A blood sport in the coffee house

“No murderer or rapist is as honest in his lust as a chess player moving in for a sacrificial kill.”

FORMIDABLE and grand on a hilltop in Camden, the glass-fronted Prompt Corner chess café dominated the approach to Hampstead. It was springtime in England, one year before Bobby Fischer’s conquest of the chess world. I walked into the café full of confidence, eager to test my new chess skill. All around the sides people sat at tables smoking, watching and playing chess. There was some noise — bursts of approval and dwindling growls of disappointment — but not enough for so large a group. Laughter was aware of itself, and so was conversation.

A short middle-aged guy in a much faded suit sat with patrician remoteness watching a game near the door. I ordered a coffee and caught his eye. Fancy a game? I mouthed silently. He nodded a yes.

“We’ll play for the board fee,” he said. We tossed for colours. I drew black.

My opening blunders soon became his middle game brilliances. Inwardly trembling, I glanced at the steady gaze on my opponent’s face while he calmly analysed positions invisible to my patzer’s eyes.

Behind me the café kibitzers (all lowered eyelids and knowing smiles) mumbled conspiratorially — the faithful speak a cryptic tongue. Their nervous responses were keyed to the different tensions. The whole atmosphere was charged with stress. You could almost feel the silent throb of intense minds as my opponent lifted his fianchettoed bishop. My heart rose: that bishop was guarding the path to his king — I saw my knights pulling off a quick mating coup.

I went through the attack with rash courage, in a crude pillaging butcher-boy fashion. I mentally recited, ‘If I go here, does he go there? If I do this, will he do that?’.

Then he placed the bishop on a certain square slowly, easily, marvelling at his advantage, and the swift cruel sac cut through all that. The spectators applauded. There was a right and a wrong way to do things and this player knew how to handle a bad bishop. They sat back and smiled in satisfaction.

Every afternoon I went to that café, watching and waiting for a chance to play those warriors whose concentration was unnerving in its power to exclude all else. In this absorbed state, with chins pressed firmly into concave chests, they put their smouldering cigarettes down on the tabletops where the fags burned into the wood. Nothing could be said to them because they were geniuses and genius has to be allowed a little elbow room..

Capricious players, they were usually professional people: doctors, lawyers. accountants — middle-class spivs — fluctuating between silent and moody to rough and uproarious. The odd thing was, these geniuses weren’t necessarily the strongest players in the café. In fact they were hackers (hewers of wood) always seeking the unsound edge.

The really strong ones, those with a bit more art to their butchery, were tactical gladiators, coffee house heroes with sudden death opening traps and surrealistic-edged tactics, more lethal than a Glasgow kiss.

Gossip is nearly always in disagreement over which openings are best. Some players plump for tight, solid defensive structures against blatant attack. Others, more daring, are of the opinion that counter gambits such as the Sicilian or Centre Counter, the Benko or even the Dutch are the only nostrum. Some learned their opening gambits from expensive specialist books. Yet it was only after they had studied and learned many different openings that they discovered that analysis, the ability to see clearly, is one of the most difficult commodities to purchase.

Eager to fight, but dim of plan, I battered away, making the most astounding sacs only to find that they were useless. My opponents possessed a sense of adroitness and timing that I lacked. It all depends on timing, for strategy accumulates whereas sacrifice comes with surprise. Always with surprise.

Then someone gave me a book on strategy, My System by Aron Nimzowitsch. My moves began to gain a bit more bite. Although I never enjoyed learning openings, with the help of Nimzo’s book I managed to reach middle games where I could search for a sac.

There’s a magical quality associated with finding a sacrifice. Chess is a blood sport. Don’t get me wrong, strategy’s alright, you’ve got to learn to add a bit of water to the wine, you need both to keep healthy so to speak. But on the chessboard no one meets a friend, and when the subtle stuff doesn’t work, take the old Fox’s advice: switch to brutality.

John Healy is a London-Irish author and chess master. His book The Grass Arena is re-published this year by Penguin Classics.