I think a life of ambition is like existing on a balance beam. As a child, there is no fear, no sense for the danger of falling. The beam feels wide and stable, and natural playfulness allows for creative leaps and fast learning. You can run around doing somersaults and flips, always testing yourself with a love for discovery and new challenges. If you happen to fall off—no problem, you just get back on. But then, as you get older, you become more aware of the risk of injury. You might crack your head or twist your knee. The beam is narrow and you have to stay up there. Plunging off would be humiliating.
While a child can make the beam a playground, high-stress performers often transform the beam into a tightrope. Any slip becomes a crisis. Suddenly you have everything to lose, the rope is swaying above a crater of fire, increasingly dramatic acrobatics are expected of you but the air feels thick with projectiles aimed to dislodge your balance. What was once light and inspiring can easily mutate into a nightmare.
A key component of high-level learning is cultivating a resilient awareness that is the older, conscious embodiment of a child’s playful obliviousness. My chess career ended with me teetering on a string above leaping flames, and in time, through a different medium, I rediscovered a relationship to ambition and art that has allowed me the freedom to create like a child under world championship pressure. This journey, from child back to child again, is at the very core of my understanding of success.
I believe that one of the most critical factors in the transition to becoming a conscious high performer is the degree to which your relationship to your pursuit stays in harmony with your unique disposition. There will inevitably be times when we need to try new ideas, release our current knowledge to take in new information—but it is critical to integrate this new information in a manner that does not violate who we are. By taking away our natural voice, we leave ourselves without a center of gravity to balance us as we navigate the countless obstacles along our way. It might be interesting to examine, with a bit more detail, how this happened to me.
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Mark Dvoretsky and Yuri Razuvaev are the pillars of the Russian school of chess. Considered by many to be the two greatest chess trainers in the world, these two men have devoted their lives to carving talented young chess masters into world-class competitors. They are both armed with an enormous repertoire of original educational material for top-caliber players and you would be hard-pressed to find a Grandmaster out there who was not seriously influenced by one of them. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one, I had the opportunity to work extensively with both of these legendary coaches and I believe the implications of their diametrically opposed pedagogical styles are critical for students of all endeavors. They were certainly critical for me.
When you meet Yuri Razuvaev, you feel calmed. He has the humble, peaceful air of a Buddhist monk and a sweet, slightly ironic smile. If making a decision, for example about where to eat, he will shrug and gently imply that both possibilities would find him quite content. His language is similarly abstract. His mildest comments feel like natural koans, and in conversation it is all too easy to let gems slip through your mind like a breeze. When the chessboard comes out, Razuvaev’s face settles into a relaxed focus, his eyes become piercing, and a razor-sharp mind comes to bear. Analyzing with Razuvaev, I consistently felt as though he was penetrating the deepest wrinkles in my mind through my every chess move. After just a few hours of work with him, I had the impression he understood me more truly than almost anybody in my life. It was like playing chess with Yoda.
Mark Dvoretsky is a very different type of personality. I believe he is the most important author for chess professionals in the world. His books are extensive training programs for world-class players and are studied religiously by strong International Masters and Grandmasters. “Reading” a Dvoretsky book takes many months of hard work, because they are so densely packed with ideas about some of the more esoteric elements of serious chess thinking. It’s amazing how many hundreds of hours I spent laboring my way through Dvoretsky’s chapters, my brain pushed to the limit, emerging from every study session utterly exhausted, but infused with a slightly more nuanced understanding of the outer reaches of chessic potential. On the page, the man is a genius.
In life, Dvoretsky is a tall, heavyset man who wears thick glasses and rarely showers or changes his clothes. He is socially awkward and when not talking about or playing chess, he seems like a big fish flopping on sand. I met Dvoretsky at the first Kasparov-Karpov World Championship match in Moscow when I was seven years old, and we studied together sporadically throughout my teens. He would occasionally live in my family’s home for four or five days at a time when he visited America. During these periods, it seemed that every concern but chess was an intrusive irrelevance. When we were not studying, he would sit in his room, staring at chess positions on his computer. At meals, he would mumble while dropping food on the floor, and in conversation thick saliva collected at the corners of his mouth and often shot out like streams of glue. If you have read Nabokov’s wonderful novel The Defense, about the eccentric chess genius Luzhin—well, that is Dvoretsky.
When seated at a chessboard, Dvoretsky comes to life. His thick fingers somehow manipulate the pieces with elegance. He is extremely confident, arrogant in fact. He is most at home across the table from a talented pupil, and immediately begins setting up enormously complex chess compositions for the student to solve. His repertoire of abstruse material seems limitless, and it keeps on coming hour after hour in relentless interrogation. Dvoretsky loves to watch gifted chess minds struggle with his problems. He basks in his power while young champions are slowly drained of their audacious creativity. As a student, I found these sessions to be resonant of Orwell’s prison scenes in 1984, where independently minded thinkers were ruthlessly broken down until all that was left was a shell of a person.
Training with Yuri Razuvaev feels much more like a spiritual retreat than an Orwellian nightmare. Razuvaev’s method depends upon a keen appreciation for each student’s personality and chessic predispositions. Yuri has an amazing psychological acumen, and his instructional style begins with a close study of his student’s chess games. In remarkably short order, he discovers the core of the player’s style and the obstructions that are blocking pure self-expression. Then he devises an individualized training program that systematically deepens the student’s knowledge of chess while nurturing his or her natural gifts.
Mark Dvoretsky, on the other hand, has created a comprehensive training system that he believes all students should fit into. His method when working with a pupil is to break the student down rather brutally and then stuff him or her into the cookie-cutter mold of his training system. In my opinion this approach can have profoundly negative consequences for spirited young students.
During the critical period of my chess career following the release of the film Searching for Bobby Fischer, there was a disagreement about what direction my study should take. On one side was Dvoretsky and his protégé, my full time coach, who believed I should immerse myself in the study of prophylaxis, the art of playing chess like an anaconda. Great prophylactic players, like Karpov and Petrosian, seem to sense their opponent’s intention. They systematically cinch down the pressure, squeezing every last breath of life out of their prey while preventing any aggressive attempt before it even begins to materialize. They are counterpunchers by nature and they tend to be quiet, calculating, rather introverted personalities. On the other side of the argument was Yuri Razuvaev, who insisted that I should continue to nurture my natural voice as a chess player. Razuvaev believed that I was a gifted attacking player who should not be bullied away from my strengths. There was no question that I needed to learn more about Karpov’s type of chess to make the next steps in my development, but Razuvaev pointed out that I could learn Karpov from Kasparov.
This was a delicate and rather mystical-feeling idea, and I wish I had possessed the sophistication as a sixteen-year-old boy to see its power. On one level, Razuvaev’s point was that the great attacking players all possess keen understanding of positional chess, and the way for someone like myself to study high-level positional chess is to study the way the great players of my nature have integrated this element of the art. An interesting parallel would be to consider a lifetime rock guitarist who wants to learn about classical music. Let’s say there are two possible guides for him in this educational process. One is an esoteric classical composer who has never thought much of the “vulgarity of rock and roll,” and another is a fellow rocker who fell in love with classical music years ago and decided to dedicate his life to this different genre of music. The ex-rocker might touch a common nerve while the composer might feel like an alien. I needed to learn Karpov through a musician whose blood boiled just like mine.
Razuvaev’s educational philosophy falls very much in line with Taoist teachers who might say “learn this from that” or “learn the hard from the soft.” In most everyday life experiences, there seems to be a tangible connection between opposites. Consider how you may not realize how much someone’s companionship means to you until they are gone—heartbreak can give the greatest insight into the value of love. Think about how good a healthy leg feels after an extended time on crutches—sickness is the most potent ambassador for healthy living. Who knows water like a man dying of thirst? The human mind defines things in relation to one another—without light the notion of darkness would be unintelligible
Along the same lines, I have found that if we feed the unconscious, it will discover connections between what may appear to be disparate realities. The path to artistic insight in one direction often involves deep study of another—the intuition makes uncanny connections that lead to a crystallization of fragmented notions. The great Abstract Expressionist painters and sculptors, for example, came to their revolutionary ideas through precise realist training. Jackson Pollock could draw like a camera, but instead he chose to splatter paint in a wild manner that pulsed with emotion. He studied form to leave form. And in his work, the absence of classical structure somehow contains the essence of formal training—but without its ritualized limitations.
By extension, studying the greatest attacking chess games ever played, I would inevitably gain a deep appreciation for defensive nuance. Every high-level attacking chess creation emerges from a subtle building of forces that is at the core of positional chess. Just as the yin-yang symbol possesses a kernel of light in the dark, and of dark in the light, creative leaps are grounded in a technical foundation. Years later, my martial arts training would integrate this understanding into my everyday work, but as a teenager I didn’t understand. I don’t think I was even present to the question.
TWO WAYS OF BREAKING A STALLION
Along with her many other impressive abilities, my mom, Bonnie Waitzkin, trains horses. She used to compete as a hunter jumper and dressage rider, and as a young boy I often went with her to the barn in New Jersey and romped around on the ponies. I could never believe the way she communicated with the animals. If there was a problematic horse, people called my little mom, who would walk up to an angry 1,700-pound stallion, speak in a soothing voice, and soon enough the horse would be in the palm of her hand.
Mom has a unique ability to communicate with all animals. I’ve seen her hand-line five-hundred-pound blue marlin to the side of the boat, with barely any strength. Angry, barking dogs quiet and lick her legs. Birds flock to her. She is a whisperer. She loves the animals and she speaks their natural body language.
Bonnie explains that there are two basic ways of taming a wild horse. One is to tie it up and freak it out. Shake paper bags, rattle cans, drive it crazy until it submits to any noise. Make it endure the humiliation of being controlled by a rope and pole. Once it is partially submissive, you tack the horse, get on top, spur it, show it who’s boss—the horse fights, bucks, twists, turns, runs, but there is no escape. Finally the beast drops to its knees and submits to being domesticated. The horse goes through pain, rage, frustration, exhaustion, to near death . . . then it finally yields. This is the method some like to call shock and awe.
Then there is the way of the horse whisperers. My mother explains, “When the horse is very young, a foal, we gentle it. The horse is always handled. You pet it, feed it, groom it, stroke it, it gets used to you, likes you. You get on it and there is no fight, nothing to fight.” So you guide the horse toward doing what you want to do because he wants to do it. You synchronize desires, speak the same language. You don’t break the horse’s spirit. My mom goes on: “If you walk straight toward a horse, it will look at you and probably run away. You don’t have to oppose the horse in that way. Approach indirectly, without confrontation. Even an adult horse can be gentled. Handle him nicely, make your intention the horse’s intention.
“Then, when riding, both you and the horse want to maintain the harmony you have established. If you want to move to the right, you move to the right and so the horse naturally moves right to balance your weight.” Rider and animal feel like one. They have established a bond that neither wants to disrupt. And most critically, in this relationship between man and beast, the horse has not been whitewashed. When trained, he will bring his unique character to the table. The gorgeous, vibrant spirit is still flowing in an animal that used to run the plains.
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Dvoretsky wanted to break me—shock and awe—and Razuvaev wanted to bring out my natural shine. As it was, perhaps because of his own playing style, my full-time coach was drawn to Dvoretsky’s conclusions—and so from the age of sixteen a large part of my chess education involved distancing myself from my natural talents and integrating this Karpovian brand of chess. As a result, I lost my center of gravity as a competitor. I was told to ask myself,“What would Karpov play here?” and I stopped trusting my intuition because it was not naturally Karpovian. When the maelstrom surrounding Searching for Bobby Fischer hit me, a big part of my struggle holding course stemmed from my sense of alienation from my natural voice as an artist. I lacked an inner compass.
Reflecting back on the last years of my chess career, more than anything else I am struck by the complexity of the issues confronting an artist or competitor on a long-term learning curve. It would be too easy to say that one or two factors were decisive in pushing me away from chess. I could say that the film Searching for Bobby Fischer put too much pressure on my shoulders. I could say that a bad teacher distanced me from my natural love for the game. I could say that I discovered happiness elsewhere. But all this would be too simple.
To my mind, the fields of learning and performance are an exploration of greyness—of the in-between. There is the careful balance of pushing yourself relentlessly, but not so hard that you melt down. Muscles and minds need to stretch to grow, but if stretched too thin, they will snap. A competitor needs to be process-oriented, always looking for stronger opponents to spur growth, but it is also important to keep on winning enough to maintain confidence. We have to release our current ideas to soak in new material, but not so much that we lose touch with our unique natural talents. Vibrant, creative idealism needs to be tempered by a practical, technical awareness.
Navigating our way to excellence is tricky. There are shoals on either side of the narrow channel and in my chess career I ran into more than one. The effects of moving away from my natural voice as a competitor were particularly devastating. But with the perspective of time, I understand that I was offered a rare opportunity to grow. Much of what I believe in today has evolved from the brutal testing ground of my final years in chess.