When the film Searching for Bobby Fischer came out I was sixteen years old and winning everything in sight. I became America’s youngest International Master that year, I won the U.S. Under 21 Championship twice at sixteen and seventeen, and I came within a hair’s breadth of winning the World Under 18 Championship when I was seventeen. From the outside I may have looked unbeatable, but inside I was a kid barely holding everything together.
While I adjusted to the glare of the media spotlight, my relationship to chess was slowly becoming less organic. I found myself playing to live up to Hollywood expectations instead of for love of the game. I understood the danger of becoming distracted by the adulation and I fought to keep focused. But I was slipping. More and more fans came to my tournaments to watch me play and get autographs. Beautiful girls smiled and handed me their phone numbers. Grandmasters smirked and tried to tear off my head. I was living in two worlds, and I started having a peculiar sensation of detachment during tournament games. Sometimes I seemed to play chess from across the room, while watching myself think.
Around the same time I began training with a Russian Grandmaster who urged me to become more conservative stylistically. He was a lovely man—literary, compassionate, funny—as human beings we connected but chessically we didn’t gel. He was a systematic strategist with a passion for slow, subtle maneuvering. I had always been a creative, attacking player who loved the wild side of chess. I liked to live on the edge in the spirit of Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov, and now my new coach had me immerse myself in the opposite sensibility. We dove into the great prophylactic players, studying the games of Tigran Petrosian and Anatoly Karpov, ex-world champions who seemed to breathe a different air. Instead of creating exciting dynamics in their positions, these guys competed like Anacondas, preempting every aggressive idea until opponents were paralyzed and gasping for life.
While I found this work interesting, the effects of moving away from my natural voice as a competitor were disturbing. Instead of following my instincts, my coach urged me to ask myself, “What would Karpov do here?” But Karpov had cold blood and mine boiled. When he searched for tiny strategic advantages, I yearned for wild dynamics. As I tried to play in the style that pleased my coach, chess began to feel alien. At times I felt as though my head was in a thick cloud and I couldn’t see the variations. My strengths as a young champion—consistency, competitive presence, focus, drive, passion, creativity—were elusive and moving out of reach. I still loved chess, but it no longer felt like an extension of my being.
Of course I was also at that moment when boys become men. While my chess life was growing increasingly complex, I was thriving in my coming of age. My last two years of high school were spent at the Professional Children’s School, an exciting learning environment teeming with brilliant young actors, dancers, musicians, a fencer, a young entrepreneur, a couple of gymnasts, and now a chess player. Everyone at PCS was pursuing something and many students were famous from movie careers or Broadway roles (talent shows and school plays were absolute jaw-droppers). The school gave me more flexibility to catch up on my studies after traveling to distant tournaments, and the education was first rate—one creative writing class with a brilliant woman named Shellie Sclan was the most inspiring academic experience of my life.
I read Hemingway, Dostoevsky, Hesse, Camus, and Jack Kerouac. I went out with girls and brooded about spending half my life entrenched over a chessboard trying to will heart and soul out of sixty-four squares. Socially, PCS allowed young celebrities to insulate themselves from staring fans, because everyone was exceptional in one way or another. This was a tremendous relief and I thrived at PCS; but in my professional life I felt oppressed. The one-two punch of a fame I wasn’t really prepared for and a building sense of alienation from the art I loved had me hungering for escape. When I graduated from high school, I deferred my acceptance at Columbia University and took off for Eastern Europe. I had fallen in love with a Slovenian girl and decided to spend some time on the road.
This was an intense, formative period of my life. As I matured into a nineteen- and twenty-year-old young man, my relationship to chess was infused with a more sophisticated consciousness. I was no longer soaring with the momentum of my early career. Now I had my demons to wrestle with. Self-doubt and alienation were part of my reality, but in Europe I was free of the immense pressures of my celebrity back home.
I studied chess and literature and traveled the world with my notebook and a rucksack. My home base was a little village called Vrholvje, nestled in the mountains of southern Slovenia and overlooking northern Italy. I lived romantically, took long walks in the woods, and dove deeper and deeper into chess, sifting through the hidden nuances of nine rounds I had just played against Grandmasters in Amsterdam, Crete, or Budapest. Then, after periods of intense work, I would take off for another big tournament in some faraway place.
During these years I discovered a powerful new private relationship to chess. I worked on the game tirelessly, but was now moved less by ambition than by a yearning for self-discovery. While my understanding of the game deepened, I continued to be uneven and, at times, self-defeating in competition. I was consistently unhappy before leaving for tournaments, preferring my lifestyle of introspection and young romance. When I dragged myself off to tournaments, some days I would play brilliant chess and others I would feel disconnected, like a poet without his muse. In order to make my new knowledge manifest over the board, I had to figure out how to release myself from the baggage I had acquired, and I developed a method of study that made chess and life begin to merge in my being.
At this point in my career, despite my issues, I was still a strong chess player competing against world-class rivals. Each tournament game was riddled with intricate complications and hour upon hour of mounting tension. My opponents and I created increasingly subtle problems for the other to solve, building the pressure in the position until the chessboard and the mind itself felt like a fault line, trembling, on the verge of explosion. Sometimes technical superiority proved decisive, but more often somebody cracked, as if a tiny weakness deep in the being suddenly erupted onto the board.
These moments, where the technical and psychological collide, are where I directed my study of the game. In the course of a nine-round chess tournament, I’d arrive at around four or five critical positions that I didn’t quite understand or in which I made an error. Immediately after each of my games, I quickly entered the moves into my computer, noting my thought process and how I felt emotionally at various stages of the battle. Then after the tournament, armed with these fresh impressions, I went back to Vrholvje and studied the critical moments.
This was the work that I referred to in the Introduction as numbers to leave numbers. Usually long study sessions went like this: I began with the critical position from one of my games, where my intuitive understanding had not been up to the challenge. At first my mind was like a runner on a cold winter morning—stiff, unhappy about the coming jog, dreary. Then I began to move, recalling my attacking ideas in the struggle and how nothing had fully connected. I tried to pick apart my opponent’s position and discovered new layers of his defensive resources, all the while my mind thawing, integrating the evolving structural dynamics it had not quite understood before. Over time my blood started flowing, sweat came, I settled into the rhythm of analysis, soaked in countless patterns of evolving sophistication as I pored over what a computer would consider billions of variations. Like a runner in stride, my thinking became unhindered, free-flowing, faster and faster as I lost myself in the position. Sometimes the study would take six hours in one sitting, sometimes thirty hours over a week. I felt like I was living, breathing, sleeping in that maze, and then, as if from nowhere, all the complications dissolved and I understood.
When I looked at the critical position from my tournament game, what had stumped me a few days or hours or weeks before now seemed perfectly apparent. I saw the best move, felt the correct plan, understood the evaluation of the position. I couldn’t explain this new knowledge with variations or words. It felt more elemental, like rippling water or a light breeze. My chess intuition had deepened. This was the study of numbers to leave numbers.I
A fascinating offshoot of this method of analysis was that I began to see connections between the leaps of chess understanding and my changing vision of the world. During my study of the critical positions, I noted the feeling I had during the actual chess game. I explained above how in the pressure of tournaments, the tension in the mind mounts with the tension in the position, and an error on the board usually parallels a psychological collapse of sorts. Almost invariably, there was a consistent psychological strain to my errors in a given tournament, and what I began to notice is that my problems on the chessboard usually were manifesting themselves in my life outside of chess.
For example, while living in Slovenia it appealed to my sense of adventure to be on the road, traveling, writing, exploring new places, but I also missed my family. I hardly ever spoke English, communicating with everyone but my girlfriend (who did speak English) in broken Spanish, bad Italian, and even worse Serbo-Croatian. I was a stranger in a strange land. On the other hand, I felt quite at home in Vrholvje. I loved the charming village life, and enjoyed my periods of introspection. But then every month or so I would leave Slovenia and take off, alone, for Hungary, Germany, or Holland to compete in a grueling two-week tournament. Each trip was an adventure, but in the beginning I was invariably homesick. I missed my girlfriend. I missed my family, I missed my friends, I missed everything. I felt like a leaf in the wind, adrift, all alone. The first few days were always rough but then I’d get my bearings in the new city and have a wonderful time. I was just having trouble with transitions.
It was amazing how clearly this manifested on the chessboard. For a period of time, almost all my chess errors came in a moment immediately following or preceding a big change. For example, if I was playing a positional chess game, with complex maneuvering, long-term strategical planning, and building tension, and suddenly the struggle exploded into concrete tactics, I would sometimes be slow to accommodate the new scenario. Or, if I was playing a very tactical position that suddenly transformed into an abstract endgame, I would keep on calculating instead of taking a deep breath and making long-term plans. I was having trouble with the first major decision following the departure from prepared opening analysis and I was not keeping pace with sudden shifts in momentum. My whole chess psychology was about holding on to what was, because I was fundamentally homesick. When I finally noticed this connection, I tackled transitions in both chess and life. In chess games, I would take some deep breaths and clear my mind when the character of the struggle shifted. In life, I worked on embracing change instead of fighting it. With awareness and action, in both life and chess my weakness was transformed into a strength.
Once I recognized that deeply buried secrets in a competitor tend to surface under intense pressure, my study of chess became a form of psychoanalysis. I unearthed my subtlest foibles through chess, and the link between my personal and artistic sides was undeniable. The psychological theme could range from transitions to resilient concentration, fluidity of mind, control, leaps into the unknown, sitting with tension, the downward spiral, being at peace with discomfort, giving into fatigue, emotional turbulence, and invariably the chess moves paralleled the life moment. Whenever I noticed a weakness, I took it on.
I also studied my opponents closely. Like myself, their psychological nuances in life manifested over the board. I would watch a rival tapping his feet impatiently while waiting for an elevator or carefully maneuvering around his peas on a dinner plate. If someone was a controlling person who liked to calculate everything out before acting, I would make the chess position chaotic, beyond calculation, so he would have to make that uncomfortable leap into the unknown. If an opponent was intuitive, fast, and hungering for abstract creations, I would make the position precise, so the only solution lay in patient, mind-numbing math.
When I was twenty-one years old and came back to America, I was more in love with the study of chess than ever. The game had become endlessly fascinating to me, and its implications stretched far beyond winning and losing—I was no longer primarily refining the skill of playing chess, but was discovering myself through chess. I saw the art as a movement closer and closer to an unattainable truth, as if I were traveling through a tunnel that continuously deepened and widened as I progressed. The more I knew about the game, the more I realized how much there was to know. I emerged from each good work session in slightly deeper awe of the mystery of chess, and with a building sense of humility. Increasingly, I felt more tender about my work than fierce. Art was truly becoming for art’s sake.
Of course not everything was fine and dandy. While personal growth had been my focus in my life on the road, when I came back to America I was back in the limelight. Fans once again mobbed me at tournaments, and I was expected to perform—but I was in one of those vulnerable stages of growth, like the hermit crab between shells. While my new philosophical approach to chess was exciting spiritually, it was also a bit undermining for a young competitor. The youthful arrogance of believing I had the answers was gone. I was flexible and introspective but lacked that unique character and drive to my game that had made me a champion. As a lover and learner of chess, I was flying, but as an artist and performer I was all locked up.
I. It is important to understand that by numbers to leave numbers, or form to leave form, I am describing a process in which technical information is integrated into what feels like natural intelligence. Sometimes there will literally be numbers. Other times there will be principles, patterns, variations, techniques, ideas. A good literal example of this process, one that does in fact involve numbers, is a beginner’s very first chess lesson. All chess players learn that the pieces have numerical equivalents—bishops and knights are worth three pawns, a rook is five pawns, a queen is nine. Novices are counting in their heads or on their fingers before they make exchanges. In time, they will stop counting. The pieces will achieve a more flowing and integrated value system. They will move across the board like fields of force. What was once seen mathematically is now felt intuitively.