‘It’s your move, boobee.’ You could tell that Sonja had made a decision to present a masculine persona.”

  Sonja and her family later moved to New York City, and in 1964 she won her second U.S. Women’s Chess Championship. Shortly thereafter, in an interview with The New Yorker, Sonja spoke of her regrets over her world championship game twenty-five years earlier against Vera Menchik. “I had a won game...I played the three stupidest moves.” Less than a year later, on March 7, 1965, Sonja died of a liver ailment. She was just over fifty-five, and one can only speculate as to the extent thst her intense lifestyle exhausted her. In Sonja’s own words, she was “an artist of life.” She never wrote any books in English, and because her career garnered only moderate attention in the press, the last years of her life are unfortunately unrecorded.

  The lives of Menchik and Graf show what chess can do for women. Chess allowed the shy Menchik the opportunity to come out of her shell, to achieve greatness, and to make a name for herself. It gave Graf a chance to express her passion for life, while affording her the freedom to travel the world. Sonja Graf was drawn to the intensity of the game, observing that chessplayers have “their gazes locked to the board… hypnotized, forgetting the world.” “To the chessplayer, of what importance is World War I, Hitler’s regime, or the League of Nations?” As it happened, Hitler’s regime and World War II were of major importance to Sonja Graf, resulting in a whirlwind life in which she would live on three different continents. For Vera Menchik and her family, the war brought tragedy.

  The chess world values, above all, quantifiable achievements. Vera is still (and rightly) hailed as a chess pioneer, while the poetic bon vivant Sonja Graf has faded into obscurity. Her books are scarcely available and have never been translated into English or German. Maybe Sonja would be remembered if she had won her game against Vera Menchik in Buenos Aires along with the crown of Women’s World Champion.

  It was Vera Menchik who served as the inspiration for women players worldwide: she was the first to be called the queen of women’s chess. The Vera Menchik cups are awarded to the winning women’s teams at the biennial Chess Olympiads.

  Though Menchik lived and played mainly in England, because she was born in Moscow and spoke Russian, the Soviet Union decided to claim Vera as their own—a Soviet champion, both by birth and inclination. Mikhail Botvinnik, who won the first world title after World War II and was a patriotic Soviet, said of Vera: “This Czech woman playing under the English flag is in her essence…Russian.”

  The focal point of post-war women’s chess was Moscow, where world championships were held in 1950, 1952, and 1955. In the first event, Ludmilla Rudenko (1904-1986), an economist and former swimming champion, won first place among sixteen participants. In 1952, Elizaveta Bykova (1913-1989) defeated Rudenko in a match for the title. Bykova lost the title to another Russian, Olga Rubtsova (1909-1994), in 1956, but regained her title in 1958. World Champion Elizaveta Bykova was chosen to write a biography of Vera Menchik to reflect glory onto the Soviet Union. Published in 1957, the book outlines the triumphs of Vera’s career. Bykova takes pains to claim Menchik as a Russian in an effort to extend the Russian champion tradition to the beginnings of professional women’s chess.

  Bykova was born a peasant in the Russian village, Bolugubov, and was an ideal symbol for the intellectual victory of the working class. Bykova’s devotion to communism gives a propagandistic tone to her biography on Vera. Bykova dwells on Vera’s trip to Moscow, conjecturing that Menchik may have played badly in Moscow because she was awestruck by the utopian conditions. She quotes Menchik: “You couldn’t recognize the city—the change was too huge and great.” Menchik had loved to go to the theater as a young girl, and Bykova reports how Vera marveled at the improvements in the theaters: “What a pleasure to sit in a wonderful theater, to see a happy and content crowd, and remember that in 1919, I sat here shivering.” Later, Bykova has Menchik sum up her affections for her birthplace: “Nowhere but in the Soviet Union was equality achieved, not just formal, but material.” This comment seems inconsistent with Vera’s quote from British Chess Magazine: “The thing that struck me most about England was that people leave the milk bottles outside. In Russia, they would immediately be stolen.”

  Menchik, who finished the 1935 Moscow tournament with an abysmal record (1.5-19), is quoted by Bykova: “In the West, a person who doesn’t succeed professionally is nobody. Despite all my failures I still feel warm attention here. This is only possible in the USSR.”

  As Bykova does not mention the sources of her quotes (she was not present at the tournament), it is reasonable to question both their sincerity and veracity. Maybe the quotes are real, maybe they are entirely fabricated, but most likely the truth is somewhere in between. It is possible that Vera was interviewed while playing and was encouraged, or felt it polite, to speak well of the host country.

  Despite Soviet women’s dominance in chess, Soviet authorities were not happy with the state of women’s chess. A paper published in 1953, “On the State of Chess Work in Physical Culture Organization a
nd Means of Improving It,” stated, “The All-Union Committee considers the state of work in chess among women to be unsatisfactory. The number of women regularly playing chess is insignificant.”7

  The Soviet authorities focused on the number of female participants, but British writer John Graham, author of Women in Chess, focused on the playing standard of the Soviet champions: “[Rudenko, Bykova, and Rubtsova] were curators of the title, making no strides toward equality.” Unlike Vera Menchik or Sonja Graf, the Soviet women rarely competed against men and did not raise the standard or rhetoric of women’s chess. The players who were to elevate women’s chess to the next level were from the USSR, but from farther south than anyone would have predicted.

  3

  Building a Dynasty:

  The Women of Georgia

  Georgian women have such difficult characters! They don’t ever listen to men.

  — Georgian Master Variam Vepkhvishvili

  It is two o’clock in the a.m., and five-time Women’s World Champion Georgian Nona Gaprindashvili has been at the blackjack table for hours, her dark eyes still focusing intently on the cards. It is the autumn of 2002, and the thirty-second biennial Olympiad is being held in Bled, Slovenia, a picturesque mountain resort town in the former Yugoslavia. Outside the casino in Bled, the view across Lake Bled is a stunning backdrop of a castle situated in mountains. During breaks from the tournament, chess players, coaches, and officials stroll the perimeter of Lake Bled, resplendent with turning leaves of autumn. Sixty-one-year-old Nona Gaprindashvili prefers the confines of the casino to the mountain scenery. “Fierce, strong, and obsessive,” said one fan. “For Nona it doesn’t matter what else is going on. She won’t stop, she’ll keep studying, keep throwing dice.”

  Forty years earlier, Nona won her first world championship match, bringing her fame and unprecedented accolades, while galvanizing a women’s chess revolution in Georgia. Georgia, a small country with five million inhabitants, lies in the Caucasus Mountains on the southeastern shores of the Black Sea. The tiny Eurasian country dominated women’s chess for nearly thirty years, producing two world champions, winning three Olympiads, and training dozens of talented young girls to be masters.

  Female chess talent in Georgia exploded in an environment where traditional values were the norm. Georgian women usually got married between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two. Rusudan Goletiani, the young Georgian women’s grandmaster now living in the U.S., tells me that, even today, “If you are a twenty-five-year-old girl in Georgia and not yet married, it is very strange.” Dowries of Georgian women included chess sets, because Georgian women were encouraged to play chess as a hobby. Gennady Zaitchik, a grandmaster from Georgia who now lives near Philadelphia, told me, “In Georgia it was the job of the man to do work and put bread on the table. It was good for women to cook, clean, and play chess at home.”

  Nona Gaprindashvili was born in the spring of 1941 in Zugdidi, a small town near the Black Sea, where she grew up among five older brothers. Her intense brown eyes, dark hair, and strong features give her a confident presence that can be witnessed even in photographs of her as a young girl. Nona’s father taught her the rules of chess when she was five. In family tournaments her brothers beat her regularly, and it is likely that this youthful competition against male peers shaped her tough, fearless character and promoted her high standard of play. Karledazde, a renowned chess trainer visiting Zugdidi, spotted Nona’s talent immediately and persuaded her parents to allow their twelve-year-old daughter to move to the capital, Tbilisi, where she could live with her aunt and train with experienced coaches.

  Throughout her teens, various Georgian grandmasters were called upon to instruct her. One of them, Gennady Zaitchik, describes how difficult it was to train her. “She wanted me to analyze some hopeless opening variation for hours. She was always so stubborn. She wouldn’t respect my opinion as a grandmaster.”

  Nona Gaprindashvili (1982).

  Nona’s competitive character was also witnessed by players: Nona had—and still has—a reputation as an ungracious loser. A talented young Georgian girl joked to me that she hoped not to be paired against Nona because she was afraid of an angry reaction if Nona were to lose. After a crucial victory against Nona, one British grandmaster told me that he’d made the mistake of complimenting Nona by mentioning that a friend of his had named his daughter in her honor. Unimpressed by this story, Nona walked off in an angry huff.

  In 1961 Nona won the Women’s Candidates Tournament held in Vrnjacka Banja, a mountain town in the then Yugoslavia. With this victory, Nona earned the right to challenge the reigning World Champion, Russian Elizabeth Bykova. At the match held in Moscow one year later Nona was merciless. She amassed nine points to Bykova’s two—a landslide victory. Many players might have thrown a few draws in the mix, in order to rest a little and prepare for the next game, but this was not in Nona’s aggressive, fearless character. According to one of her fans, “Nona always plays for one result: Win.”

  After winning her first world title, the young Nona became an instant celebrity in Georgia. Salo Flohr, a candidate for the world championship in the 1930s, described her return home: “Young and old, great and small, mobbed to see her, shake her hand, embrace her, and kiss her.”

  John Graham, in Women in Chess, suggests that Nona’s reception “as a conquering hero” may have been partly rooted in patriotism piqued by regional racism. He writes that Georgians were often “the victim[s] of cruel ethnic jokes.” Georgian people tend to have dark complexions and strong features, like neighboring Armenian and Azerbaijani people. Their distinct looks have often incited racism from the mainland, where the blond, blue-eyed, fair-skinned Russians were (and still are) the ideal of most. Estonian Grandmaster Jan Ehlvest joked in an interview that, above all qualities, he values “blonde hair and blue eyes.”1 In Moscow I witnessed two darker-skinned women from Central Republics being denied admission to a rock show. The girls were told that they were too drunk to enter, even though they looked and smelled perfectly sober to me. The swarthy Garry Kasparov, born in the Azerbaijani capital Baku, complained that “Russia is the most racist country in the world.”

  During the sixties and seventies, as Nona was winning championships, national pride in the ancient country of Georgia was never greater. From 1921 until 1991, when Georgia was an official republic of the Soviet Union, the Georgian people studied Russian in school, but continued to speak Georgian, which has a thirty-three character alphabet and is a unique language unrelated to any other in the world. In 1978, massive public protests struck down Soviet attempts to establish Russian as the official language of the Republic of Georgia. More than being a woman champion or a Soviet champion, Nona Gaprindashvili was a Georgian champion.

  Nona spent her twenties and thirties winning one world championship match after another, three in a row against Moscow-born Alla Kushnir, her major competitor at the time. By 1975 her influence on women’s chess in Georgia was at its peak. Her next challenger, Nana Alexandria, was another Georgian. Alexandria, born in 1952 in Tbilisi, worked with Karledazde, the same coach who had noticed the young Nona years earlier. The “in-house” world championship match thrilled the Georgian public. A perfumery even developed a scent—Nona and Nana—to celebrate the event. Patriotic camaraderie between the two combatants disappeared quickly over the board, where a brutal slugfest unfolded. Of the twelve games, Nona won eight; Nana, only three. There was just one draw. The final 8.5-3.5 score was a great triumph for Nona, who, at thirty-four, was at the top of her game.

  Nona played rarely, but successfully, against male opposition. According to International Master Victor Frias, “Nona was the first woman who could sit down against anyone and play.” Nona’s most impressive result among men was in 1976 in a tournament held in Lone Pine, a mountain resort town in California. She tied for first, defeating four male grandmasters. Nona’s strength of character must have helped her endure unflattering comments, such as the one in The Lone Pine Bulletin tha
t wrote Nona was “constructed more like a bricklayer than a woman.” In this unkind description is the implication that a real woman could not have won the tournament.

  Despite such isolated sexist slurs, Nona was widely respected in the chess world as a pioneer in women’s chess. The FIDE congress, held in Buenos Aires in conjunction with the 1978 Olympiad, decided to award Nona the title of grandmaster based on her result in Lone Pine, her overall high level of play, and her sixteen-year reign as world champion. She was the first woman to hold this title, the most prestigious in chess, for which many players strive their entire lives. The decision to make her a grandmaster was not without controversy. Nona had not strictly met the requirements that would normally merit a grandmaster title. To become a grandmaster, a player must earn three norms, meaning that they have to perform over the 2600 level at three different events while maintaining an overall minimum rating of 2500. Grandmaster Pal Benko wrote at the time, “She is the only woman ever to have deserved it [the title]. It is regrettable that she did not earn the title in the regular way. In my opinion, this historic occasion should not have been allowed to carry even this slight tarnish.”2

  The timing of Nona’s acquiring the GM title was bittersweet. Nona had just encountered the first major disappointment of her chess career, one from which she would never bounce back. In October of 1978, Nona was scheduled to defend her title against another Georgian, the seventeen-year-old Maya Chiburdanidze.

  Maya learned chess from her eldest brother when she was a child of six or seven. She improved rapidly at her local club, catching the eye of Grandmaster Eduard Gufeld. Eduard played a few casual games with Maya and was immediately impressed by the focus and passion of the child: “Before me sat a girl of nine who was not in the least perturbed by an international grandmaster. I remember her resourcefulness, surprising for someone of her age, with which she tried to reorganize her reduced forces after she had lost a pawn in the middlegame. We played another game and it was clear that she had great natural chess talents and an all-absorbing love for our ancient game.”3 Between the opening (the first phase of the game in which the pieces are developed) and the endgame (where the material is reduced and the result often settled) is the middlegame. Professional players have usually spent countless hours studying their opening set-ups prior to the game and memorizing the most common endgames. Middlegames are the least theoretical phase of the game, where a player must rely on creativity, intuition, and calculating abilities.