Free Tactics of Conquest by Barry N. Malzberg Page B

had him for sure, down two Pawns to three in a simple end game. But I allowed him to take timing on me and was forced to blunder my way into a clumsy draw. Frustrating, ah, frustrating! It is expected that the champion will win
most
of his games against other grandmasters, this being after all the definition of a champion. But he cannot by any means win
all
of them; even the greatest have percentages of somewhat lower than eighty percent, meaning that better than one time out of five they can be beaten. But even though the statistical probabilities were in my favor and even though I know myself truly to be the best chess player in the world (the only games I have lost have either been thrown, as in this series, or lost on stupid blunders under time pressure), the fact is that I had never beaten the champion, never once forced him to resign (much less undergo checkmate).
    The draw in Moscow was the closest that I had come in our seventeen encounters conducted over a period of five years, and after that draw I went into a raging state of depression which took me from near the top of the standings to the verybottom within a matter of weeks. I could have won that tournament, too. Everyone said it.
    But in New York City, in my birthplace, for the Golden Cups & Knights Championship of the Eastern Seaboard, I knew at last that I had him. We drew against one another in the first round and then in the twelfth; in the first I was able to take him thirty-seven moves until my Fried-Liver Attack succumbed to the wedge of his Knights and my Queen fell. Even then, looking into his eyes somewhere around the twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth move, I knew that we had entered into a different relationship. For the first time I had the power over him. He was truly beatable. I knew it, and he knew it too; his eyes refracted that knowledge and it was in a strange, doomed trance that he went through the ensuing twelve moves that gave him the game. His mind was already filled with dread; he knew that we would meet eleven games hence and I could see him calculating already whether he would be able to avoid me; perhaps some sniffle or pimple could erupt in time to afford him a medical excuse. But even then, the match would merely be postponed until he was well again; a game can be canceled only by mutual consent and I would not let him go. He knew that. I could sense that knowledge as a high, dense odor which came through his pores and into my nose.
    Much has been written of the champion, of his behavior in head-to-head matches, of his strange and peculiar ability to mesmerize and destroy his opponents, of his ability to infiltrate them with what the specialists call “Monarchial Misery,” in which the opponents seem to lose control of themselves, lose the thrust of their game, and begin to commit infantile blunders of the sort which they have not done for more than twenty years. “MonarchialMisery,” the specialists say, may come from some strange, psychic force which the champion emanates, a force which causes otherwise mature opponents to go off their game and begin to gibber like children. Two weeks after the matches they are perfectly normal again, calm, confident that they can beat the champion upon a return match. But there are rarely return matches and in tournaments they never do.
    The champion has one of the most amazing winning records in the history of chess, over ninety-five percent, I believe, with the utmost majority of his few defeats having occurred when he was playing grandmaster chess before his fifth birthday and thus hardly counting. Since the age of twelve his record approaches perfection: He has lost two games and drawn thirty-four, the two losses meaningless defeats occurring at the end of tournaments already won, forfeiture by nonappearance, When I speak of the eighty-percent win factor, as you see, I am not speaking of the champion who goes beyond the superhuman attainments of even a Fischer or an Alekhine. He is the champion