My Chess

Index

Foreword

Every chessplayer has his memories. These memories are part of a private world that the player has created around him. In My Chess, Hans Ree describes this world. He delves into the past when he was still an active player. He portrays impressive Dutchmen from a distant past that he knew: grandmaster Hein Donner, writer Willem Frederik Hermans, psychologist and international master Johan Barendregt, singer Tabe Bas. Ree brings them to life through his refined penmanship.

Ree expresses his fascination for art and literature when he writes about Vladimir Nabokov and Marcel Duchamp, both devotees of chess. But there is more: Ree remembers his old schoolfriend with whom he played endless series of games. He also reveals that he recorded games that he played against himself. I was particularly struck by this, as I had the same habit of inventing games when I was young. I did not present them as games against myself, though. In his chapter on chess cafés, Ree gives a gripping impresion of the atmosphere and the regular customers..

After his career as a player, Ree became a chess journalist. He never really aspired to writing novels or biographies. When he visits Duchamp’s widow, he expresses his intention to write a biography about her late husband. Later on he changes his mind and leaves this work to others.

Ree knows that his forte is the short story. In this field, his literary style blossoms to full advantage. Ree has a very economic use of words. He likes to interweave anecdotes in his stories. For a lesser writer, this might cause a problem, since the reader may get confused. Ree, however, does it in a purposeful way. As a result, My Chess is a treasury of stories and anecdotes.

Jan Timman

Amsterdam

June 2013

A6648

From time to time, I take a look to see how A6648 is doing. He or she — but I don’t really think it’s a woman — is a member of the Internet Chess Club, just like me. The club has about 30,000 members, ranging from world champions to common-or-garden players, and at any hour of the day or night at least a thousand of them are online. For most of the day and the night, A6648 is one of them.

Like the majority of club members, he uses an alias, but he has disclosed some things about himself: that he lives in New York, that he has been a member since 1996 and that he has played a record number of over 495,000 games since that time. This was in October 2009, so I’m sure many have been added since. (And indeed, in 2013 he had reached 580,000 games)

One of the last times that I was watching A6648’s movements, the club’s computer indicated that he had checked out at 7:54 am. The club’s clock is set to Pittsburgh time, which is identical to the time in New York, where A6648 lives.

This means that he had played through the night and may have taken a nap around eight in the morning — but not for long, because later I saw that he had already finished a fresh game session at 2:57 pm.

A6648’s favorite playing time is one minute per player for the entire game — roughly one second per move, played by instinct: not thinking but doing. Since 1996, day and night, every single free hour.

Many people think that this is not how chess ought to be played, and I agree. Chess is played in cafés, at home against friends, at a real club or in a tournament — places where you find real flesh-and-blood people instead of digital pseudonyms on a screen.

But there may be reasons to do it differently. Maybe A6648 is sick or handicapped, so that he can only play on a computer. I would like to know more about him, but he doesn’t say much about himself, possibly because he doesn’t want to play the sympathy card.

A6648 is an extreme case, but there are hundreds of thousands of people in the world who play in one of the many Internet chess clubs every day. A6648 is the unknown soldier of Internet chess, shackled to his screen and playing till he drops.

Hans Aalmoes

Hans Aalmoes is probably not mentioned in any other chess book, but this book is about my chess world, and in that world he was important.

We played chess at school, the Cartesius high school in Amsterdam, and in junior chess club Het Zwarte Veulen (The Black Foal). I had learned the game from my father when I was six years old, but I rarely played — until a chess club was established at that high school during my junior year. After that, if it had been up to me, I would have done nothing but play chess for the next few years — at least that’s how it feels when I look back.

In The Defense, Vladimir Nabokov describes the moment when little Luzhin sees a chess game for the first time in his life: Only in April, during the Easter holidays, did that inevitable day come for Luzhin when the whole world suddenly went dark, as if someone had thrown a switch, and in the darkness only one thing remained brilliantly lit, a newborn wonder, a dazzling islet on which his whole life was destined to be concentrated.

I did not become a Luzhin, neither becoming such a strong player as he, nor turning into such a misfit in the normal world, but in my life, too, there had come a brilliantly lit thing. I played at the school chess club, in matches against other schools, at the junior chess club (which by a happy coincidence was established just when I succumbed to chess fever), in class with surreptitiously exchanged notes on which we wrote our moves, and at home, where I played an endless series of matches against Hans Aalmoes and another chess fanatic from our school, Hans Plukker.

Why? Because I had found something at which I could win, you could say. But winning only comes after a while; almost everyone starts their chess career with losses. You could also say that playing chess is a form of human contact that remains superficial and doesn’t require you to talk a lot, which can be a real boon for a bashful child.

Such psychological explanations may have some truth in them, but they fail to give chess its due. It was a magnificent game; that is the best explanation. Everything was beautiful in my eyes. The pieces had wonderful shapes that perfectly fitted my hand, and in very short order I had mastered the casual gesture with which a seasoned chessplayer removes an enemy piece from the board: by picking it up between middle finger and ring finger, while continuing to hold his own piece between index finger and thumb. The pieces on the board just after the opening, when there were still a lot of them in play, constituted a visually attractive group of sculptures. But the most beautiful thing was what you couldn’t see or feel: the force fields with which the pieces affected one another, and the endless range of possibilities this created.

I copied my games into nice, thick, hard-back notebooks, adding smart-alecky comments in imitation of the game analyses I read at home in Lod. Prins’s chess column in the Het Parool newspaper. Lod. was short for Lodewijk, but that was something I did not know.

They were not very good yet, our games and my comments, yet we were strong enough to win the Dutch school championship on one occasion: in March 1960, Cartesius High School beat Lorentz High School from Eindhoven 4-2.

Our school was in Amsterdam, although you could hardly call it Amsterdam anymore. It was a new school standing on a bare wasteland in a newly built district called the Overtoomse Veld. For such a new school in the Siberia of Amsterdam it was a great success to win a chess championship against all kinds of venerable schools with rich traditions. I did not yet think in those terms then, although I did have an inkling that true life was to be found closer to the city center.

The issue of the Tijdschrift van de Koninklijke Nederlandse Schaakbond (Journal of the Royal Netherlands Chess Federation) with the result of the school championship also contained a report from the individual junior championship of the Netherlands in Diever. It was the first time I was allowed to participate, and I finished shared fifth. The report in the federation journal ended with the sentence: The play of the youthful Hans Ree definitely holds promise.

Yochanan Afek

The Israeli IM Yochanan Afek, who has been living in Amsterdam for the last few years, is a multi-talented man. He is a strong chessplayer, a gifted composer of endgame studies and problems, an experienced chess trainer, a specialist in the area of chess stamp collecting and a prolific publicist.

One Saturday afternoon in the year 2000, we were sitting in the local train from Rotterdam to Amsterdam — at least, that’s what we thought. I had played a game in our club competition in Rotterdam, and Yochanan had come along as a spectator. While we were travelling back, he gave me some riddles to solve.

I recently told Artur Yusupov that I know five grandmasters called Arthur... Yochanan wanted me to name them, of course, but I couldn’t. Maybe that was exactly what he wanted. I had failed the first test.

He continued: ‘Five grandmasters have died this year.’ That one I should be able to answer, I thought. I listed Lodewijk Prins, George Koltanowski, Abe Yanofsky and Aivars Gipslis, but number five, Alexei Vyzmanavin, I had already forgotten again, despite the fact that I had been shocked at the time by his early death — he had been only 40.

The chess world had also forgotten Vyzmanavin a bit, although he had briefly been in the world’s top 20. In his final years, he had stopped playing serious tournaments. He was depressed and penniless. Nor did he seem to have any friends, because after his death — from a heart attack — it took six days for him to be found.

The year 2000 is a dangerous year for grandmasters, said Yochanan, possibly to give me a word of warning. Then we talked about Jacques Mieses (18651954) who, at his 80th birthday party, had said that since he had safely negotiated the dangerous period between 70 and 80, when so many people pass away, he might well go on living forever.

We failed to notice that the train had turned around in Woerden and was on its way back to Rotterdam, from where we had set out. It stopped in Gouda. Gouda, haven’t we been there already? Yochanan inquired cautiously. If this was true, we would have to get out, but he had already gotten the better of me twice. Was he now also thinking that he knew the geography of Holland better than I? No, no, that’s impossible, I said resolutely, with the result that our short train ride turned into a long trip with plenty of time to exchange a lot more interesting chess information.

That same day, April 30th, it was announced that yet another grandmaster had died, the American Arthur Dake (1910-2000). He was one of the five Arthurs that Yochanan had talked about, so besides all his other qualities, you’d almost credit him with second sight as well.

Shortly after our train trip he received a Dutch residence permit, a card that allowed him to practice the freelance profession of chessplayer and endgame composer in the Netherlands. An endgame composer rarely earns any money, so I felt great joy, and a measure of pride, that our authorities had recognized endgame composition as a profession capable of enriching Dutch culture with a unique and irreplaceable contribution.

Alcohol

The Chinese poet Li Bai wrote in the eighth cenury that only the names of the great drinkers will live on, and thereby has put many lovers of Chinese poetry on the wrong track. World champions Alexander Alekhine and Mikhail Tal were great drinkers, and their names surely live on, but most other world champions were more moderate tipplers who lived and played chess for far longer than those two great drinkers. Wanting to become a great chessplayer and starting by becoming a great drinker — that’s definitely not the right approach.

At the 1978 tournament in Kiev, I spent a lot of time in the company of Dr. Heinz Lehmann, a learned lawyer who played for Berlin there, not Germany, because the Soviet Union refused to recognize people living in West Berlin as citizens of the German Federal Republic.

Over bottles of vodka, Lehmann told me great stories, for example, about the Russian grandmaster Ratmir Kholmov, with whom he had played in the 1965 Capablanca Memorial in Havana.

This tournament became famous because of the participation of Robert Fischer not in Havana, but in New York. The American authorities had refused Fischer permission to travel to Cuba, so he played his games by telex. He did this in the Marshall Chess Club in New York, where the chessboard and table that he used can still be admired as relics in the club’s headquarters. This was an enormous handicap for Fischer, as the telex connection between New York and Havana was slow and his games lasted hours longer than if he had been there. It was a 21-round tournament, a format that no longer exists. Fischer finished shared second, a half-point behind winner Vasily Smyslov — a magnificent performance given his handicap.

But to return to the alcohol... Lehman told me that in the course of that Capablanca tournament, he and Kholmov had discovered that they had fought at the same front, at the same little village even, during world War II — Lehmann on the German side, Kholmov for the Soviet Union.

This discovery made them inseparable. Every day after the round they retired to a hotel room, put a few bottles of rum on the table and started swapping memories about their battle, old comrades, albeit from opposite sides of the front.

I found it an interesting story, so I wrote about it in a Dutch newspaper. But then Genna Sosonko told me that the story couldn’t possibly be true. Kholmov, he said, had never fought at the Russian front. During the war he had served on a Russian ship that sailed to the United States, which is why he never got permission to play chess in a capitalist country afterwards.

Maybe Heinz Lehmann had been pulling my leg. While in Kiev, we had also talked about Heinrich Heine, who was supposed to have written that he intended to go to Holland when the world was nearing its end, because in Holland everything happened 50 years later.

In the Netherlands, the question of whether Heine had really written this was hotly debated. Most literary experts were of the opinion that it had been thought up by a Dutch prankster. Lehman disagreed. He said he was a great admirer of Heine, that he was very familiar with his work and that he was sure he remembered reading this thing about Holland somewhere, although he couldn’t say exactly where.

Since that time, Dutch Heine experts have trawled through his entire oeuvre to find this declaration about Holland, but to no avail. It could be that Lehmann pulled my leg twice, first about Kholmov and then about Heine. Many bottles of vodka passed the tables in our hotel rooms in Kiev, because there wasn’t much else to do there except drink.

Kholmov, Lehmann’s so-called war opponent, died in 2006 at the age of 80. He had a great reputation in Russia, but up to 1989 he had never been allowed to play chess in a capitalist country. This was because he had seen too much of the West and as a consequence was no longer deemed to be a trustworthy Soviet citizen. During World War II he had been in the United States, where he had seen that people’s lives there were better than at home.

On the voyage back to Vladivostok, his ship had been stuck for weeks off the coast of Japan, a country on which the Soviet Union would declare war a year later. These were crimes that could get a Soviet citizen executed or packed off to a concentration camp. Kholmov was lucky that he was only forbidden to play in the West.

Roughly a year before Kholmov’s death, Genna Sosonko had a long talk with him at the Aeroflot tournament in Moscow, about which he wrote an article in New in Chess. It goes without saying that they discussed his famous game against Fischer at the Capablanca tournament in Havana 1965, a game that Kholmov had won.

Kholmov recounted that he had been drinking Bacardi rum in the hotel bar the night before the game. In the early hours of the morning, Smyslov had dragged him to his room to show him a variation of the Ruy Lopez, but Kholmov was already so drunk by that time that Smyslov was convinced that he wouldn’t remember a word of what he told him. But Kholmov remembered.

To Sosonko he said: The next day I sit down at the board, and I think to myself: What possessed you last night, there’ll be hell to pay for what you did, and just before a game against Fischer, too. They will say: You asshole, you were as drunk as a skunk. I sat there, gritting my teeth and clenching my fists and refusing to get up from my chair. And imagine: the entire line that we had looked at the night before came on the board.

Kholmov won that game against Fischer beautifully, so let that be a salutary lesson to all clean-living fanatics. But alas, such triumphs of the drink-befuddled mind are few and far between. In his conversation with Sosonko, Kholmov wondered aloud whether he would have been more successful if he hadn’t drunk so much, coming to the obvious conclusion that this would most certainly have been the case.

About smoking you could say much the same as about drinking. Both have been called both the cause and the solution of all our problems. Both are bad for chessplayers, but for some people — me being one of them — they can present themselves as indispensable aids.

Smoking dulls the mind, but the treacherous thing is that for a short spell it will sharpen it. When someone smokes during a game, his mental alertness will decrease, but each time he lights a cigarette, it briefly increases. This is not a subjective delusion but a scientifically proven fact.

Each new cigarette raises the level of one’s mental activity by a fraction, but each time from a lower starting point. The cumulative effect of all those cigarettes is negative. Something similar can be said about alcohol. It helps you to tolerate stress, but it can also cause you to become incapable of tolerating any stress at all anymore.

Genna Sosonko’s books about chess in the Soviet Union feature copious amounts of alcohol, and he makes no exception for himself. In his interview with Kholmov, the latter says: Ah, Gennochka, do you remember the two of us sharing a hotel room in Riga for two weeks? Do you remember Lenya (Stein) and Misha (Tal) carrying you back like a dead-drunk corpse, not that they were so steady on their legs themselves, and that they put you on a table and that you slept on that table the whole night?

It’s not for nothing that according to a Russian proverb, chess and wine are blood brothers. Sosonko, incidentally, has cleaned up his act. Since his arrival in the Netherlands in the 1970s I have known him as a man who likes to drink a glass of wine, but always in moderation.

As regards the theme of chess and alcohol, my most vivid memory is of a scene during a tournament in Sukhumi, a seaside resort in the Crimea, in 1972. Former world champion Mikhail Tal was crawling on all fours through his hotel room looking for a bottle of brandy that he thought his wife might have hidden in a closet. All the while, she was sitting on his back trying to stop him. Tal won the tournament, but he lost that drunken fight with his wife.

Why do we drink? My friend Tabe Bas, who died in January 2009, never touched alcohol. While I am writing this, a thought strikes me: was he really the only friend of yours who never drank? I really think so.

Tabe described himself as a man permanently two drinks over par. What he meant by this was that his normal state of being was identical to that of someone who had drunk two glasses of alcohol. He never drank alcohol, but he was in the habit of gesticulating vigorously and had a loud voice, which is not so strange, considering that he was a professional singer. People who didn’t know him often thought he was drunk.

I, on the other hand, particularly in my early years, was naturally a couple of drinks below par, shy and introverted. I didn’t want to be like that, I wanted to be at par, like the rest of the world, and for this I needed two glasses of alcohol. But there was always a difference, of course. Someone who needs two drinks is not going to stop there.

If you type in chess + alcohol in Google, you get in excess of two million results, which seems to suggest that the Russian proverb about the pair’s blood brotherhood has more than a grain of truth in it. But not all of them are stories about debauchery, of course. On the website of Russian chessplayer Alexandra Kosteniuk, for example, I came across a story about the European women’s championship that she had won in 2004, and which contained a photograph with the caption: After accepting her prize, Alexandra drinks a non-alcoholic cocktail in a nearby sushi restaurant. What an annoying show of virtuousness. But maybe it was at the behest of the company Balmain, whose watches she promotes.

On the Internet you can also find an article by the American chess master and journalist Jeremy Silman about the personality changes his American chess friends underwent during a drinking spree. Grandmaster Larry Christiansen changed into a simple-minded fan of the ultra-rightwing radio show host Rush Limbaugh, while his colleague John Fedorowicz turned into a mean version of the boxer Rocky Balboa, a movie character. Only grandmaster Nick DeFirmian remained harmless. Normally a quiet and reserved person, he morphed into more of a kissing-cuddling love beast with each drink.

And what about Silman himself; did he have nothing to report about his own experience? He let it be known that he wasn’t really part of this bunch of drunks, having been introduced to more civilized relaxants in San Francisco in the 1970s.

But even with Nick DeFirmian’s mild-mannered way of getting drunk you may expose yourself to danger, as witness a weblog he wrote during the 2006 American championship. On the evening before the first rest day the players had a party, attended by the usual suspects as described by Silman, of course. They started with beer and wine, and when these ran out, the Scottish journalist John Henderson brought in an ample supply of whiskey.

Later, when the whiskey had also run out, DeFirmian walked to his hotel — at least, that’s what he thought. In reality he had taken the opposite direction, and after walking for a while he suddenly found himself on a naval base. They had posted a sentry, but apparently he and the sentry had missed one another. So much for home security, DeFirmian wrote in his weblog.

A military police car passed, and DeFirmian thumbed a lift. The policemen asked him if he was a security risk, to which DeFirmian replied that he was and that therefore they should give him a lift. Such jokes can get you into serious trouble these days, but DeFirmian was lucky. They picked him up and drove him to his hotel. If he had had a beard and been wearing a white dress, the outcome would probably have been very different.

But what about myself? Isn’t it time I told you about my own disgraceful experiences? I have also learned a lesson about the dangers of alcoholic chessplayers parties. This particular get-together was in the hotel room of the Finn Heikki Westerinen during the 1978 Buenos Aires Olympiad. In the next round, the Netherlands was to play the Soviet Union, but we would have a rest day first, so this important match was far away.

I was sitting on a bed with the Austrian Franz Hölzl and the German woman player Gisela Fischdieck, who was playing in the women’s Olympiad. I don’t remember the exact tenor of the conversation, but at some point I uttered the ominous words: Franz, let’s fight a duel over this woman. I got off the bed, but not with the grace of an experienced fencer that I had in mind — on the contrary, I fell over and broke a leg.

I felt no pain, but I couldn’t get up. Only natural for that drunken sod, the other partygoers must have thought at first, but after a while they began to realize that there was something else the matter with me. Someone called our team captain Frans Kuijpers, who had gone to bed hours earlier. Knowing his duty, he rushed to the room of Westerinen, who opened the door and welcomed him with the words: Of course it’s terrible what happened, but what do you want to drink?

Then someone rang the German Helmut Pfleger who, besides being a grandmaster, was also a doctor. He established that my leg was broken in two places. I was taken to a hospital, where I was awakened the next morning by a nurse who addressed me in Frisian, something so unexpected in Buenos Aires that I briefly wondered if all of it hadn’t been just a dream.

Back in Holland, I saw that the Russian weekly 64 had written about my accident. I cannot really read Russian, but I recognized a few words. "Gollandski master Gans Ree and travma" — this had to be about me.

It had been the first — and last — time that the Soviet team had not won the Olympiad. They had finished second behind Hungary, which is why the match reports were more subdued than normal, and the journalists had had to fill the space with amusing minor incidents.

I had the notice translated and saw that this was the gist of it: People often regard the Dutch as coarse and humorless folk, but that this is not the case was demonstrated by the Dutch Master Hans Ree, who laughed so hard about a joke from one of his teammates that he fell off his bed and broke a leg.

Doctors in an Amsterdam hospital told me that the Argentinians had set my leg wrong and that it would have to be broken again in order to do it right. That procedure took quite a bit of time. These days you’re thrown out of the hospital the minute you open your eyes on the operating table, but in those days they were financed in a different way and far more inclined to try and keep you there as long as possible.

I missed the zonal tournament held in Amsterdam shortly after the Olympiad as a result, but for the Hoogoven tournament in Wijk aan Zee, I was up and about again, albeit on crutches.

It was brutally cold there,