Life at Play: A Chess Memoir

By Lubomir Kavalek

Kavalek could speak from experience as he had played with or met all the chess greats of the last century. He assisted Bobby Fischer during the legendary Match of the Century in 1972, and in later years, he was the second of Nigel Short and Jan Timman. He also was the tournament director of the prestigious World Cup organized by the Grandmasters Association. But first and foremost, he was an elite player, winning countless tournaments and brilliancy prizes.

Kavalek rose spectacularly fast to the rank of grandmaster. With attractive and sharp play, he twice won the national championship in his native Czechoslovakia. In 1968, after the Soviet invasion had ended the Prague Spring, he fled his home country and eventually settled in the United States with his wife Irena.

At the end of his life, Lubosh Kavalek started writing his memoirs. With humour, wit and passion, he put on paper the compelling story of his adventurous life and rich chess career. When he passed away in 2021, he had all but finished the book he had been working on with the Czech-American writer Jan Novak.

Kavalek’s memoir makes for compelling reading and evokes his fascinating journey in life and the chess world. His story is supplemented by more than fifty of his best games, many with Kavalek’s entertaining comments.

• Language: English
• Publisher: New in Chess
• Release date: Oct 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9789493257603

Book preview

Life at Play

Lubomir Kavalek

Life at Play

A Chess Memoir

New In Chess 2022

© 2022 New In Chess

Published by New In Chess, Alkmaar, The Netherlands

www.newinchess.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission from the publisher.

Photos: page 114 bottom, 117 bottom and 119 bottom: Šach Info; page 116 bottom: Jac de Nijs/Dutch National Photo Archive; page 117 top, 119 top and 121 bottom: Rob Bogaerts/Dutch National Photo Archive; page 127: both pictures Vladimir Jagr; page 128: Bill Hook.

All other photos: archive Irena Kavalek.

Cover design: rouwhorst + van roon

Editing, supervision: Dirk Jan ten Geuzendam, Peter Boel

Typesetting: Joop de Groot

Proofreading: John Donaldson, Mariska de Mie

Production: Anton Schermer

Have you found any errors in this book?

Please send your remarks to [e-mail]. We will collect all relevant corrections on the Errata page of our website www.newinchess.com and implement them in a possible next edition.

ISBN: 978-94-93257-59-7

Contents

Foreword by Irena Kavalek

The world of gambits (1943-1964)

Grandmaster (1965-1968)

In the West (1968-1969)

On to America (1970-1972)

Reykjavik and the aftermath (1972-1978)

The organizer (1979-1987)

Training Odyssey (1988-1993)

Selected games

Appendix

Index of names

Explanation of symbols

Explanation of symbols

The chessboard with its coordinates:

Foreword

Some twenty years ago my husband, Lubomir (Lubosh) Kavalek, started working on a book of his memoirs. It was to be a story of his chess life accompanied by games or game fragments. He kept compiling stories and collecting games and the amount of material grew. In 2015 he started working with the well-known Czech-American writer Jan Novak. With Jan’s help the text of the book started to take shape. Now the plan was to have perhaps a two-volume work with the games published in a separate volume.

On January 18, 2021, Lubosh died unexpectedly. Jan Novak compiled the existing text, without the games, and prepared it for publication. The book is to be published in the Czech Republic under the title Rozehraný život.

It seemed important to me to publish an abridged version of the book in ‘the West’. I spent the rest of 2021 translating relevant parts into English. I omitted some vignettes of purely Czech interest and added a few paragraphs I found in Lubosh’s notes. Some quotes are translations of translations.

While going through Lubosh’s papers I found a list of games that he considered for inclusion in the book. My assumption was that those games, some probably annotated, resided somewhere in his computer or on one of the numerous USB flash drives scattered around his office. This presented a challenge since I know nothing about computers and even less about chess. To the rescue came Craig Saperstein who used to take chess lessons from Lubosh as a kid. Craig, now conveniently a software engineer, volunteered countless hours of his free time to look through Lubosh’s ChessBase files trying to locate annotated games that could be included in the book.

Various lists I found in my husband’s papers and the internet helped me to compile a timeline of his personal a professional highlights included as an appendix. Any mistakes of omission or commission are my own.

Several others helped as well. I owe a great debt of gratitude to John Donaldson for his careful reading of the text and his general help and advice throughout. My thanks to Dirk Jan ten Geuzendam for shepherding the project through to publication. Also thanks to my son Steven and his family for their moral support during this difficult year.

As a result of these combined efforts, Life at Play took the shape that was likely intended by its author.

It is my hope that Lubosh would have approved of the final result.

Irena Kavalek

Reston, Virginia, USA

August 2022

The world of gambits (1943-1964)

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Intuition • I am flying • And that’s that • The game • The mysterious number eight • Christmas present • The elegant car mechanic • The world of gambits • Chess camp • Books • Almost the sea • Zugzwang • The doctor in Hronov • The gaze • It won’t be long • Smart heads • Sun on the brain • Talent is hard work • School and club chess • A stunning novelty • Stubborn as a mule • At the demonstration board • Long walks in short pants • The youngest grandmaster • Another century • Pillsbury’s knight • The downfall • The leap • The chess doctor • Wandering kings • Just you wait! • The mathematician • Graduation • The city of Peter • Chess Pushkin • Banished to Siberia • The winning spree • Dumpling war • Back in Zilina • Noise in one’s head • Waiting with Villon • Imperialist sweater • The slap • Bridge • Gathering experience • Theater • The Adriatic • Lenin as James Bond • New Year’s Eve to remember • Marianske Lazne 1965 • Don Quixote wises up • Style makes a man

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INTUITION

The wail of the sirens sent the people in our apartment building to the cellar. It was a cold day, February 14, 1945, later known as Ugly Wednesday. Prague was about to be bombed.

My mother usually ignored the sirens-more often than not it was a false alarm-but on that day she grabbed me and ran downstairs with the others. The bombing lasted five minutes, enough time for some sixty American bombers to drop close to 150 tons of explosives. It was all a mistake. The original target of the Allied Forces was Dresden, but Germany was under dense cloud cover and the sky was clear in Prague. Some theories claimed the American staff in the Netherlands had made a navigation mistake, moving the ruler a few centimeters south of their original target. Whatever the reason, over 700 people died that day.

When we got back to our apartment, my crib was full of broken glass. This was my only direct encounter with the war. I was a year and a half old and blissfully oblivious. Only as I got older did I notice the craters where there used to be houses.

When the sirens went off in south London on June 27, 1944, Vera Menchik was just across the street from a bomb shelter. Usually her family would run there and wait for the all-clear, but that day they decided to stay home. The entire family perished when their house was hit by a German bomb. Vera Menchik, the Women’s World Champion, was 38 years old.

I AM FLYING

The end of the war was cause for great celebration. My father grabbed me by the arm and ran down the stairs, yelling: ‘Airplane!’ By the time we landed at the bottom of the stairs, I had a dislocated shoulder and ended up in a cast for six weeks. My first real flight took place later when somebody suggested a short flight above Prague to cure my whooping cough.

My father was a teacher with movie ambitions. He ended up as an assistant director on several movies and put me in one when I was four. I was the son of Nikola Šuhaj, a Czech Robin Hood from the Subcarpathian Rus. While I was attending an English language preschool, we saw a fantastic movie, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

The happy times didn’t last long, however. February 1948 arrived, and with it came Communist rule. Our beautiful Snow White turned into an American imperialist exploiting seven poor miners. My father, the perennial joker, taught me a ditty celebrating Marshal Tito and told me to walk down the street and sing it out loud. He himself walked behind at a safe distance. Since Tito was then no longer Stalin’s friend but a ‘bloody dog’, passersby gave me a wide berth.

My father’s ‘resistance’ did not last long. It became clear that Communist rule was not a joke and that the new bosses had a poor sense of humor. He decided to buy my mother and me tickets for a sightseeing flight over Prague. While we were in the air, my father took off for the West. He somehow managed to escape across the Czech border into the American sector in Germany. My father was free, and it would take 15 years before we would see each other again.

My mother, a nurse, had to support both of us now. She was working long shifts in the hospital and it was hard to find childcare, so I was sent to a children’s home in Jílové near Prague. On the first night there were no free beds in the boys’ wing, and I ended up in a room with 10 girls. When the eldest was changing, the other girls held up a blanket so I could not see. But I did want to see! Two girls jumped me, one sitting on my stomach, the other on my chest to hold me down. An interesting, memorable experience, and not altogether unpleasant.

The home had a nice garden, the staff was kind, and I had a great time there. In 1952 we had to say goodbye because the building was property of the Czechoslovak Hussite Christian Church and, like most religious properties, was confiscated by the Communist state and repurposed as a retirement home. We were transferred to Kostelec in central Bohemia. There I was not happy. I kept running away and my mother eventually had no choice but to take me back to Prague.

In our apartment there were still traces of my father’s presence: screenplays, LPs, opera librettos, a tropical helmet, hats, a ukulele, and his scout shorts. One of the screenplays, a story about scouts, actually became a movie: Na Dobré Stopě (On the Right Track). The communist regime had no use for scouting, but the movie was released in December 1948 anyway, albeit only in suburban theaters. This partial ban was an excellent advertisement and people came from all over to see it. After this miscalculation, the regime banned the film outright.

AND THAT’S THAT

In the late 1940s, the political climate deteriorated. There were show trials and executions and people getting arrested, never to be seen again. My mother was regularly called in for interrogations by the secret police force (StB), and asked what she knew about my father. She did not know anything, but of course the police knew perfectly well what he was doing: he was working as a broadcast journalist for Radio Free Europe in Munich. The StB pushed her to divorce him, and she did, but it did not help. My father’s defection was used against us for the next twenty years.

THE GAME

In the fall of 1954, I discovered chess. Most chess players learn the game from family members; José Raúl Capablanca learned it at the age of four from his father, who was a commander in the Cuban army. As Capablanca tells it, one day he went to visit him at the military headquarters, saw him sitting across from another soldier staring at something on the table between them, saying nothing. That is when Capablanca saw a chess board for the first time and after watching a few games, he knew how the pieces moved. ‘Even though I was only four I could see that the chess game resembles a military battle – one attacks, the other defends,’ as he described the moment.

I was much older, already eleven, when I came across the game at a playground and became hooked. I bought a cheap chess set and a cardboard chess board that I still have. Once I learned the moves, I could not stop playing. It is an affliction common to most beginners. In the absence of partners, I played against myself. I played an entire make-believe chess Olympiad. You might be surprised to learn that Czechoslovakia won.

Much later I learned that my solitary chess was not unique. When Bobby Fischer kept playing against himself, his mother was alarmed enough to seek advice from a psychologist.

It was my great luck that there were quite a few chess players in our school and some were not bad at all.

THE MYSTERIOUS NUMBER EIGHT

My chessboard was full of secrets that fascinated me. Why 64 squares, why not 100? Why do pieces march the way they do, forming triangles, squares, rectangles? The only piece that made absolutely no sense to me was the knight. Why is a simple horse called a knight? The knight in the middle of the board controls eight squares and its reach resembles that of an octopus. A well-placed knight symbolizes the entire board with its 8x8 dimensions and eight pawns.

Clearly the number eight must have meant something. The Chinese love it, and it plays an important role in their math, symbolism, and astronomy. There are theories that trace the origins of chess to China before the game reached India and Persia. Perhaps that is why a chess game is full of unexpected adventures, treacherous chasms, and vertiginous heights. Anyway, that is what my game looked like in the beginning. The pieces were unruly, hard to control, the moves full of mistakes. Only later one starts to think that one has the board under control. What folly. Nobody has chess under control. And nobody ever will.

CHRISTMAS PRESENT

It was December 1954 and my mother asked me what I wanted under the tree. I knew right away: to play a game with chess grandmaster Luděk Pachman. A few days later she called me to the phone. It was Pachman on the line. He asked me how long I had been playing and when I said four months, he suggested I visit the upcoming chess tournament at the Prague Radio Palace to see real chess. The next day I told my chess playing friends and we decided to go and watch the experts.

The Radio Palace is an enormous cubist building in Vinohrady. The name of its street changed seven times with the changing political winds, the name at the time being Stalin Avenue. Once inside, we climbed to the balcony to watch the action. The tournament was a competition between three countries: Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary.

The enormous ballroom was crowded with chess tables, but it was eerily quiet. Some of the masters and grandmasters were sitting down, some strolling around looking serious. I pointed out Pachman, the man nice enough to call me on the phone. ‘Pachman is an asshole!’ yelled my friend the joker into the deathly silence. People looked up and we slid under the seats, awaiting catastrophe. My friend wasn’t done. ‘Kavalek said that!’ he yelled. Nobody came after us, and as we slipped away from the building, I was sure my chess career was over before it started.

Just to be on the safe side, I took my trips to the Radio Palace alone from that point on. The games were too complicated for me to follow, so I switched to collecting autographs, concentrating on the Hungarians who were a class above the other two countries. When I found out that their team would be attending an opera performance, I asked my mother’s friend to smuggle me in. During intermission, I bagged all their signatures. Among them was László Szabó, who, at age 18, became the 1935 Hungarian champion. His chess career was interrupted by WWII. He was drafted and became a Russian prisoner of war. When he returned home he weighed 45 kilos. After some time, he recovered enough to play a Candidates’ tournament in Amsterdam, tying for third. One of his opponents in that tournament was Miroslav Filip, who replaced Pachman as the best Czech player. Filip advanced and became one of the nine best players in the world, repeating the feat in 1962 and becoming the most successful Czechoslovak chess player of the second half of the twentieth century. My visits to the Radio Palace continued even after my notebook was full of signatures. I still believe to this day that watching high-level chess is the best way to introduce kids to the game.

THE ELEGANT CAR MECHANIC

In our elementary school on Perunova Street, the biggest chess star was Michal Janata, who was a year younger than me. He started playing when he was six and knew much more than the rest of us. Michal lived around the corner from me, and we often played together. His father had a wonderful chess library and we played over some of the more interesting games, especially the ones with exciting sacrifices. Emanuel Lasker called sacrifices in chess a victory of mind over matter, and the greatest of these is a queen sacrifice.

One day Michal and I discovered a fantastic win by the Swedish master Gösta Stoltz. Stoltz worked as a car mechanic and learned chess at the age of sixteen. His teacher was the famous Russian grandmaster Efim Bogoljubow, who lived in Germany, and in the 1930s, Stoltz played two matches against the World Champion Alexander Alekhine. Stoltz was an elegant dresser, a heavy smoker, and a player of great originality. In 1930 in Sweden, Stoltz played an unbelievable game against Rudolf Spielmann, a well-known attacking player. Their game makes one think of a walk through a strange town full of twists and turns and surprises. What will you find around the next corner? In this game Stoltz stepped into the unknown a few times and his courage was rewarded. Spielmann later wrote an article about the game for the Münchener Zeitung, calling it an old-time fairytale. It reminded him of the immortal 1851 game of Adolf Anderssen against Kieseritzky in London that inspired entire books. Spielmann was not exaggerating; he himself wrote a book on correct sacrifices in chess, a classic text on the art of combination and the role of intuition and creative energy. In Stockholm he became a victim of such intuition and energy when he lost to Stoltz. What was his decisive mistake? Was the game lost after Stoltz’s queen sacrifice? He was unable to find satisfactory answers, proving once again the endless mystery of chess. And if the game inspired admiration even from its loser, you can imagine how thrilling it was for two schoolboys from Prague.

THE WORLD OF GAMBITS

We were drawn to sacrifices in chess and used them as one would spices in cooking. We not only played constantly but also talked about chess incessantly – no surprise our school won the Prague Championship in 1956. Our success earned us an invitation to the offices of the Chess Federation and a meeting with Bedřich Thelen, a chess coach and trainer. He advised us to concentrate on tactics and play gambit tournaments among ourselves, especially the King’s Gambit, the ‘Middle Gambit’, and the Evans Gambit. In all three openings, White sacrifices one or two pawns to activate his heavy pieces. While the opponent holds on to the booty, White gains control over the lines and diagonals and can take out the king.

One of the games Thelen showed us was a beautiful counterattack in the King’s Gambit that left us in awe. It did not occur to us that he was just playing over a famous game of Louis Paulsen. We had no idea that such beautiful chess had been played in the nineteenth century. Paulsen’s game made such a strong impression that I remembered it, and ten years later used its variation in Bucharest to win against Romanian champion Florin Gheorghiu. Our elementary school gambit tournament, however, was won by Michal Janata. Somebody explained to us that the term gambit is derived from the Italian phrase ‘dare il gambetto’ which means ‘to put a leg forward to trip someone’, fitting our games perfectly. We tried to trick each other, countering gambits with counter-gambits, answering sacrifices with sacrifices. Nothing intelligent or beautiful ever came out of it, except more amateurish jousting.

CHESS CAMP

In the summer of 1956, I was invited to attend a chess camp near Prague. There were about 30 of us ‘chess talents’, boys and girls, and the more I learned about chess the more unknowable it seemed. The editor-in-chief of Československý Šach showed us zugzwang, which occurs when any move you make leads to the total collapse of your position. Others were demonstrating the zwischenzug (the intermediate move), where a player chooses to skip an obvious move and insert something unexpected, like in the 1909 game of Akiba Rubinstein in Petrograd, where he surprised Emanuel Lasker with a quiet move and won the ensuing endgame.

Most of these games were too difficult for us but we loved listening to the stories. We could see why Lasker was avoiding Rubinstein and how he kept his title for 27 years, even though he eventually lost it to Capablanca in 1921. We were told that Lasker often played moves that were not necessarily the best but were the most unpleasant for his opponent. Another mystery! Why would the best move not also be the most unpleasant?

During lessons in endgames two names were emphasized: Luis Ramírez de Lucena and François-André Danican Philidor. The first tried to queen his pawn, the other to prevent it. Lucena, a Spaniard, was a little over twenty when he wrote a chess book in 1497 – the oldest known chess text that has 150 diagrams. In the book he compares a chess game to an amorous conquest. The book lacks the winning rook endgame ascribed to Lucena only a century later, but does contain a ‘Smothered Mate’ where, after a queen sacrifice, a knight checkmates a king trapped by his own pieces. This combination appears again in the works of the best player of the eighteenth century, François-André Danican Philidor. His L’Analyze des Échecs was published in 1749, and the Smothered Mate was later referred to as Philidor’s legacy. Philidor was probably not familiar with Lucena’s book because chess was not his main interest: Philidor was a renowned musician, the author of some twenty operas. He died at the age of 68 in London, chased out of France after the French Revolution. His most significant contribution is the third rank defense in the rook + pawn vs rook ending, which I first learned about in my chess camp that year.

BOOKS

If you are what you read, books play an important role in a player’s development. The first chess book I remember is a slim volume of tournament games I bought in some second-hand bookshop. I liked it because each game carried its own descriptive title, and the game I liked best was ‘Many dogs, rabbit’s demise’ where White sacrifices a piece only to bury the opponent under an avalanche of pawns. This game was a precursor to my game with Eduard Gufeld in 1962, but of course back then I had no idea.

The library of Mr. Janata hinted at how vast the world of chess literature is. Today I know that the largest chess library in the world is in Cleveland, Ohio, and numbers some 40,000 volumes. Years later the German grandmaster Lothar Schmid showed me his library, describing it as the largest private collection of chess books. He owned some 20,000 titles housed in a specially built tower lined with wood paneling. When we stopped to examine an especially unique publication I, without thinking, took out my cigarettes. Schmid was busy describing his treasures, but when he noticed that I was taking out my matches he jumped like a tiger, snatching the matches out of my hand. Any damage to his magnificent collection would have been an incalculable loss. Once someone starts to collect chess books it becomes an obsession, and there is no stopping. My own collection eventually counted over 5,000 titles, requiring us to move to bigger and bigger apartments and houses. By now it’s hard to tell whether I am moving the books, or if the books are moving me.

ALMOST THE SEA

One advantage – and sometimes disadvantage – of chess literature is that one does not need to know the language. Every chess player can read a chess notation, which is what I discovered in 1956 after my chess camp. My mother arranged for us to take a trip to Lake Balaton in Hungary, a poor substitute for a beach vacation. No waves, no tides, no sand, no pirates. On our way back I discovered a chess magazine in a bookshop at the Budapest railway station. On the cover was a soldier with a convict-like crewcut, Lajos Portisch, who was then a rising star. His signature was missing from my autograph collection from Radio Palace. I skipped the magazine, though, and bought a booklet on endgame tactics. The book, in Hungarian, contained some 240 chess studies arranged according to tactical motifs and resembling actual games, except that in the book there was only one way to win or draw, forcing the reader to make very precise calculations to find the magical path. The games looked like chess duels, only much more beautiful, full of surprising turns. Some you could only win with a sacrifice; in others you needed a quiet move.

I remember that in one composition White tied Black in knots, limiting his options, and Black could only play with his queen – which could reach 22 squares, but any square she moved to led to disaster. The train jerked along, my mother slept, and I was admiring the clever studies, dreaming how I would come up with similar gems in my endgames.

ZUGZWANG

It turned out that the trip to Lake Balaton was a diversion to cover up the fact that my mother could not keep me in Prague any longer and was about to ship me off to stay with my grandparents in Hronov, a small town near the Polish border. A decision had been made and I had to say goodbye to my school – which was the best chess grade school in the country – and to my chess friends and adversaries. I felt it would mean a year-long break in my chess playing and packed a suitcase full of chess books; there was the newly published Russian book with the 300 best games of Alexander Alekhine, a Russian aristocrat who escaped from the Bolsheviks to Western Europe, and whom the Soviets reclaimed only after his death in 1946 in the Portuguese Estoril; Bronstein’s book about the Candidates’ Tournament in Zurich; Pachman’s Theory of Modern Chess; and various tactics and strategy books.

When I settled in at my grandparents’ house, I realized that with my books, I brought along all kinds of big-city prejudices. It turned out that this small town had a long tradition of rich chess life. The local chess club had been meeting weekly since 1913 in the Hotel Sokol, and so my chess education continued. During the day I slept through classes and in the evenings I attended real school in the pub of the Hotel Sokol.

THE DOCTOR IN HRONOV

In 1956 the best chess player in Hronov was Dr. Rudolf Kudrnáč. He beat both Karl Schlechter and Milan Vidmar in a simultaneous exhibition in Prague in 1918. He was the moving force behind most of the cultural activities in and around Hronov, and when the Communists chased him out of more visible functions, he devoted himself to chess.

Despite my age and inexperience, he accepted me into the club and thanks to my Prague gambit training, we had countless interesting games. Even though I was only 13, my kindhearted grandparents let me spend most of my free time in the smoky pub of Hotel Sokol. There was Dr. Kudrnáč with his beer, I with my lemonade, Dr. Kudrnáč with his check on h4 with the bishop, I with my King’s Gambit.

This was the opening I chose when I played him at the regional championship. He expected me to sacrifice most of my pawns on the kingside as was the custom. Players would sacrifice their entire king’s flank to open the files and the diagonals to get to the black king by way of countering the Cunningham Defense. I did not sacrifice my pawns and chose a cowardly retreat with my king. Dr. Kudrnáč devised a great attack, but after a small blunder lost the game.

THE GAZE

In years past, Hronov had hosted several famous players who came to give a simultaneous exhibition. A chess simul has some resemblance to theater play: one does not know the plot, but everybody knows it will be a massacre. Some masters walk around the tables with such speed that the players panic and move the wrong piece. Many live and re-live these encounters their entire lives. In 1933, Hronov faced the World Champion.

Alexander Alekhine came by train, elegant in a dark suit with a white scarf and white pocket handkerchief. He was met by Dr. Kudrnáč and taken to Hotel Sokol to rest before the simul. In the evening he started one of the 29 exhibitions he would play in his 31 days in Czechoslovakia. Alekhine, 41 at the time, was full of energy and showed no signs of slowing down. Every evening he faced 50 opponents. During his tour he played 1,402 games, won 1,038, drew 234, and lost 130.

His exhibitions were society events. Women players wore their furs and wide-brimmed hats, men smoked cigars, and next to the board one could see spittoons. Hronov showed up in all its glory. The principal of the local high school, Rudolf Marek, wrote in the weekly Lidové Proudy:

‘The fight has now lasted several hours, the master turned down an offer of a break, he is happy just with his black coffee and cigarettes, and plays more and more aggressively. The master makes his moves slowly, and they are always well-thought-out and surprising. His soft, Slavic gaze rests lightly on the chess boards, but meeting the gaze up close, one can see another pair of eyes, eyes like steel, seeing things mere mortals do not, the eyes of a chess genius. They do not miss anything, they see every trap.’

In Hronov Alekhine’s gaze continued to move from board to board for eight hours, and when he finished he received thunderous applause. Alekhine won 39 games and drew eleven. Dr. Kudrnáč was one of the eleven.

IT WON’T BE LONG

In Hronov I was attending eighth grade and living with my father’s parents, but nobody ever told me what really happened with my father. I was beginning to suspect there was more to the story than I knew, and finally my grandfather let something slip. Every evening he would go into the living room and close the door. The radio in the room was tuned to Radio Free Europe where his son, my father, sometimes read children’s fairy tales. They were meant for me, but I never heard them and never knew about them. Neither did my grandfather because he was hard of hearing and the radio station was full of static and interference courtesy of the Communist censors. The result was that the noise from the room could be heard by the neighbors, and we were very lucky that nobody squealed.

At the end of October 1956 my grandfather came running into the kitchen: ‘It’s about to happen! Lubosh will come home!’ He had been listening to the reports of the Hungarian uprising against the Russians. Unfortunately, his excitement was short-lived. In no time the Russian tanks were bulldozing through Budapest, and I could only wonder whether the Hungarian players who had signed my notebook would survive the bloodshed in one piece. In the end, nothing changed, and my father did not come back.

SMART HEADS

That year my Christmas presents included a metal toy motorcycle with a rider that could go around in circles with lights flashing and the motor buzzing; obviously not a domestic product.

After Christmas I took the train to Hradec Králové to play in my first tournament. It was also the first time I stayed at a hotel alone. The hotel was famous for an incident that had supposedly taken place there some years earlier. During a tournament Ervin Rosenblatt and Eduard Szirmai shared a room. Their game was adjourned and when it was time to resume play Szirmai locked Rosenblatt in the room to make him lose on time. The desperate Rosenblatt opened the hotel window and yelled: ‘Open the door! My clock is running!’

Rosenblatt ran a chess store in Prague where he sold German chess sets advertised with the slogan, ‘For the duel of smart heads’. Rosenblatt and his German wife used to drive to the Wijk aan Zee tournament in the Netherlands where he played in the lower groups. The tournament takes place in January. Rosenblatt would park his car on the street and his wife and dog would sit in the parked car for four, five hours, patiently waiting for Ervin to finish his games. She told me her fur coat and their big dog kept her warm.

Back in Hradec Králové I enjoyed my hotel stay and ended up tied for first. It was a junior tournament, with an upper age limit of 20 years old. I was 13, and Dr. Kudrnáč was thrilled.

SUN ON THE BRAIN

In 1956, three chess players appeared on my horizon who would later become world champions. Misha Tal was not yet well known. He gained notoriety after his game with Alexander Tolush. In that game Tal behaved like a magnanimous ruler tossing around his riches. His pieces were on offer all over the board and Tolush didn’t know which to grab first. Tal later said that he wasn’t worried because his opponent could not take more than one piece at a time. It was clear that a remarkable chess romantic had suddenly appeared. Tal had a bewitching, almost hypnotic stare with which he eyed his opponents. They tried to avoid his gaze in various ways – some even wore mirrored sunglasses, like Pál Benkö. In four short years Tal became World Champion.

Boris Spassky was a rebel who was from Leningrad but did not much care for Lenin. As a child he got in trouble when he asked the apparatchik Solovjev whether it was true that Lenin had syphilis. He much preferred the old days and kept calling his domicile ‘the city of Peter’. Spassky had several trainers who tried to teach him ‘correct’ positional chess, but with little success. He quickly developed into an attacking player once he started working with the volatile Tolush, who uncovered for him the wonderful world of combinations, imagination, and play using the entire board. In 1955 Spassky became the Junior World Champion, and a year later he played in the Candidates’ Tournament in Amsterdam, but then disappeared from the scene. His career revived in 1960 when he started working with Igor Bondarevsky, whom Boris called ‘fater’ because he represented a substitute father figure. Bondarevsky introduced him to the psychology of attacking in chess, gave him chess problems to solve, and Spassky later said that it was as if a sun rose in his brain. He became World Champion in 1969.

The last rebel I discovered in Hronov was my contemporary, the American Bobby Fischer. He was 13 when he played a stunning game against the American master Donald Byrne, who was considered one of the best U.S. players at the time. Bobby crowned this ‘game of the century’ with