The Toxic Pursuit of Greatness in Chess (w/ Brin-Jonathan Butler) | The Chris Hedges Report

Author and journalist Brin-Jonathan Butler chronicles the disturbing history of chess’ greatest players and those obsessed with the game.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

Achieving greatness requires immense sacrifice. Nobody knows this better than perhaps professional athletes or, as author and journalist Brin-Jonathan Butler reveals, chess players. Butler joins host Chris Hedges to discuss his book, The Grandmaster: Magnus Carlsen and the Match That Made Chess Great Again and how the history of chess’ greatest players is riddled with psychological dysfunction.

Butler invokes famous chess figures such as Bobby Fischer, Peter Winston and Magnus Carlsen to demonstrate how those who reach the top do so at the expense of their humanity. Referencing Fischer’s famous victory over Boris Spassky in 1972, Butler explains how Fischer was not satisfied because “it’s not enough to murder your opponent, you need to compel their suicide.”

“That was a very common sort of narrative throughout all the top levels of chess, how often the metaphor of blood execution, murder, blood on the board was commonly used,” Butler adds.

The level of obsession that develops within the best chess players transforms into an addiction, similar to one with drugs, alcohol or gambling. Despite it being a fun, challenging game for most, for others who have a propensity to become addicted in such an obsessive way, it must be cautioned with. Butler says, “For that narrow group, which I think comprises the people at the top because you have to be that way, it’s not only sort of recommended that you be this way, there’s no other way to qualify for that top zone unless you happen to be this relentlessly devoted.”

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Host

Chris Hedges

Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Diego Ramos

Crew:

Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges

Transcript:

Diego Ramos

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Chris Hedges

In the Far East, where the game of chess was invented around 600 A.D., stones were placed on each corner of the board to keep the evil of the match from spilling into the world. Chess, like a powerful narcotic, consumes lives and has a propensity to drive its greatest players, such as Bobby Fischer, to insanity.

It spawns a bizarre subculture that churns out the kind of one-dimensional people captured in Stefan Zweig’s book, Chess Story, a psychological study not only of chess, but obsession and fascism. Those who reach the highest levels of chess often do not finish high school and few have college or advanced degrees.

They devote their lives to studying and memorizing the moves of every great match ever played. Vladimir Lenin, a skilled player, forced himself to drastically curtail his chess matches because it was interfering with his orchestration of the Russian Revolution.

When Charles I was executed in 1649, he carried two belongings to the scaffold, where he was beheaded, a Bible and his chessboard. Brin-Jonathan Butler, in his book, The Grandmaster: Magnus Carlsen and the Match That Made Chess Great Again, uses the 2016 World Championship match between Norway’s Magnus Carlsen and Russia’s Sergey Karjakin to look at the pathology of those who devote their lives, often ruining them, to chess.

Falling deep into this chess rabbit hole, of course, has been exacerbated by online chess. Chess players, he writes, had the same bottlenecked intensity behind their eyes as gamblers. But the enemy was moving in the opposite direction, not outward, towards some romantic dream or delusion that convinces people to waste their lives in the hopes of leaving it all behind. It doesn’t work this way for chess.

Chess is vaccinated against players’ delusions of self-worth. However special you think you are, enter the game’s competitive circuits, and your rating is held up for all to see and recalibrated accordingly after each game.

On the chessboard, the world chess champion Emanuel Lasker observed, lies and hypocrisy do not survive long. Joining me to discuss his book is Brin-Jonathan Butler. So I loved it, it’s beautifully written and of course both you and I love chess.

But let’s talk a little bit about the nature of the game itself. You liken it to, I think correctly, to a narcotic or an addiction and a very dangerous one. What is so addicting about it?

Brin-Jonathan Butler

I think that it’s just perfection. I remember talking to the New Yorker’s Richard Brody, who as a child grew up with a prodigy, Peter Winston, and he just said a certain cast of mind, philosophy or chess are dangerous things to introduce to them because nothing else can really compete with it. Poker is a game of incomplete information. Chess is a game of complete information that is totally unfathomable to the human mind.

And that is a dangerous thing to a certain cast of obsessive mind. So, I think some of the criticism this book engendered was that I was saying that chess is dangerous for everybody. I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying for the people at the outer reaches of a narrow arena of ambition of people who want to dominate this game.

A disproportionate number of those people seem to become unhinged as a result of their relationship to chess, both in, I think, what they bring to it and what chess brings to them. That collision has proven to be quite a dangerous thing. And I’m not the first person to remark upon such a large number of the greatest practitioners of this game losing themselves in the process of their obsession with it.

Chris Hedges

Since you brought up Winston, he’s a character in the book, comes later in the book, why don’t you talk about him now, he’s a fascinating character.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

Peter Winston was on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post as first a math prodigy when he was five years old, and that’s what his parents wanted him to be. And his parents really intended that chess would play no role in his life because they were afraid, based on his brilliance and his obsessiveness, that chess could be very dangerous.

And unfortunately, his father died when Peter was very young. And a grandfather came over to visit to babysit and brought over a chessboard. And just as his parents thought, he became totally hooked. And this happened right after he was born in 1958. And he became the first next Bobby Fischer.

And that proved to be a very dangerous thing. He was definitely a chess prodigy, but he eventually fell into mental health problems such that he was institutionalized, drug addiction. And finally in 1978, he walked out into one of the worst blizzards to ever hit New York City without a jacket, ID or money. And his body has never been found and he’s never been seen again.

So it’s the Fischer impact, and I think people forget in 1972, Bobby Fischer playing chess was being foregrounded ahead of Watergate and ahead of Vietnam regularly. This might have been the most famous person on earth, walked away at the height of his success and popularity and sort of became chess’s answer to J.D. Salinger.

And so America was desperate to find somebody, if Fischer wasn’t going to return, somebody to fill in that role and Winston was the first one to do it and unfortunately had a lot more overlap to Fischer both in his prodigious talents as a child but also in how he disintegrated mentally.

Chris Hedges

And what do you blame this, I mean, insanity is not an uncommon fate for many of these great players. What do you blame it on? Is it the obsession? Is it the distortion? Is it the one-dimensional nature of their lives? At the end of the book, you actually talk about it being perhaps a kind of infantilism.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

Yeah, I mean, I think in any arena of ambition, I mean, chess has been around, as you mentioned, for 1,400-1,500 years. It was invented in the same century as toilet paper. And yet nobody’s been able to really commodify it, despite the fact that you have several hundred million people playing it today. Billions of people have played it across all these centuries. And yet nobody can really make money doing it, except for a very few people.

I heard regularly while I was writing this book that really the top 30 players were able to make a reasonable living playing chess and everybody else had to have a second job. That’s a lot of people when you consider four or five hundred million people are playing this game.

How many other things does capitalism interact with that have that level of involvement where you aren’t making a boatload of money? So I think that’s a feature is that as you mentioned earlier also, a lot of these people don’t have a plan to fall back on as far as having a college degree or serviceable skills in other areas because to get to that highest level, you really have to devote.

I mean, if Malcolm Gladwell is to be believed with the 10,000 hour rule, I think most chess masters and there’s 1,700-1,800 of them probably meet that quota by the time they’re ten or 11 years old and still they would require a second job or to teach or something like that to to make ends meet. So I think that’s a feature probably being in poverty, the demands of it mentally.

I think people who are on the spectrum seem to occupy an outsized role at the upper levels of chess. I did hear that a number of times in relation to Magnus Carlsen, that he was on the spectrum. I have not heard him address that. But that obsessiveness, single-mindedness, the degree of paranoia that is intrinsic to playing chess for somebody who is a little bit unstable, it’s not paranoia in chess.

It’s not about just constructing a perfect game on your part. It’s about destroying your opponent’s game. And I think it’s telling that when Bobby Fischer was asked by Dick Cavett, what is the equivalent of a knockout punch or a home run in baseball in chess, he said, destroying a man’s ego is the greatest thrill in chess. And it’s even more disturbing, I think, that when he came back on Dick Cavett to talk about winning the 1972 World Championship, he was asked, did he have that moment?

And he said no, because he didn’t really, [Boris] Spassky didn’t really self-destruct. So in a sense, he was saying metaphorically, it’s not enough to murder your opponent, you need to compel their suicide. And that was a very common sort of narrative throughout all the top levels of chess, how often the metaphor of blood execution, murder, blood on the board was commonly used.

I mean, far more so than boxing, which I’ve covered fairly extensively. So it tells you something, I think, about the mentality of people where this is their obsession, that the great pleasure is destroying the mind of your opponents. And I think the metaphor becomes literal in many cases at the highest levels.

Chris Hedges

Magnus Carlsen says much the same thing. He’s asked about Bob Simon, I think, from 60 Minutes, but you enjoy it when you see your opponent squirms. And Magnus says, yes, I do. I enjoy it when I see my opponent really suffering.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

The sadism in this game is really something, and I think one other feature is it’s the most status-obsessed subculture that I’ve ever interacted with as a journalist. The analogy I used, which maybe not in the most flattering way, was it felt like a Mensa convention in many ways, where you couldn’t meet anybody and ask any question, where it wouldn’t lead to you learning that they’re a member of Mensa.

And in the case of chess grandmasters, I think there’s 1750 of them. It’s a little strange to be, I’m 1750th in the world at tennis or any other pursuit, but it was the rule in meeting people at the chess world championship that after their name, this is what you’d hear about them. So it was of paramount importance because outside of the arena of chess, the level of notoriety of chess players since Fischer has been pretty low and pretty obscure, whereas Fischer was almost at Muhammad Ali-level of notoriety.

And I think chess conflated that Fischer revealed how wonderful and popular chess was when I think it was sort of the other way around for the most part in terms of Fischer being this incredible personality of the 20th century. I think Dick Cavett said he was the most interesting person he ever interviewed.

At that time, across the 20 years or so that Cavett was interviewing people, he interviewed everybody in American life. There’s something about Fischer that I think haunts the game and certainly haunts my imagination in relation to the game.

Chris Hedges

Well there’s a quote in the book, that Fischer is an artist and Magnus Carlsen is a drone. So explain the difference.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

Yeah, I think Fischer has a tremendous romantic relationship to the game, both what he did on the board and off. I mean, not just competing against the Soviets.

Chris Hedges

And we should be clear that Soviets have dominated chess since the 1920s or something maybe before.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

Absolutely. Yeah, and America needed metaphorical victories against the Soviets and communism. And Fischer was more than happy to step up. And he did it from a lower class background in Brooklyn on his own, learning foreign languages in order to study the game. Just the most hermetically sealed world champion in the most hermetically sealed of games.

And he just was incredibly compelling as a personality. I mean, he seems like J.D. Salinger wrote him as a character, as a sort of bastardized black sheep member of the Glass family. And yet, I remember Gay Talese very early in his career at the New York Times saw Fischer, I think at 10 years old or 11 years old, and said as he looked at the board, it looked like the fate of the world was at stake.

And there was something about the way that he could involve Americans in that struggle. And America, we have the space race and we have the chessboard as the predominant images of trying to take on communism. And so Fischer took that on and then that went to some very dark places after he left the game and ultimately just became the most famous cautionary tale, arguably in the history of the sport.

Chris Hedges

Well, he went completely insane. Didn’t he pull his teeth out and thought he would put tin foil over his house>

Brin-Jonathan Butler

And became a raging anti-Semite and cheered on 9/11.

Chris Hedges

Even though he was, wasn’t he Jewish? He was Jewish.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

He was absolutely Jewish and more Jewish than he initially thought in terms of his biological father also being a Hungarian Jew, Paul Nemenyi, yeah. And cheering on 9/11 definitely galvanized the Bush administration to go after him. So he was arrested in Japan and later was given citizenship in Iceland, but he never seemed to really pull back on that direction that he was going.

He became a member of a number of obscure churches. He just became very unhinged and darkly menacing in almost all of his views. I kind of think of him a bit like the Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove, riding the nuclear bomb in terms of his rhetoric. Just deranged. So that was such a stark contrast from the young kid who seemed to embody this incredible symbol of the American spirit in the Cold War to cheering on 9/11 was quite a whiplash, I think, that fans of his had to deal with.

Chris Hedges

You brought up Muhammad Ali and you make a comparison between Fischer and Muhammad Ali and let’s talk about that comparison and also about the analogies between chess and boxing.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

Muhammad Ali became quite a blank canvas for many issues himself in terms of his strident opposition of the Vietnam War, as a racial advocate, I mean, his identity in American life has changed dramatically from when he was fighting to what he became later on in his post-fight career and being silenced by Parkinson’s. But I mean, he became a kind of secular saint and sort of civil rights icon largely after the fact.

Chris Hedges

Which wasn’t true. He supported segregation through the Nation of Islam.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

No, he gloated about meeting with the Ku Klux Klan and make analogies like Bluebird should stay with Bluebirds. Yeah, he was a pro-segregationist early on. So he evolved and I think it’s important for people to understand the complexity of that evolution of his consciousness as he got older. He did recognize the errors of his ways.

This was somebody whose best friend Malcolm X called out the leader of the nation of Islam and Muhammad Ali’s response was that he deserved to be murdered for doing so and later on said that was the biggest regret of his life. But his symbolic importance to many causes in American life can’t be understated and Fischer was similar just in the sense that somebody who was so incredibly charismatic in such an unexpected venue for charismatic athletes as chess is.

I remember entering the World Chess Championship for the first day and the setting kind of reminded me of covering boxing matches in Atlantic City and coming home at a Greyhound bus station at three o’clock in the morning, crossed with an oligarch black market art auction. It seemed like the strangest juxtaposition of people at the event.

There were people who were spraying disinfectant on the floor and I asked what that was about and they said, well, the general hygiene in this place is a little suspect. So there was this strange overlap with boxing and chess that jumped out at me just in terms of the sadism of the athletes. And that, I think a lot of people went, that’s the chess, how could that play into chess?

But it was absolutely true if you talk to the participants, the language that they used in defeating people. And I think the level of humiliation at stake if you lost was really important. Boxers are infinitely more concerned with being humiliated and rendered helpless than they are about being hurt, even killed in the ring. And I think with chess, it’s the mental equivalent of that.

It’s being dominated. It’s being humiliated in front of the world as you’re playing. And there is such a wonderful clarity to chess about exactly where you are. The Dunning-Kruger effect is bleached more in chess than I think in any other area in the sense of overestimating your ability. You are being snapped into total clarity and focus and honesty about how good you are every time you’re playing somebody.

These people all have attached to them their rating number and who they’re competing against. Like everything is being constantly recalibrated. And as much of a benefit that that is to outsiders trying to assess who’s the best, who’s good, who’s up and coming, for the players themselves, I think it’s a lot of pressure in such a status-obsessed environment.

And an environment where outside of chess, beyond a world champion, most people around the world are not that concerned with their popularity or status. There’s, Mensa, there’s a tremendous amount of status obsession compounded by some of the most insecure people I’ve ever encountered relative to status.

Chris Hedges

Well, boxers like [George] Foreman, he used to say that he went in the ring to kill them. He became Uncle George later, and Sonny Liston and others.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

Yeah, and we have fetishized boxers for their nightmarish capabilities, both in what they look like, how they dominate people. Mike Tyson was a far more marketable boxer after his rape conviction than he was before it. And that’s an interesting commentary on our values, voyeuristically, in supporting him, that this is a guy who could step out of jail and basically fight you or me and make $25 million, because we didn’t care who he was fighting.

We just wanted to spend time with him, doing what he did best, which was separating people from their consciousnesses. And that was true of Bobby Fischer too. I mean, that’s why I make the analogy: Fischer stepping away from the game was offered several million dollars to have a rematch against Boris Spassky that had no relevance or importance whatsoever to the chess world per se, as far as how good is he. He’s not fighting the equivalent players who are top ranked.

We just want to spend time with Fischer again. So he was able to still make boxing money. And I say that because boxing is still minting the highest paid athletes and sometimes entertainers in the world today, even though the ecosystem of boxing like chess is if you’re not rich, you need a second job. So there’s overlap there too, in that these are people who are pretty isolated and desperate if they’re not really successful in many respects.

In both games, there’s no pension plan, there’s no health care. These people are very alone in what they’re doing, very isolated, and there’s nobody to help them when they step into action, which is this other area which I think adds to the drama and romanticism and stakes that are involved.

Chris Hedges

Well, it should be clear these second jobs are menial jobs. I mean, you go down to the chess forum and meet grandmasters and if they’re lucky, they’re driving cabs. You write about people virtually homeless, sleeping under the chess tables in Washington Square Park.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

Absolutely, I mean, one of the people who was really interesting to meet was a guy whose nickname was Backgammon Falafel, Matvey Natanzon, who became the world’s top backgammon player, became very successful. But he initially came to New York from Buffalo to go to Washington Square Park where Bobby Fischer and Stanley Kubrick played and many other icons.

He was only successful enough to sleep under a chessboard in Washington Square Park and rustled enough money together that he could buy a falafel, hence the nickname. But you move that brain over to backgammon, he can make a lot of money. I think he said sometimes $10,000 a point was what he was up to. So yeah, I did meet people at the chess forum who had one or two PhDs who had just given up careers in academia were writing because ultimately this was just too addictive and they couldn’t divide their energies and sort of mental bandwidth.

So that was quite something and the owner of the chess forum just said, I’ve seen people fall prey to alcohol addiction, cocaine, nothing is more addictive than this game. And these people are throwing away their lives and I would throw my own life away if I got involved with chess. So instead of drinking the alcohol as an alcoholic, instead decided to become a bartender. So he was definitely a standout character for me.

Chris Hedges

But before we go on, there’s a quote in the book. I tried to look for it, but it’s about the eyes, the similarity of the way Muhammad Ali would look and the way Fischer would look.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

Yeah, that was from, geez, his name just escapes me, but this great photographer from Life Magazine, a Scottish fellow.

Chris Hedges

Was it Brents? Yeah, I’ll find it. Brentson or Brennan or something like that. Benson, there you go.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

Harry Benson. So Harry Benson, I reached out to him because he spent a lot of time with Fischer during 1972, both leading up to the championship and after. And he had also photographed the Beatles arriving, I think he was on the same plane as the Beatles arriving for Ed Sullivan, and it photographed every president going back to Eisenhower.

And I asked him, after I heard a question posed to him about who was the most interesting person that he ever photographed in his entire career. And I think he was in his mid-80s when I got to him. He said, the most interesting person I’ve ever met is the same person who’s the most interesting person I’ve ever photographed, which is Bobby Fischer. And I don’t know a goddamn thing about chess, and it didn’t make any difference.

I’ve just never met anybody like this. And he said that Fischer’s eyes, exactly like Muhammad Ali’s, just before the bell rings, were like a snake looking at their opponent that they just had this degree of killer instinct.

And I mean, I think Muhammad Ali has been now sort of characterized as this cute figure, playful, lovable. That was not him early on. He was a bad, bad man and an incredibly sadistic man, both verbally, the games and antics he would play, calling Joe Frazier an Uncle Tom or a gorilla. I mean, he was not above any means of trying to get into…

Chris Hedges

Let me just interrupt there. This was when Ali was not allowed to fight. Frazier gave him money. Frazier had funded him.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

Yes he did. And went to Washington to advocate for him, to get his license back. He was a good friend to him. And he was repaid by being addressed by some of the most derogatory terms that Ali could use in terms of specifically going after stereotypical race features that he had, you know, pressing down his nose and beating up a gorilla and stuff. It was really some of the ugliest stuff that I think Ali put out.

Chris Hedges

Well, he used to hold up a little toy gorilla, I mean, it was very cruel.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

Very cruel, very cruel. You know, as we’re saying about Ali, I mean, as much as he was a secular saint, he took a principled stand with his religion not allowing him to be involved in Vietnam. It didn’t preclude him from extramarital affairs, which was punishable by death by that same faith.

So he was a little bit a la carte in sort of where he used this to sign off on his behavior during his career and some of his private conduct. But I think the overlap with Fischer and Ali is interesting because Fischer was definitely aware Ali was the top dog as far as an athlete, as far as the kind of money Ali was making, and really dramatically increased the amount of compensation that all chess players received.

That on the basis of himself first getting these large rewards to play in world championships or to play other games. But the major figure, the major analog that he looked at about if Muhammad Ali can get this, I deserve just as much, was his attitude. And so I think part of what really drew us to both of them, it’s interesting when Cavett and Johnny Carson interviewed Fischer and he said things like, destroying a man’s ego is the great pleasure. There’s a gasp in the audience when they see that he’s not joking.

He’s really serious. I think he would have delighted in somebody dying from their ego collapsing after a match. I think he was a tremendously vicious person in just how competitive he was, which is not uncommon with most athletes. I mean, we’ve seen it with Michael Jordan getting a Hall of Fame induction and his speech is just riddled with grievance. He seems like one of the most grievance ridden people.

I mean, a lot of people who are at the top get there because to get there requires almost sociopathic attitudes towards your opponents. These are not just extremely competitive, but enormously sadistic people at the top. I’m not saying outside of the realm of what they’re competing at, but within it, you don’t get there without being kind of everything your parents don’t want you to be as a kid in many respects, as far as a compassionate, kind person. Those people are not very present at the elite levels of any arena of ambition, I think.

Chris Hedges

I want to read a quote in your book. This is from Stanley Kubrick who was a passionate chess player.

“Among a great many other things that chess teaches you is to control the initial excitement you feel when you see something that looks good. It trains you to think before grabbing and to think just as objectively when you’re in trouble. When you’re making a film you have to make most of your decisions on the run and there is a tendency to always shoot from the hip. It takes more discipline than you might imagine to think even for 30 seconds in the noisy, confusing, high pressure atmosphere of a film set. But a few seconds thought can often prevent a serious mistake being made about something that looks good at first glance. With respect to films, chess is more useful for preventing you from making mistakes than giving you ideas. Ideas come spontaneously and the discipline required to evaluate and put them to use tends to be the real work.”

I thought that was really, really interesting.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

Yeah, totally obsessive chess player. And I was able to get a hold of his wife to talk to her about his relationship to chess and also somebody that I sat next to for the entire world chess championship in 2016, Dr. Frank Brady, who was a biographer of Bobby Fischer, but also Hugh Hefner, Orson Welles, many, many others.

It was very interesting to get a sense into Kubrick’s psychology in relation to chess, because I think his genius in filmmaking is really responsible for the two things he did before he got into filmmaking. Photography, which he was prodigiously talented at, and chess. You combine those two and you get Stanley Kubrick.

Frank Brady said a funny anecdote that he used to show up to compete where you had to pay a drop-in fee in the West Village where Kubrick was living and playing and he would never pay when he would pass through Dr. Frank Brady and he’d always just say, you can take it from my winnings after I finish and there never were winnings that he ever paid so he just said, that son of a bitch never paid me when he owed me money. So that was Kubrick.

Chris Hedges

You talk about the addictive quality of chess and how that addiction will, I mean, you have in there lawyers who give up their practice, marriages that fail. At what point does there come a reckoning?

Brin-Jonathan Butler

I think it’s a combination of really what you bring to the game is the, you know, I think many of us have somebody in our family who’s an alcoholic or where gambling is an issue. I think they say from data that I’ve read, 10% of people who dabble in drugs or alcohol or gambling, 10% of them are the ones where it takes over their lives.

90% of people can basically manage interaction with any of those things, but 10%, it becomes the soup rather than the spice of their life. So I think with chess, and again, I need to stress if four or five hundred million people are playing it on the whole I would highly recommend it for kids to play to learn problem solving to learn analytical thinking I think there’s lots of constructive value to it for a certain type of person who is obsessive which I think, I hope you would grant me, writers are that type. You have to keep us from doing this because it takes over our lives those kind of…

Chris Hedges

Well, you make that point in the book and it’s a very good point. It’s the obsession. And I think you had a line in there, you can’t not do it.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

That’s right. I think I interviewed Errol Morris in the book and I asked him in terms of how do you know somebody who’s dealt with obsession throughout their career as a documentarian and he just said I just don’t understand this idea that you could nurture or inculcate devotion to anything like in terms and create a Bobby Fischer, create a [Franz] Kafka. What you have to do as a parent is prevent them from this taking over their lives to safely be obsessed with it because there’s no way to stop it with those kind of people.

Fischer couldn’t have been anybody but Bobby Fischer. Kafka couldn’t have been anybody but Kafka. So I think there is this misunderstanding of a lot of parents with hiring these top level chess players to coach their kids to become a prodigy. So they become a kind of ornament for their parents, but it just doesn’t seem to work this way.

I’m not saying they can’t get better with teaching, but the rarefied air of these people who have the intellect and the devotion and the capabilities. I mean, one of the mysteries of chess, which is really interesting, is trying to understand what mastering chess allows you to master outside of chess.

Fischer used to take great exception when people would say that he was a chess genius. He’d say, no, I’m a genius who happens to play chess. But there’s no indication he was even competent at anything else outside of chess.

This was something he was spending 16 hours a day at and in every other area he just seems like a totally undeveloped child because his entire life, his entire bandwidth was devoted to this game which was necessary for him to become a Mozart of the game. So I think that that obsession is not restricted to the people who become wildly successful at it.

But for the people where this takes over your life, like drugs, like gambling, like alcohol, sex addiction, chess seems to be something very dangerous for a certain cast of mind. And once it takes over, as we mentioned at the beginning with Peter Winston, a little child who was a prodigy on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post at five or six years old when America was desperate for child prodigies, that was for math, which is exactly what his parents were trying to steer him towards, but the moment he just interacted with the chessboard, there was no going back.

It just totally hijacked his life. And I met a lot of people where that was true, which is a narrow, rarified group of those people out of hundreds of millions where it’s perfectly healthy and fun. But for that narrow group, which I think comprises the people at the top, because you have to be that way, it’s not only sort of recommended that you be this way, there’s no other way to qualify for that top zone unless you happen to be this relentlessly devoted.

Chris Hedges

Yes, although I mean, when you write about the match, you talk about the incredible physical physicality of it, they’re seven hours long. They’re just drained and exhausted. And chess champions can’t, I think the champion I quoted was the champion for twenty seven years. But most don’t last that long. I mean, there’s a burnout rate. You just can’t do it at that level. And then what happens? I mean, these lives just appear to disintegrate.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

Yeah, I mean, mentally, there seems to be overlap in chess with what are the physical limitations in boxing. Up until recently, where I think performance enhancing drugs probably plays a role, along with better nutrition and science and that sort of thing, once you hit 30, most fighters looked very different.

Muhammad Ali looked very different coming back from three and a half years outside of the game. He was no longer a dancing, balletic person. He was flat-footed and we got to see what his chin was like taking all those punches. And in chess similarly, past the age of 30, and this is something that Bobby Fischer acknowledged when Dick Cavett interviewed him, you don’t see many people getting better past their early 20s, mid 20s, the faculties do seem to deteriorate.

And I mean, we know we lose neurons as we get older and that kind of thing. I’m sure it just carries over from that. But that can be very troubling and stressful to these champions who, I mean, even a Magnus Carlsen, by the time he’s 30 in his early 30s, you can see he’s sort of moving away from the game in many respects. And now with allegations of cheating within the game.

It’s sort of becoming a bit like baseball where there was all this speculation about why these records are being broken in sort of seemingly unnatural ways. Chess has its own problem with that, which is getting more headlines than even the people who are dominating the game, which is an interesting commentary on chess’s relationship to the public.

Chris Hedges

We just had a case of didn’t a grandmaster just commit suicide over an allegation of cheating?

Brin-Jonathan Butler

Yeah, we did. Yeah, Daniel Naroditsky, believe. I hope I’m pronouncing that correctly. But yeah, 29 years old and Vladimir Kramnik. Sounds like they’re allegations of cheating. And before that, had Hans Niemann, who Magnus Carlsen just stood up in protest and walked away from a game because he was pretty sure that Nieman was cheating.

And then there were revelations that Niemann, on Chess.com, which became wildly popular during COVID, was caught, I think, hundreds of times cheating there. So chess has a problem because, I mean, within any phone is an app that could beat any grandmaster who’s ever lived handily. And if they can find ways to transmit the information from their phone to these players, and there’ve been famous.

I mean, Hans Niemann had allegations of anal beads initially, if you can believe it, but there were bathroom gates of getting information to the bathroom or sort of Morse code methods of tapping somewhere, sort of like gambling methods of cheating. But chess might need to have something like baseball’s answer to a Mitchell Report just to get a better understanding of how many people Chess.com’s algorithm, which apparently is the most refined, sophisticated methodology of tracking cheating within the game.

How many people have been caught doing this and who are they? Are they at the top of the game? And as we’re saying, it seems to be really in danger of encouraging and incentivizing cheating because there’s so little money other than at the very top. So if you can jump the line through effective cheating, I think the incentives are there to bring about those kind of people going after it as opposed to just being rendered nameless or irrelevant.

Chris Hedges

You bring up the misogyny, which is common among many top chess players. The fact that only 20% of grandmasters are women. Do I have that correct? And you talk about that. Why are women so underrepresented? What do you think’s happening within the chess world?

Brin-Jonathan Butler

Historically chess has been, I quoted a number of people, top level people who made tremendously misogynistic claims about the female brain just not being able to compete with men in this area. And I think that trickles down to the atmosphere of any local place where children play if there’s hostility to that barrier of entry for just somebody being encouraged to play or being welcomed.

but instead you’re meeting hostility and there’s a dismissive, misogynistic attitude to young girls participating. That’s a really hostile place. So a general question from non-chess people was, this game is segregated? How could you segregate this game?

But I think it was a pretty reasonable approach given that hostility and it did not take long to seek out some of the top players in the game, even in the 80s and 90s and 70s, just making breathtakingly misogynistic statements of fact as far as they were concerned that have been totally disproven by neuroscientists and sort of anybody wanting to get to the bottom of this.

But these sort of glib, dismissive remarks about women in the game, I think were very hurtful. And I did a whole chapter about Judit Polgár, whose parents were psychologists. I’m not sure if both her parents were, certainly her father was. They were a Hungarian Jewish family, like where my mother is from. His goal was to sort of prove that I can create genius in my children. And I wanna do it in a male dominated area. And so all three of his daughters became tremendous talents.

And Judit, I think of the three children, became the most talented and accomplished. She was just an incredible pioneer. I mean, for anybody who watched the Queen’s Gambit, I mean, she was kind of that in real life in terms of on her way up and just a fascinating character. And she did a lot, I think, to dispel these unfounded misogynistic views against women’s involvement in the game.

And then I think the Queen’s Gambit, I hope, encouraged a lot more women to get involved.

Chris Hedges

I want to read a quote in the book from Richard Brody:

“I think the chess itself is a very troubling game for geniuses and for ordinary people and perhaps much more for ordinary people, he told me. The analogy I would make is to Plato’s Republic. Socrates talks about how philosophy is important for young people to work on, but that young people should first have experience with the more practical side of life, adult life, adult responsibility, and then when they are worldly and generally experienced, then they are ready for philosophy. Or rather, they are raised to the level of life experience that makes them worthy of philosophy. Philosophy is too real and too perfect. If you study philosophy when you’re young, it spoils you for experience, which spoils experience for you. It actually makes you think the realm of ideas and the realm of books is better, worthier than the realm of life that one experiences. A young person who has an imagination and energy and is given good books of philosophy as a teenager will never go out and live and that is terrible and chess is the same.”

I mean, Princeton University is up the street. I’m a journalist. I read a lot, but I’m a journalist and boy that I think totally captures the divide between writers such as ourselves and academia.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

And this is somebody whose childhood best friend was Peter Winston, who was destroyed by chess in exactly that way. So I found him to be one of the most articulate, insightful people that I discussed it with who had this profoundly personal connection to what chess could do. And he himself was a chess player as a child.

He played Winston and just said, you know, I was talented, but I was not that talented as Winston, who I think he described as one of the few geniuses he ever met in his life who was a paradigm shifting thinker who instead devoted all of that energy and intellect to chess. And I don’t think ever made any money from it, particularly even though I think he was a junior national champion very early in his life as a teenager.

So yeah, I think Brody really nailed something about the game and then I would just add, I think the paranoia that is intrinsic to becoming a great player, you need to be anticipating what all your adversaries are trying to do to you. You’re not just trying to destroy their cathedral, they are trying to destroy yours at the same time. And you need to be constantly on that sort of dialectical thinking and engagement.

And it’s not a healthy way to be. I myself got very fascinated and obsessed with speed chess in my late teens, and I was trying to be a writer. And I found I couldn’t do both. There was something about the energy that it was drawing from. It was just exhausting and you would fall asleep thinking about chess. And I needed to be thinking about what I was reading and researching and working on. And I couldn’t do both.

And I don’t think at the top levels, A, I think you probably have to start at five, six years old. I think you basically have to be willing to enter into indentured servitude to chess as a child in order to compete with all of the other people whose parents are totally fine with their children accepting that sacrifice.

And that’s a big price to pay when you’re that monomaniacal about one thing that doesn’t have a lot of transferable skills to the rest of your life. And I think I interviewed one college graduate who went to Yale who enters the book early on and he made that point: You know, I’m a grandmaster too, but there’s not a lot of us who have college degrees, like probably on two hands out of the 1700 that exist. That’s a little risky because I wanted to be more well-rounded in life rather than realize my full potential at chess because could I have been in the top 10? I don’t think so. So I would have rather studied, I think he studied history at Yale.

But that was a choice that wasn’t really available to a lot of the other people for a variety of reasons, including their inclination and just the way their mind was constructed in reaction to chess also.

Chris Hedges

I’m just going to turn to the end of the book and you have some beautiful passages here:

“The popular narrative is that winners show their character and strength in finding a way to win, while losers are weak and lack the necessary metal. Yet winning is a single note, pure in tone, but alone. It’s the losers who are confronted with who they really are and find depth and perspective as a direct consequence of failure, take us far closer to human truths when we hear their stories compared to those of their vanquishers. Winners are rarely self-aware. Losers have no choice. The fundamental, irrevocable lesson of life and nature is loss. Winning is a temporary illusion.”

And this is where you write all these later on:

“Quests are in the end the issues of children underneath springs an innocent yet awesome desire to conquer all an unchecked power. What that power has developed around it is a defense mechanism against growing up against time and I suppose here is where the whole issue dovetails not just with art but with all human achievement. A well-balanced adult, as the model is presented to us, should never attempt these things. The gamble is too great, the risk too enormous, the failure too final, because to lose, to lose, turns it all into nothing but a lesson, a transient thing in a transient world. Perhaps that is why, even when we don’t understand, we celebrate above all others those who dare to take the risk.”

But of course, it’s like Prometheus. They take that risk and then they inevitably come too close to the sun.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

Just seems to be how it’s felt interviewing boxing champions or ghost writing for Lance Armstrong. I would say Lance Armstrong was about the least self-aware person I’ve ever met, but he could certainly read us as a culture. You know, I think he referred to himself, they’ll never forgive Cancer Jesus, but Cancer Jesus as a narrative is something every family’s been touched by cancer.

So that deception is something we would all rather buy into than the truth. He understood that about us. But in terms of who he was as a person when I met him, I thought, my God, he believes he is Cancer Jesus. And that’s been true of most of the top elite athletes that I’ve had a chance to interview and authors too.

I do think there’s a defense mechanism about trying to vanquish whatever this feeling is about, I think, the role of death in our lives or irrelevance or ending up a footnote. Yeah, I guess that’s just my point of view on it, that losers do always seem more self-aware. And I think, I mean, you tell me as a journalist, interviewing anybody who’s a proverbial loser, they certainly seem to be a lot more illuminating about things than your proverbial winners seem to be.

Chris Hedges

Yeah, because they’ve been forced to ask questions about themselves and the people around them, and that winners are not forced to ask.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

And I think that the devotion to winning is that terror. I think I suspect that anybody who is afraid to lose, it is sort of seeing what’s motivated you to become this obsessive winner. And often it’s not positive. Often we look at winners as demonstrating character and strength and virtue and most of the ones that I’ve met, that’s not the fuel for it. It’s quite the contrary in terms of what characteristics have driven them to get there.

It’s fear, it’s anger, it’s revenge, hypercompetitiveness, sadism, destroying your adversaries. It’s a zero sum attitude. Whereas I do think losers, and I say it, I mean it in quotes, but the people who suffer that loss, it definitely seems to put you much more into contact with qualities of humanity that we would want our kids to represent in terms of compassion, concern, humility. Winning is very isolating, I think. I often sort of think about this in terms of fame, seems to be the biggest serial killer that we have.

And yet we still encourage people to try to get there. like, kids now want to be famous more than they want to accomplish anything, despite the fact that there are so many examples of cautionary tales that exist there for us and always have. So it’s interesting.

Chris Hedges

I’ve interviewed celebrities and they don’t know who they are. They can’t distinguish between the public fiction that’s presented to the world and their inner self. They don’t know who they are. They have no concept.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

Yeah, and I mean, I think it’s, I mean, even in Alexander the Great, what is driving this person to conquer the entire known world and name everything after themselves? It seems similar to somebody we know today who’s in office where, you know...

Chris Hedges

At least Alexander the Great was a great general, at least he had that going for him. No, I’m not disagreeing.

Brin-Jonathan Butler

No, absolutely, but you just think, I think he… It’s just an interesting, one of the things that I find refreshing is that history bears out that people are remembered for what they gave, not what they had. And anybody who needs to name things after themselves, it betrays insecurity rather than arrogance or they’re dominated by ego. It betrays an insecurity that somebody wouldn’t name it after them.

And I can’t imagine wanting to name something after myself. I want to name it after somebody I care about who has assisted me and helped me in some way. Who am I performing for to name something after myself? So it’s, yeah, it’s a strange feature and it is a common one amongst winners. There does seem to be a defensiveness about it that I don’t think we spend a lot of time trying to get to the bottom of it because it seems unsettling to question winning.

Like it’s such a dominant thrust of what everybody should aspire to. And I’m not saying people should aspire to be a loser, but it just is an interesting feature that I haven’t met many of the so-called world, like winners or world champions and stuff that didn’t in their personal life represent a lot of what jumped out at me as a cautionary tale about what developed them into that kind of winner.

So I guess you can pick and choose what you like about them. But I came away from a lot of them just thinking, God, could you imagine being the, I mean, Michael Jordan at the Hall of Fame induction ceremony looked at his children and said, God, I wouldn’t want to be you. And I just thought, wow, could you imagine saying that to your children? Or imagine that people would hear you saying that to your children and think that that is a funny remark. It was terrifying to me.

Chris Hedges

Great, thanks. That was Brin-Jonathan Butler on his book, The Grandmaster: Magnus Carlsen and the Match That Made Chess Great Again. I want to thank Thomas [Hedges], Victor [Padilla], Sofia [Menemenlis], and Max [Jones] and Diego [Ramos], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.

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Photos

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Men playing a game of chess at Bryant Park. (Photo by: Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

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Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov.

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Chess grandmaster and current world chess champion Magnus Carlsen (L) of Norway moves a piece on the board against challenger Sergey Karjakin of Russia during their World Chess Championship 2016 round 1 match in New York on November 11, 2016. (Photo by Jewel SAMAD / AFP) (Photo by JEWEL SAMAD/AFP via Getty Images)

Emanuel Lasker

(Eingeschränkte Rechte für bestimmte redaktionelle Kunden in Deutschland. Limited rights for specific editorial clients in Germany.) Philosoph, Mathematician, Champion in chess, Germany *24.12.1868-11.01.1941+Portrait Vintage property of ullstein bild (Photo by John Graudenz/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

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Daniel Naroditsky American Chess Grandmaster

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