Chess Bitch: Women in the Ultimate Intellectual Sport Page 8
A common charge is that women chessplayers often win against stronger male opponents, because men are distracted during the play. In one case, a man from Australia who lost to a young woman complained to organizers and journalists that her low-cut shirt had distracted him and caused him to lose.4 But an attractive opponent can also inspire great play, as one male chessplayer confided in me: “Guys play better against women, because they want to impress them.” My own motivation spikes when I play against men I admire or find attractive. I find it fun to play against someone I like, and therefore I work harder at the board. At the 1999 World Girls’ Championship held in the capital of Armenia, Yerevan, I realized that I could also experience heightened concentration against women I admire.
Armenia borders Georgia, and the people of Armenia share the strong features, ancient history, and patriotic fervor of the Georgians. Irina Krush and I were roommates at the championship, both representing the United States. The conditions at the tournament ranged from shabby to grand. The food, often inedible, caused many players to lose ten pounds at the event. (Even with heartier fare, it is typical for chessplayers to slim down at events; playing is a physical strain, and nerves contribute to long stretches of fasting.) Irina and I subsisted on bread and fresh tomatoes and cucumbers, eschewing the daily mystery meats. We slept on tiny beds with stiff mattresses in rooms with a kind of exotic post-communist charm. Our balconies did open onto Yerevan’s central square, an inspirational setting reminiscent of James Bond movies.
The tournament itself began with a dramatic upset on board one, in which Greek player Maria Kouvatsou was paired against top-seeded Rusudan Goletiani, then playing for Georgia. After Maria sacrificed two pawns in the opening, Rusudan was unable to shield herself from Maria’s onslaught. She resigned, still not castled. Charged by this first-round victory, Maria steam-rolled through the rest of the field, beating four players over 2200. Not in the top half of the field, Maria was expected to lose more games than she won. She hadn’t planned to play in the tournament, but when she went to the Greek Federation to inform them of her decision to cancel, there was no one at the office. “I took this as a sign that I should play.”
The movie-like narrative of Maria’s charge drew me in; it was hard for me to stop looking at this hip woman from Athens, who wore a nose ring and stylish outfits in bright colors. She had a nearly sublime focus while playing. Her long hair tucked behind her ears, she placed her hands on her temples and stared at the board, immobile for hours.
In the last round, I was paired against Maria. I had no chance of winning the tournament myself, but if I beat her, there was a possibility that my roommate, Irina Krush, would tie for first and earn a medal. I traveled to Yerevan right in the middle of a semester at NYU, and sometimes I found it hard to focus on the chess; while playing my thoughts would drift to the possibility of drug legalization or existentialist literature. I had no such problems in concentrating against Kouvatsou. I became aware before the game of a certain amount of attraction that I felt toward Maria. I thought she was beautiful and cool and I wanted to impress her. This newfound clarity allowed me to play my best. I did win, in my best game of the tournament. Maria still won the tournament on tiebreak. In the end, I tied for fifth place, just a half a point out of the four-way tie for first, which did include Irina Krush.
There is a wide range of ways for a woman to react to another powerful woman in the same field. The range can span everything from accepting her as a role model to feeling envy or even to feeling attraction. Too often, the admiration of one girl for another is completely displaced by jealousy. A heterosexual woman ought to be able to recognize and embrace the feelings of respect, admiration, and even attraction for a female peer. And the complicated admiration that a woman can have for a man is too often displaced by attraction. It should be possible to be attracted to and competitive with a great man—to want to be with him and to beat him. Judith Butler, gender theorist, says, “Desire and identification can coexist.” I would add that they should, and if we are aware of this peaceful coexistence, sexual relations will improve.
The first time I saw my childhood idol, Judit Polgar, in person is imprinted on my memory. As a teenager I read voraciously about the Polgars and played through all of Judit’s major tournament games. Her style even influenced my choice of openings—I switched from the relatively restrained c3 Sicilian to the riskiest lines of the Open Sicilian, as championed by Judit.
I was spending a couple of days in Holland, where Judit was playing in an elite grandmaster event. Sightseeing would wait for another trip. I traveled to Tilburg, an hour away from Amsterdam, to the world-class event Judit was playing in, where she was the only woman among twelve men. That day she was playing a strong Dutch Grandmaster, Jereon Piket, and I studied how she looked at the board with a focused but calm gaze. In the post-mortem, she joked around and assertively waved away a smoker. After the analysis, a friend introduced me to Judit, who was friendly, though she declined to join us for dinner, explaining that she was tired and wanted to study for her game the next day. This disappointed me, but I also admired her decisiveness. In the next few years, I realized how hard it can sometimes be, especially for a woman, to say no when asked to join friends for parties or socializing.
I didn’t need to know Judit personally—she was already very powerful to me. Since I didn’t know her, my image of her reflected what I wanted to be just as much as it reflected what she was actually like, which is perhaps the essence of a role model.
5
Bringing Up Grandmasters:
The Polgar Sisters
From Greek mythology to fairy tales to Chekhov all the way up to Sherwood Schwartz and Woody Allen, Western culture has evoked sisters times three to personify the forces that bewitch and buffet humankind.
— Melissa Morrison in Bitch magazine
Whenever Garry Kasparov, the top-ranked man in the world since 1980, plays Judit Polgar, the top-ranked woman in the world since 1988, the crowd is transfixed. Garry, with his good looks and confident swagger, fits into his glamorous Armani suits as easily as he fits into his larger-than-life role as the best chessplayer ever. Judit stands just over five feet tall, and—aside from her fiery red hair—her appearance is understated; she is possessed of a calm presence both on and off the board. The drama of the war of the sexes is heightened by Kasparov’s outrageous remarks. “Chess is a mixture of sport, psychological warfare, science, and art,” he said to the Times of London in 2002. He continued, “When you look at all these components, man dominates. Every single component of chess belongs to the areas of male domination.”
The two stars were paired in Moscow in a 2002 match featuring Russia Against the Rest of the World. Judit, as always, opened with her King pawn. Garry chose the Berlin defense, a solid system that usually results in a trade of Queens on move seven. It was a surprising choice for Garry, who prefers complicated positions with the Queens on the board. Moreover, he had recently been defeated by the Berlin system when Vladimir Kramnik used it in their 2002 world-championship match, ending Kasparov’s fifteen-year-long world reign. Judit Polgar tends to be even more aggressive than Kasparov, favoring the most violent variations in nearly every opening. “In analysis, I will sometimes suggest to Judit to trade Queens and she will look at me and chant ‘no, no, no,’” recalls her trainer, Polish Grandmaster Bartek Macieja. “She knows she will have more chances to trick her opponent with Queens on the board.” Talk of Judit’s aggressive style can be misleading. She is a world-class player who often wins in long, strategic battles, or in the endgame. Trading Queens against the Berlin defense is, according to theory, the only challenging option. So Judit did just that, calmly maintaining her advantage. In a cool performance, she dominated the play throughout the entire game, forcing Kasparov’s resignation on move forty-two.
This was Garry’s first loss to a woman, and the first time that the strongest woman in the world defeated the strongest man. It was a monumental encounter, moving the
once-hypothetical notion that a female could become world champion one step closer to reality. The milestone, many might argue, could have been reached nearly a decade earlier when Judit played Garry for the first time in a game marred by controversy.
Their first contest was in 1993 in Linares, Spain, where the strongest players in the world meet each year for a round-robin tournament. Judit, who was seventeen at the time, had the white pieces against Kasparov. He replied energetically to her opening and was able to establish a strong position. Just when he was about to finish off the game, Kasparov picked up his Knight and placed it on c5, a losing square. Noticing that this move would be a grave error, Garry lifted the Knight and put it elsewhere. The question would arise as to whether he had taken his hand off the piece. Judit said nothing at the time, and Kasparov won the game. Afterward Judit said that she believed Kasparov might have let go of the Knight on the fatal square. If so, according to the strictly enforced “touch-move” rule, he would be forced to leave it there. After examining the videotapes of the match, it was clear that Kasparov did, if only for a fraction of a second, take his hand off the piece. If Garry had realized that he had released the piece, he was morally obliged to abide by the rules. On the other hand, Judit should have reacted when it happened. It is unorthodox to make a claim once a game has been completed and lost. Nevertheless, Judit was furious with Kasparov, accosting him at the end of the tournament, asking, “How could you do this to me?” For two years Judit and Garry did not speak to each other.
After this loss, Judit dropped eight more games to Kasparov, including a heartbreaking one in which she lost a drawn endgame. She had only a Rook, to Kasparov’s Rook and Knight, which theoretically is a dead-draw. But Judit was in time pressure, meaning that she had to play several moves in a short time period, sharply increasing the chance that she would make a mistake. Kasparov did trick her, reeling in yet another win.
Judit’s victory in Moscow was long overdue. When I asked her about beating Kasparov, she recognized that “it was a historic moment,” but she was not very enthusiastic about the game, saying “it didn’t feel so special to win, because besides that game, I had a terrible tournament.” Judit’s response to her landmark victory was characteristically low-key. Busy studying chess and working on her game, she prefers to leave the discussion of her accomplishments to fans and journalists.
Before the Polgars arrived on the scene, male chauvinism in chess circles was more widespread and virulent. “The Polgar sisters changed everything,” says master Ivona Jezierska, originally from Poland, who played women’s chess both pre- and post-Polgar. “I am so grateful for what they did.” Judit, along with her two older sisters, Sofia and Susan, was responsible for altering the course of women’s progress in chess. The old questions “Could women ever be grandmasters?” or “Could women defeat the best players in the world?” were dismissed by Judit Polgar’s success. New questions took their place: “In general, can women be as good as men?” or “Will a woman ever be world champion?”
Laszlo Polgar was determined to turn his children into geniuses, a project he planned before they were born. In Bring Up Genius!, he maintains that with dedication, any parent can raise a genius, writing, “It is much easier to blame differences in ability on inheritance than to investigate the intricate social roots.” Laszlo was also convinced that girls, if raised shielded from sexist cultural biases, could achieve at the same level as men.
Susan, Judit, Sofia
Sofia, Susan, Judit
Judit, Sofia, Susan. (Photos courtesy Susan Polgar.)
Laszlo married a fellow teacher, Klara Alberger, a union that would eventually produce three daughters. Fortunately for him, Klara was willing to be part of her husband’s experiment. All the members of the Polgar family would function as a single unit with Laszlo as the mastermind, and his children the flesh-and-blood subjects.
The Polgars’ first child, Susan, found a chess set in an old rusted trunk in 1972 when she was three. The little girl was immediately attracted to the game, mesmerized by the pieces and the stories her father told about them as he taught her the rules. Although he himself was not a skilled player, Laszlo, who had always loved chess, was thrilled by Susan’s interest in the game. Just half a year later at the age of four, she won her first tournament, the Budapest Girls’ Under 11 Championship, with an astonishing 10-0 score. “I was just a little munchkin. I had to sit on pillows to reach the chessboard.”1 Recognizing her potential, Laszlo began to organize an intensive chess-training program for her. Six-year-old Susan devoted time to an alternate intellectual course, advanced math. Laszlo thought she could be a prodigy in either area, but wanted her to choose between the two. “It was an easy decision,” she now recalls: “I hated math.” After abandoning math, she began to devote twice as much time to chess, studying it for six to eight hours a day.
She progressed rapidly and became the strongest girl in Hungary when she was only twelve years old, making her eligible to represent her country in international youth competitions. Susan traveled to the West in 1981 when she played in the World Girls’ Under 16 Championship in England. Years later Susan vividly remembers her first impressions of the West: “It was amazing to be in London. Nowadays you can get anything anywhere, but then, the variety of goods and services was astonishing in comparison to Communist Hungary.” Not that the family could afford to buy much at that time. The Polgars were not well off, so Klara and Susan were traveling on a tight budget.
Susan, who was only twelve, won the gold medal with five wins and two draws. In retrospect, Susan sees this victory as a crucial moment of her career: “The name Susan Polgar would now be a name to be reckoned with.”2
One of Susan’s draws in England was against American player Baraka Shabazz, the first African-American to represent the United States internationally. Unlike Susan, whose tournament in England was at the start of an illustrious career, this was destined to be Baraka’s final international foray.
Baraka’s father, like Susan’s, pushed her to study chess for long hours, sometimes from seven in the morning until late at night. The entire Shabazz family moved from Alaska to San Francisco so that Baraka could train with the best coaches. Her father’s control over his daughter was even more intense than that of Laszlo Polgar. One coach reports that after asking Baraka if she wanted something to eat, she replied, “If I accept, my father would be very angry.” Baraka got some media attention for her successes, including a lengthy profile in the Los Angeles Times. Her father predicted in the article that exhibitions, books, and tournament prizes would make their whole family rich—he even envisioned a Baraka doll. Baraka did become an expert—the category just before master, the first African-American woman to do so. She faded from the game before becoming a master, maybe burnt out from the pressure brought by her father. In contrast to the inspirational chronicle of the Polgars, the short-lived career of Baraka Shabazz is a cautionary tale. Excessively pushy parents are likely to guide their children not to greatness but into early retirement. Why wasn’t this so with the Polgars? It may have been because of the genuine love that was shared within the family, the girls’ quick successes and financial rewards, as well as the deep passion the girls had for the game itself.
By July of 1984 the name Susan Polgar appeared at the top of the ratings list for women. Susan at fifteen was already higher ranked than the world champion, Maya Chiburdanidze. Susan was ready to play stronger opposition and made it clear that she wanted to compete against the best men. In the fall of 1984 she was awarded the prestigious international master title, becoming the youngest woman ever to receive it. “At this time in my career, it felt as though the sky was the limit,” said Susan.
Susan’s appearance fees, prize money, and endorsements significantly improved the economic status of the family. They moved out of their one-room flat in Budapest into a much larger apartment. Laszlo and Klara quit their teaching jobs to concentrate on training Susan and her sisters, Sofia and Judit, who were born i
n 1974 and 1976. From their experiences with Susan, Laszlo and Klara had gained invaluable knowledge.
Although his daughters were able to beat him quite easily, Laszlo’s role in their training was integral. Laszlo could now afford to hire trainers to coach the girls. He made sure that the girls had access to all the best books and latest periodicals. He laboriously collected and organized games from all over the world—a task that today would take minutes with an Internet connection.
The Polgar routine was rigorous and structured. They awoke at six and started the day with three hours of table tennis. The sisters were home-schooled by Laszlo and Klara, who were using their savings to support the girls’ full-time education. Laszlo warns that school is “very dangerous for talented children because leveling out happens at a low standard.”3 Glad to have escaped the daily grind of the classroom, middle sister Sofia says, “To go to school is a major waste of time. You could study a textbook for a year that it is possible to read and absorb in a week or two.” The parents made sure to cover subjects outside chess, compiling very full daily schedules, including the study of many languages: English, Russian, Spanish, and Esperanto. Laszlo was a supporter of the Esperanto movement, whose goal was to unite post-war Europe with a common language. There are only one million Esperanto speakers today, among them Laszlo, Susan, and Klara. In the afternoon and evening they spent up to eight hours on chess. There was even a designated block of time for telling jokes.