An Immortal Game

Chess is interesting. Calling it “the gymnasium of the mind” is quite apt. Like crossword puzzles, your mind has to work on multiple levels at the same time. You have to remember things. People’s personalities need to be judged. Since there are so many possibilities that grow from each set of moves, a form of Bayesian logic enters into it. You’re using hypotheses instead of hard facts to determine a course of action.

Many people have the kind of minds that can memorize a great deal of information, including very complex information. If you’ve ever cracked a chess book, you’ll find that there are not all that many standard openings, and reactions to these openings. Great players often have pattern recognition far beyond what an average player can even understand, never mind memorize.

Pawn Sacrifice is an interesting movie about chess. Many of us are old enough to remember when Fischer beat Spassky in Iceland, and this depicts it fairly well:

What happened here is not an immortal game, I don’t think. Spassky had memorized Fischer’s style of chess, and was ready for it. Fischer just decided to play in a completely different style. All the memorization was for nothing. Spassky had brought the wrong map to the geography quiz, and immediately got lost. Fischer had memorized the new terrain without telling anyone. It was brilliant.

But it’s not an immortal game, at least not in the way I understand the definition. If you watch the first video closely, you can see why they called the match The Immortal Game in the first place. It went beyond a new approach, or a new variation on existing play. It was, on its face, completely batshit crazy. Anderssen yells LEEROY JENKINS! from the get-go and loses important pieces by the bushel, seemingly for no reason, until he has basically nothing left. But somehow or other the other king is mated while his opponent’s surfeit of pieces just sit there watching it happen.

I may be wrong, but I think I might be watching an immortal game being played right now.