A Prodigy In My Family?

Levy at a chess tournament

As a working mom, I had to enroll my older son in an after-school care program when he’d entered kindergarten. The program charged $7 for the unstructured afternoon time per day, and $10 for the enrichment option. I signed him up for painting because he loved to draw and chess because every person in my family played it, moi included. No one was particularly hopeful he’d grasp the concept – up to that point, my father’s attempts to teach him the basic principles failed miserably. Levy simply didn’t have the patience to stay in one place for more than a minute. Levy’s father said he’d do much better in gymnastics, but that class was already full. 

I figured Levy would learn the pieces’ names, some moves, and we’d call it a start.

My Size Trophy!

Whether it was the right moment, the right setting, or the right teacher, but the game took. Within months, Levy learned not just the moves, but strategy and tactics. When he started consistently beating every kid in his section, we took him to a children’s tournament hosted by Susan Polgar at her New York chess club (she was the Women's World Chess Champion from 1996 until 1999) – and he won first prize. 

In Russia, chess is as much of a favorite past time as baseball is in America. If you didn’t learn from your parents, you picked it up from your cousins or the elders on the park benches. Schools hosted tournaments, and social clubs sponsored competitions. Coaches scavenged students’ organizations for talent for their teams. Being a chess player was an honor. It meant you were smart.

Depending on the sources, chess arrived in Russia around the 10^th century by way of Baghdad, the Byzantine, or perhaps even the Vikings (see Supriya’s post on its history). Around 1262, it received a name: shakhmaty (checkmate). Supposedly, it was banned in 1550s by Ivan the Terrible for unclear reasons. The first chess book published in Russia was a translation of Benjamin Franklin's Morals of Chess. Then, in 1824, Alexander Petrov, who had held the title of the best Russian player for over half a century, wrote  A Systemized Game of Chess. In 1886, St. Petersburg held a telegraph match against London – and won. 

Infamous for their asinine judgment, the Bolsheviks were precipitous to dub the game as a "decadent bourgeois past time." Yet the ban was short-lived: the tradition had long roots and numerous enthusiasts, including the proponents of the new regime. When Chess Master Ossip Bernstein was arrested for being a bankers’ adviser and ordered shot by a firing squad, a Bolshevik’s officer recognized and released him. A similar story happened to the famous Alexander Alekhine who was awaiting his fate in a death cell in Odessa for alleged spying, when the Commissars’ Council received a petition from his fans, and set him free. The Commissars made the right decision: in 1927, Alekhine became the fourth World Chess Champion by defeating Casablanca. By that time, the socialist state counted 140,000 registered chess players. When the Fédération Internationale des Échecs – World Chess Federation (FIDE) created the Grandmaster title in in 1950, 11 of the 27 first grandmasters hailed from the Soviet Union.

The 1980s brought the world the unforgettable battles of Karpov-Kasparov. 

Garry Kasparov and Levy's team

Anatoliy Karpov learned to play chess at the age of four and became a Soviet National Master at fifteen - the youngest in history. Garry Kasparov, a half Jewish, half Armenian Soviet prodigy, began studying chess seriously after he nonchalantly proposed a solution to a chess problem debated by his parents. Karpov had been enjoying his ten-year world championship tenure when Kasparov challenged the title in 1984. A long and hard battle, it became the one and only world match to be abandoned without result because neither player could score enough points for a win. A year later, using a Sicilian defense while playing black in the 24th game, Kasparov became the youngest world champion at age 22. 

The laurels of the world championship come hard, but as a favorite hobby, chess can be motivating and addictive, although no victories come easy. Chess skills take a lot of studying and patience– books, lessons, private coaching. Most importantly, it takes perseverance. 

At age 10, Levy won the State Chess Championship and two years later became the second place player in the country for his age group. Alas, the triumph didn’t last long – his teenage angsts kicked in and he dropped out of the race. Three years later, on a whim, he decided it was time to come back, and within six months, earned the title of the National Master. 

Will I ever see his name in the list of World Champions contestants? I think he has the talent. I don’t know if he’s got the necessary level of obsession. Neither do I think that a fanatical fixation on 64 squares and 32 black and white pieces is healthy either. But I hope he will make an International Master one day. It would be cool to have one in the family.

Kasparov's chess books... autographed!!!

Ancient Games, Modern Twists

We’ve played Chutes and Ladders with our young daughters for years without ever realizing how good it was for our karma.

Turns out our Sesame Street-inspired Chutes and Ladders, the Americanized name for what the British called Snakes and Ladders, was originally a morality game from ancient India, one of a variety of family board games, in fact, that started with the invention of dice. 

Archaeologists once excavated the oldest known dice from a 5,000-year-old backgammon set in Shahr-i-Sukhta (Burnt City) in Southeastern Iran. But more recent excavations in the Indus Valley suggest a possible South Asian origin. Possibly corroborating this discovery is that dice were mentioned in the ancient Indian tomes, the Rig Veda and Mahabharata, as a means for gambling. It was even listed as one of the games the Buddha would not play. (He kept a list? Apparently, he also didn’t approve of board games, pick up sticks, hopscotch, playing with toys or balls, charades, or the olden-day version of Pictionary. There are also lists of things he would not watch [dancing and animal fights, among them] and things he wouldn’t wear [mainly anything ornamental or decorative]).

But the ancient Indians loved dice, even creating a number of popular board games with them, games the world continues to play today. The modern forms of Parcheesee and Ludo, for example came from an old game called pachisi (from pachis, which means twenty-five, the largest score that could be thrown in one shot). 

Before Milton Bradley brought Snakes and Ladders from England to the States and changed its name, it was Moksha Patam, which literally means the path to salvation (or the ladder to salvation). The original version was based on the ideas of luck, chance, and destiny. The ladders represented the attainment of higher virtues, such as humility, faith, and knowledge, and the snakes represented vices such as greed, rage, theft, and murder. In the original game, there were more snakes than ladders, to signify how much more difficult the righteous path is than its alternative.

Another game that’s weathered the travel through time and place is chess. The Gupta dynasty in India created it sometime between the 5^th and 6^th century AD and called it chatrang or chaturanga, meaning “having four limbs,” which in turn was thought to represent the four divisions of the military (in those days, elephants, chariots, foot soldiers, and horsemen). Originally, the Indian military played it as a battle simulation game to work out strategy—with 100 or more squares on the original chess boards compared to 64 in our most common modern form. Scholars from those days noted that one of the main reasons ancient Indians used ivory was to produce the pieces for chess and backgammon sets.

An illustration from an old Persian
manuscript shows Indian ambassadors
presenting the chatrang to the king
of Persia, Khosrow I Anushirwan.
(Photo by Firdausi)

From India, chatrang spread to Persia, which changed its name to shatranj. When attacking the piece we now know as the king, the Persians would call out “Shah!” (the Persian word for king, typically the military ruler) and shah mat for checkmate. (Hear the similarity with the current form?) From there, the game spread throughout the Arab and Greek empires then to the Byzantine empire through Spain. Once it made its way through Europe, the game took on its current form around the 15^th century, with ornamental pieces shaped as kings, queens, bishops, knights, and rooks, before making its way to East Asia via the Silk Road.

Much of the world derived its names for chess from the Persian one: in Latin, shatranj became scacchi, thus influencing the names in languages derived from Latin, such as echecs in French, or inspired by the Germanic, Russian, or Slavic, such as schack in Swedish or szacyhy in Polish. Mongols call the game shatar; Ethiopians, senterej; and the Russians as shakhmaty. In German, Schachmatt means checkmate.

Plenty of food for thought next time I sit down with our beat-up board games, cluttered with pictures of Big Bird and Elmo, right?