ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Robert Siegel.
Even in this era of Madden football and Grand Theft Auto, of Gameboys and Playstations, you can still read an account of Hezbollah's raid across the Israeli border as Nasrallah's gambit and you can find descriptions of the response it provoked as Israel's end game.
The vocabulary of chess forms a metaphorical bridge between a harmless board game of strategy and the strategies of real life war. The history of the game is recounted in a new book by David Shenk. It's called The Immortal Game. And to serious chess players that title has an obvious double meaning. It refers to the game itself and also to a particular match that was played by two masters in 1851.
David Shenk weaves the story of that match move by move throughout the larger story. Welcome to the program.
Mr. DAVID SHENK (Author, The Immortal Game): Thank you for having me.
SIEGEL: And tell us about the immortal game of 1851.
Mr. SHENK: Well, this was a remarkable game because it wasn't supposed to be remarkable. Here were two amazing champions, Lionel Kieseritzky and Adolf Anderssen. They were participating in really the first formal international chess tournament ever in 1851 in London.
And in between the formal games, these chess players, of course, couldn't get enough chess so they would play practice games. The actual formal games could last hours and hours and even days, so the practice games tended to be a lot shorter than that.
And this was one of those practice games. It really should've been a throwaway game. It shouldn't have even been remembered at all in history. But it turned out to be so remarkable that the loser - who I will not name - was so blown away that he recorded it, and it was quickly dubbed the immortal game and has been studied ever since.
SIEGEL: The lesson of this particular immortal game match, as best as I can make of it, is that the player who actually gave us several very, very important pieces still won. It wasn't telling that he had lost such vital pieces as two rooks and a queen.
Mr. SHENK: That's the technical lesson here is that you can sacrifice an amazing amount of material. You know, a novice would never think that you could give up a queen and still win a game. But, in fact, if you know what you're doing you can give up far more than that and still win.
The broader lesson, though, is that any chess game, like any piece of art, starts out mundane and you never know if it's going to turn into magic or not and the players don't know either.
SIEGEL: Part of your motivation here in writing the book was to learn something about one Samuel Rosenthal. Why don't you tell us about him.
Mr. SHENK: Yes. This was a piece of family lore and I really knew nothing about it. I wasn't even sure if Samuel Rosenthal existed. But I had been told that he was my great-great-grandfather and that he was the dean of all chess in France in the 19th Century and that he had been given all these prizes and taught someone in the Napoleon family and really was dominant for several decades. And did those simultaneous demonstrations, playing against 50 or 100 people at once and beating them all without a problem and would play these long, long chess matches in which he would be described as being as still as a statue.
SIEGEL: And you met chess teachers who say Samuel Rosenthal, I've taught some of his games.
Mr. SHENK: Yes. He is still known among serious chess players. Now I mean, one of the interesting points to make about chess and where Rosenthal fits is that not too many of his games would be considered stellar today, because chess knowledge, like all other knowledge, builds on itself. So we can look at some of the amazing games in the 19th Century, and we can say wow, for their time, that was particularly creative and that was a new way of thinking.
But serious chess players build on top of that. And actually, there have been two or three schools of thought of how to play chess that have come along since Samuel Rosenthal's day.
SIEGEL: Yes. Actually, if the great players of the 19th Century were brought back and played against contemporary great grandmasters, the contemporary players, evidently, would just easily beat them because they played recklessly 100 years ago, 150 years ago.
Mr. SHENK: By our standards, yes. I think one of the great analogies, if we say, you know, take a 19th Century doctor, a brilliant one, and put them up against a mediocre doctor from today, that doctor of today is going to have so much more knowledge that in all likelihood, they're going to be able to come much closer to a real diagnosis of the problem.
And the same goes for chess players. You can take a fairly serious but not absolute champion chess player of today and they just know so much more about how the game is constructed.
SIEGEL: I understand the difference between 21st Century medicine and 19th Century medicine much more easily than the advance in tactics in what is a fairly circumscribed, logical game. And it's changed that much you say over the past 200 years?
Mr. SHENK: It has. And you need to realize fundamentally that in the 19th Century they played a style of chess that we now call the romantic style, which is the way we would all want to play chess, which is you're trying to outfox your opponent and think a few moves ahead and come up with a combination that's going to be stunning and blow your opponent away.
Now the way serious players play is they don't ignore, you know, the idea of coming up with great combinations, but really there is a way of understanding the elements of the game. Playing more positionally, if you will, playing more scientifically.
Understanding that there are certain principles that you have to follow. And combining the principles and the understanding that certain positions simply do not work, and then within that paradigm trying to be creative and outfox your opponent.
SIEGEL: Well, David Shenk, thank you very much for talking with us about the immortal game.
Mr. SHENK: Thank you.
SIEGEL: And you can read about the opening move in the immortal game of chess at our Web site, NPR.org.
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