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180 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
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April 18, 2021
I have a lot of thoughts about this book and nowhere to put them, so they’re going here.
The Author
If you don’t play chess semi-seriously, you haven’t heard of Lev Polugaevsky. He was great – he spent the better part of a decade in or around the world top 5, and twice made it to a semifinal match in the Candidates’ tournament, a few rungs short of the world championship match. A brilliant player, on a level I’ll never be able to fully grasp, one of a handful of people who’ve ever breathed the intellectual air in which he operated. He lost a match to Anatoly Karpov as the latter was marching to the world title in 1974; he lost a couple more to Viktor Korchnoi as Korchnoi was marching to his own losing battles with Karpov in later years. “200 feet below the summit of Mt Everest” territory – the goal in sight, but forever beyond his reach.
Among the giants he sparred with, Polugaevsky’s preparation was the thing that set him apart. Opening preparation is in a bit of a bad odor these days, what with, you know, how it’s destroying top-level chess. Fair enough, but this was a different time. No superhuman assistants holding your hand as you search for possible surprises. Opening prep in Polugaevsky’s day was solitary, frustrating work for the weird, the driven, and the obsessed. Alone, at night, shuffling the pieces on the board as you hack at the coalface of possibility. Does it work? It might work! Ah, shit, but if he plays this the entire concept falls apart. Well, there’s a week’s worth of work consigned to the trash can.
Polugaevksy was one of the guys who excelled at this. His most famous win[1] came against Mikhail Tal – former world champion, the Magician of Riga. In the match that won him the world title Tal famously sacrificed a knight not even by capturing a pawn, but by placing it where a pawn could take it; the sacrifice was unthinkable, and, in actuality, doesn’t work – but there under the bright lights, with the clock ticking, the reigning champ couldn’t solve the puzzle. Point for Tal. Anyway, in Polugaevsky’s game he was the one making the sacrifices – first a pawn, then a piece, then offering more, but with overwhelming threats closing in, leaving Tal with no better option than to bail out into a losing endgame. 25 moves in a friend of Polugaevsky’s looked over his shoulder and was stunned; that morning, Polugaevsky had told him that this exact position would occur in his game that day. It was all prep; he’d found the line, sacrifices and all, months before, and then led the most unpredictable great player in history obediently onto the killing floor he’d set ready. This is weird, uncanny shit.
The book
So what’s this book about? Well, chess preparation, and also love and obsession. To explain that, though, we have to take a look at the actual chess.
1.e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 Nf6 5. Nc3 a6 6. Bg5 e6 7. f4 – this position has appeared on thousands of chessboards in master level play. It’s a prominent continuation of the Sicilian Najdorf , the so-called “Cadillac of chess openings.”[2] 7…Be7, we’re on well-trodden ground here.
Sometime around 1958, Polugaevsky encountered a different idea: 7…b5. This is, to put it mildly, a very weird move. At first glance, it hangs a piece – 8. e5 and the black knight on f6 is a goner. At second glance the piece can be recovered – 8…dxe5 9. fxe5 Qc7 10. exf6 Qe5+ and black is getting back the bishop on g5 [3], but this is far from saying any of this is a good idea. Chess has a small body of formal rules – check and checkmate, horsey go jump jump, pawn go trudge trudge, queen go zooooom, etc. Out of these comes a larger body of emergent rules, tested and proven through long practice. Develop your pieces quickly in the opening; move no piece twice before moving every piece once; develop your queen late and to a square where she is not easily harassed. You can break a rule here or there and still be perfectly fine, but this is breaking a lot of them all at once.
Polugaevsky is playing with fire here, and he knows it. For the same reason, though, he’s fascinated. This position shouldn’t work – we’re far up the periodic table of openings, and this thing should be flying apart into a soup of pawns and alpha particles almost before you have a chance to detect its existence. And yet, as he pokes and prods at it, it proves surprisingly resilient. He tests it out in a tournament; comes away with a win. He claims a win with it at the USSR championship in 1959, then brings it back the next year. A friend looks over his shoulder and says “Lev, you mustn’t allow yourself such liberties!” To play this once as a trick is one thing; to commit to it, to bring it out with no element of surprise – this, now, is very risky.
But Polugaevsky, who already had the weirdness and drive you needed for opening exploration, has now found his obsession. 7…b5, by now known as the Polugaevsky Variation, becomes his baby. Time and again either he or somebody else finds the move that seems to refute it; time and again he retreats to his study, tests and tortures the position some more, and finds the unlikely resource that keeps black’s hopes alive. Each appearance of a potential refutation is a new agony; Polugaevsky has poured heart and soul into his Variation by this point, but has no guarantee that a move can’t be found that renders it objectively dead. Even after years of save after miraculous save, for all Polugaevsky or anyone else knows each new white response is the one that leaves black with no more cards to play.
Which raises the question: why? Why does he keep doing this? There is, I think, a chess answer and a life answer.
In chess terms, Polugaevsky believed very strongly in white’s opening advantage. Computers and top grandmasters today would describe the privilege of first move as having the value of about half a pawn, the faint flame of an edge that chess theory at its highest level attempts to fan into the roaring bonfire of a decisive advantage. To Polugaevsky it seemed – and felt – bigger. A standard interpretation of his career is that he had the skill but lacked the killer instinct needed to claim the world title, and this might have been part of it.[4] With white, he felt the strength of his advantage, believed in it, and capitalized. With black, the opposite – and this drove him to seek some way out from under that crushing advantage, however risky. The Polugaevsky Variation is a narrow mountain path, strewn with pitfalls and unseen hazards, a route you’d only take if you thought the paved road down there in the valley led into disaster. He leapt at the chance.
In life…I’m not the first person to observe that this is a love story. Polugaevsky is deeply emotionally invested in his Variation, depressed when it’s at risk, overjoyed when he improbably saves it yet again. It becomes difficult, though, to determine where it ends and he begins. This thing would have never seen the light of day if Polugaevsky hadn’t adopted it – too weird, too demanding, too aggressively flying in the face of all reason. The tangled pages upon pages of notes on possibilities that lived and died as shadows of the action on the tournament board – this is a behind the scenes tour of the workshop where someone set forth to do the impossible and succeeded. [5] A love story, yes, but a mad scientist kind of love: Polugaevsky, or, The Modern Prometheus, in which the doctor has the courtesy to make it clear that his creation does in fact share his name.
This is a wild and fascinating story, and I wish I could recommend that people read it. The problem is that, while it’s unique and wonderful among chess books for its emotional content and narrative drive, it’s…a chess book. I don’t fully understand the chess in this book, and I’ve dumped all my competitive energy into this game ever since my knee stopped working. I get it well enough to enjoy the story and appreciate some of the games and ideas, and at that level it’s a great book to read, but you can’t take the chess out of this book and make it work. 13…h6! Isn’t a metaphor or a McGuffin, it’s a pawn advance on the 13th move, and insofar as it works as a metaphor or a McGuffin it’s only because it’s a very interesting pawn advance – you get the idea.
A very good book, written by a very interesting guy, for a small audience of which I barely qualify as a member. The world is a better place for having weird stuff like this in it.
[1] Not his most famous game; he had the misfortune to be the guy on the losing side of one of the most insanely brilliant attacks in chess history. Polugaevsky-Nezhmetdinov 1958; worth googling.
[2] It’s the Cadillac of chess openings in part because of Polugaevsky’s work developing it; he exclusively played the Sicilian against 1.e4 and did a bunch of theoretical work in the Najdorf. Also, he once wrote a chapter titled “My Sicilian Love: Ten Memorable Sicilians” in a serious chess book, which rules.
[3] “But what if-“ yeah, you got me, white actually has a choice of which piece to return. But giving back the bishop is the strongest.
[4] Not necessarily a bad thing. It’s not a coincidence that a lot of chess world champions have been real dicks – that Michael Jordan-esque “can’t ever turn it off” issue.
[5] It’s hard to convey how staggering the volume of this analysis is. Polugaevsky did not bluff. He had no intention of bringing the Variation out for game action without solid proof in his own mind that it worked, and the standard he demanded ran to pages of analysis demonstrating the refutations of mind-bendingly complicated attacks stemming from a single candidate move.
One of Polugaevsky’s most famous games occurred in the Variation; in it, Polugaevsky sat calculating at the board for a full hour, then played a provocative move. His opponent sacrificed a piece for an attack that seemed destined to reclaim the lost material and perhaps more. Polugaevsky offered a sacrifice of his own in return, potentially unlocking his own withering is-it-or-isn’t-it fatal attack on the king; it was this attack that Polugaevsky had been working out in his mind before his initial move. The opponent, unable to determine to his satisfaction that he wasn’t marching towards certain death, declined the sacrifice – and Polugaevsky coolly retreated the sacrificed piece into perfect position to nullify his opponent’s attack; the entire thing had been a maneuver to get his knight to the magical defensive square. It’s incredible stuff, but after reading this book I suddenly find myself surprised he didn’t have the whole thing worked out in his notebooks in advance.
The Author
If you don’t play chess semi-seriously, you haven’t heard of Lev Polugaevsky. He was great – he spent the better part of a decade in or around the world top 5, and twice made it to a semifinal match in the Candidates’ tournament, a few rungs short of the world championship match. A brilliant player, on a level I’ll never be able to fully grasp, one of a handful of people who’ve ever breathed the intellectual air in which he operated. He lost a match to Anatoly Karpov as the latter was marching to the world title in 1974; he lost a couple more to Viktor Korchnoi as Korchnoi was marching to his own losing battles with Karpov in later years. “200 feet below the summit of Mt Everest” territory – the goal in sight, but forever beyond his reach.
Among the giants he sparred with, Polugaevsky’s preparation was the thing that set him apart. Opening preparation is in a bit of a bad odor these days, what with, you know, how it’s destroying top-level chess. Fair enough, but this was a different time. No superhuman assistants holding your hand as you search for possible surprises. Opening prep in Polugaevsky’s day was solitary, frustrating work for the weird, the driven, and the obsessed. Alone, at night, shuffling the pieces on the board as you hack at the coalface of possibility. Does it work? It might work! Ah, shit, but if he plays this the entire concept falls apart. Well, there’s a week’s worth of work consigned to the trash can.
Polugaevksy was one of the guys who excelled at this. His most famous win[1] came against Mikhail Tal – former world champion, the Magician of Riga. In the match that won him the world title Tal famously sacrificed a knight not even by capturing a pawn, but by placing it where a pawn could take it; the sacrifice was unthinkable, and, in actuality, doesn’t work – but there under the bright lights, with the clock ticking, the reigning champ couldn’t solve the puzzle. Point for Tal. Anyway, in Polugaevsky’s game he was the one making the sacrifices – first a pawn, then a piece, then offering more, but with overwhelming threats closing in, leaving Tal with no better option than to bail out into a losing endgame. 25 moves in a friend of Polugaevsky’s looked over his shoulder and was stunned; that morning, Polugaevsky had told him that this exact position would occur in his game that day. It was all prep; he’d found the line, sacrifices and all, months before, and then led the most unpredictable great player in history obediently onto the killing floor he’d set ready. This is weird, uncanny shit.
The book
So what’s this book about? Well, chess preparation, and also love and obsession. To explain that, though, we have to take a look at the actual chess.
1.e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 Nf6 5. Nc3 a6 6. Bg5 e6 7. f4 – this position has appeared on thousands of chessboards in master level play. It’s a prominent continuation of the Sicilian Najdorf , the so-called “Cadillac of chess openings.”[2] 7…Be7, we’re on well-trodden ground here.
Sometime around 1958, Polugaevsky encountered a different idea: 7…b5. This is, to put it mildly, a very weird move. At first glance, it hangs a piece – 8. e5 and the black knight on f6 is a goner. At second glance the piece can be recovered – 8…dxe5 9. fxe5 Qc7 10. exf6 Qe5+ and black is getting back the bishop on g5 [3], but this is far from saying any of this is a good idea. Chess has a small body of formal rules – check and checkmate, horsey go jump jump, pawn go trudge trudge, queen go zooooom, etc. Out of these comes a larger body of emergent rules, tested and proven through long practice. Develop your pieces quickly in the opening; move no piece twice before moving every piece once; develop your queen late and to a square where she is not easily harassed. You can break a rule here or there and still be perfectly fine, but this is breaking a lot of them all at once.
Polugaevsky is playing with fire here, and he knows it. For the same reason, though, he’s fascinated. This position shouldn’t work – we’re far up the periodic table of openings, and this thing should be flying apart into a soup of pawns and alpha particles almost before you have a chance to detect its existence. And yet, as he pokes and prods at it, it proves surprisingly resilient. He tests it out in a tournament; comes away with a win. He claims a win with it at the USSR championship in 1959, then brings it back the next year. A friend looks over his shoulder and says “Lev, you mustn’t allow yourself such liberties!” To play this once as a trick is one thing; to commit to it, to bring it out with no element of surprise – this, now, is very risky.
But Polugaevsky, who already had the weirdness and drive you needed for opening exploration, has now found his obsession. 7…b5, by now known as the Polugaevsky Variation, becomes his baby. Time and again either he or somebody else finds the move that seems to refute it; time and again he retreats to his study, tests and tortures the position some more, and finds the unlikely resource that keeps black’s hopes alive. Each appearance of a potential refutation is a new agony; Polugaevsky has poured heart and soul into his Variation by this point, but has no guarantee that a move can’t be found that renders it objectively dead. Even after years of save after miraculous save, for all Polugaevsky or anyone else knows each new white response is the one that leaves black with no more cards to play.
Which raises the question: why? Why does he keep doing this? There is, I think, a chess answer and a life answer.
In chess terms, Polugaevsky believed very strongly in white’s opening advantage. Computers and top grandmasters today would describe the privilege of first move as having the value of about half a pawn, the faint flame of an edge that chess theory at its highest level attempts to fan into the roaring bonfire of a decisive advantage. To Polugaevsky it seemed – and felt – bigger. A standard interpretation of his career is that he had the skill but lacked the killer instinct needed to claim the world title, and this might have been part of it.[4] With white, he felt the strength of his advantage, believed in it, and capitalized. With black, the opposite – and this drove him to seek some way out from under that crushing advantage, however risky. The Polugaevsky Variation is a narrow mountain path, strewn with pitfalls and unseen hazards, a route you’d only take if you thought the paved road down there in the valley led into disaster. He leapt at the chance.
In life…I’m not the first person to observe that this is a love story. Polugaevsky is deeply emotionally invested in his Variation, depressed when it’s at risk, overjoyed when he improbably saves it yet again. It becomes difficult, though, to determine where it ends and he begins. This thing would have never seen the light of day if Polugaevsky hadn’t adopted it – too weird, too demanding, too aggressively flying in the face of all reason. The tangled pages upon pages of notes on possibilities that lived and died as shadows of the action on the tournament board – this is a behind the scenes tour of the workshop where someone set forth to do the impossible and succeeded. [5] A love story, yes, but a mad scientist kind of love: Polugaevsky, or, The Modern Prometheus, in which the doctor has the courtesy to make it clear that his creation does in fact share his name.
This is a wild and fascinating story, and I wish I could recommend that people read it. The problem is that, while it’s unique and wonderful among chess books for its emotional content and narrative drive, it’s…a chess book. I don’t fully understand the chess in this book, and I’ve dumped all my competitive energy into this game ever since my knee stopped working. I get it well enough to enjoy the story and appreciate some of the games and ideas, and at that level it’s a great book to read, but you can’t take the chess out of this book and make it work. 13…h6! Isn’t a metaphor or a McGuffin, it’s a pawn advance on the 13th move, and insofar as it works as a metaphor or a McGuffin it’s only because it’s a very interesting pawn advance – you get the idea.
A very good book, written by a very interesting guy, for a small audience of which I barely qualify as a member. The world is a better place for having weird stuff like this in it.
[1] Not his most famous game; he had the misfortune to be the guy on the losing side of one of the most insanely brilliant attacks in chess history. Polugaevsky-Nezhmetdinov 1958; worth googling.
[2] It’s the Cadillac of chess openings in part because of Polugaevsky’s work developing it; he exclusively played the Sicilian against 1.e4 and did a bunch of theoretical work in the Najdorf. Also, he once wrote a chapter titled “My Sicilian Love: Ten Memorable Sicilians” in a serious chess book, which rules.
[3] “But what if-“ yeah, you got me, white actually has a choice of which piece to return. But giving back the bishop is the strongest.
[4] Not necessarily a bad thing. It’s not a coincidence that a lot of chess world champions have been real dicks – that Michael Jordan-esque “can’t ever turn it off” issue.
[5] It’s hard to convey how staggering the volume of this analysis is. Polugaevsky did not bluff. He had no intention of bringing the Variation out for game action without solid proof in his own mind that it worked, and the standard he demanded ran to pages of analysis demonstrating the refutations of mind-bendingly complicated attacks stemming from a single candidate move.
One of Polugaevsky’s most famous games occurred in the Variation; in it, Polugaevsky sat calculating at the board for a full hour, then played a provocative move. His opponent sacrificed a piece for an attack that seemed destined to reclaim the lost material and perhaps more. Polugaevsky offered a sacrifice of his own in return, potentially unlocking his own withering is-it-or-isn’t-it fatal attack on the king; it was this attack that Polugaevsky had been working out in his mind before his initial move. The opponent, unable to determine to his satisfaction that he wasn’t marching towards certain death, declined the sacrifice – and Polugaevsky coolly retreated the sacrificed piece into perfect position to nullify his opponent’s attack; the entire thing had been a maneuver to get his knight to the magical defensive square. It’s incredible stuff, but after reading this book I suddenly find myself surprised he didn’t have the whole thing worked out in his notebooks in advance.
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