This is All Things Considered from NPR News. I'm Robert Siegel.
Even in this era of Madden Football （一款电脑游戏名，中文名叫疯狂足球，也有叫马顿足球的）and GrandTheft Auto （一款电脑游戏，中文名叫侠盗车手） of Gameboys and Playstations, you can still read an account of Hezbollah's raid across the Israeli border as Nasrallah's gambit, and you can find descriptions of the response it provoked as Israel's endgame. The vocabulary of chess forms a metaphorical bridge between a harmless board game of strategy and the strategies of real-life war. The history of the game is recounted in a new book by David Shenk. It's called "The Immortal Game". And to serious chess players, that title has an obvious double meaning: It refers to the game itself and also to a particular match that was played by two masters in 1851. David Shenk weaves the story of that match move by move throughout the larger story. Welcome to the program.
Thank you for having me.
And tell us about the immortal game of 1851.
Well, this was a remarkable game because it wasn't supposed to be remarkable. Here were two amazing champions Lionel Kieseritzky and Adolf Anderssen. They were participating in really the first formal international chess tournament ever in 1851 in London and in between the formal games, these chess players of course couldn't get enough chess so they would play practice games. The actual formal games could last hours and hours and even days. So the practice games tended to be a lot shorter than that. And this was one of those practice games that really should have been a throwaway game, it shouldn't have even been remembered at all in history but it turned out to be so remarkable that the loser who I would not name was so blown away that he recorded it and it was quickly dubbed the immortal game and has been studied ever since.
The lesson of this particular "immortal game" match, the best I can make of it is that the player who actually gave up several very, very important pieces still won, it wasn't telling that he had lost such vital pieces as two rooks and the queen.
That's the technical lesson here is that you can sacrifice an amazing amount of material ah, you know, a novice would never think that you can give up a queen and still win a game but in fact if you know what you're doing you can give up far more than that and still win. The broader lesson though is that any chess game like any piece of art starts out mundane and you never know if it's gonna turn into magic or not. And the players don't know either.
Part of your motivation here in writing the book was to learn something about one Samuel Rosenthal. Would you tell us about him
Yes, this was a piece of family lore and I really knew nothing about it. I wasn't even sure if Samuel Rosenthal existed but I had been told that he was my great-great-grandfather and that he was the, the dean of all chess in France in the 19 century and that he had been given all these prizes and taught someone in the Napoleon family and really was dominant for several decades and did those simultaneous demonstrations playing against 50 or 100 people who wants them, beating them all without a problem and, and would play these long, long chess matches in which he would be described as being as still as a statue.
And you met chess teachers as say I'm Samuel Rosenthal, I've taught some of these games.
Yes, he is still known among serious chess players. Now I mean one of the interesting points to make about, about chess and where Rosenthal fits is that not too many of his games would be considered stellar today because chess knowledge like all other knowledge builds on itself. So, we can look at some of the amazing games in the 19th century and we can say well, for their time that was particularly creative and that was a new way of thinking but, but serious chess players build on top of that and actually there've been two or three schools of thought of, of how to play chess that have come along since Samuel Rosenthal's thought.
