Joe Biden’s Gambit
For a few years back in high school, I made a feint at becoming a chess whiz. It was unsuccessful, though I did manage to become a grandmaster of Cheez Whiz, so that’s sort of the same thing.
I was on the high school chess club but never made it above the fourth chair. I played in a few local tournaments and did okay, but never threatened the finals, or the semifinals, or the quarter-finals. I’d win a game, maybe two. I’d draw a few and lose a few. I think my highest rating was somewhere around 1100 — which meant I was a low-average, casual player. I could show some flair in the middle game but lacked the discipline needed to study openings and endgames. All in all, my incipient chess career was a bust. Yet, in that otherwise unillustrious endeavor, I had one genuinely spectacular game. It was such a great game that as I watched the news today, I relived the whole brilliant experience.
At the time, I was fifteen years old and playing in my first tournament, held at the local university, and while it’s not relevant to the story, one of my strongest memories is how EVERYONE was smoking, including me. Cigarettes were lit at every table, and ashtrays overflowed all day long. To fight down my nicotine headache, I was drinking coffee and chewing Excedrin tablets like they were candy.
It’s hard to believe that we once really lived like that.
Anyway, I won my first-round match against a weaker player. That put me into a game with a stronger player in round two, and I managed — through a good bit of luck — a draw. Then, in the third round, I was set across the table from a player who, in most circumstances, I’d not have seen. He was worlds better than me. I’m not entirely clear on how I even ended up playing him. Maybe he dropped an earlier game, unexpectedly landing him with the weaker players for a round, before — as was expected — he’d work his way back into the heart of the action.
His name — I remember it because I saved our play record for more than twenty years — was Mr. Washington, and while he wasn’t a Master, he was a very, very good player — rated at over 1700. The way the system works, I was considered a novice, and Mr. Washington was Class A. For him, the match should have been an absolute waltz.
But it wasn’t because I played my ass off, and he made a terrible blunder. To this day, it was the best game I ever played. It was so good that it’s got me wondering if I could still find that notation sheet. It’s probably upstairs in the attic, now that I think about it. Yet, for our purposes here, I don’t need to find it. I remember all the salient moves like the board was still in front of me.
The game got hot after about twelve transitions. Most of our material was developed, and I had castled queenside. Mr. Washington fianchettoed his King’s bishop, so I knew that he was targeting my Queen’s-Knight Pawn on the long diagonal. (Players now call that square B2 by modern notation, though I still prefer the Victorian elegance of the old style. I always will. )
Anyway, I was under significant pressure along the Queen’s-Bishop and Queen’s-Knight files and would likely have lost the game in under 25 moves, but then I saw the counterattack — an audacious knight’s strike at his central pawn structure. If I could launch the series, I’d force him, five moves later, to hang his queen.
God, I still remember the feeling of internal awe as the series of transpositions came to me. For one glorious moment, I knew what it felt like to be a grandmaster. It was all there in front of me, glowing, a sort of Act II of Flowers for Algernon’s instant of realization.
My brain usually did not work this way. I was a play-as-you-roll guy, taking on attacks as they came and never really engaging in much complex strategy, but that day, I got lucky. I looked at one option from my position, which led to a few more options. I then thought about how one of those options would spill out, and it just clicked — five forcing moves, where Mr. Washington would have virtually no choice but to do what I wanted him to do, and then I’d have his queen. It was how I typically lost games, not how I won them.
But there was a problem. My counter strike required opening up a little more space in the center of the board, and the only way to do that was to get Mr. Washington to fall into a trap. If I made it too obvious, he’d see where I was leading him and avoid the whole embarrassing fiasco altogether. So my only real option to get him where I wanted was to play a move so stupid, so amateurish, that he’d not look beyond my bungle — and would instead just grab the sacrificed material.
If he did that, my gambit would ensue.
I was staring down at the table, with my head in my hands — wondering how the hell I could do this. Without looking up, I sort of peered at Mr. Washington from the tops of my eyes, so he’d not even notice me doing so. He was smoking lazily, sort of leaning back in his chair, contentedly letting me eat minutes off my clock, knowing that this game would soon be over and he could get back to the adult tables. To him, this game was like one of those movie-scene slapstick fights where a big guy puts his hand on the tiny guy’s head and holds him back while the tiny guy wheels his arms in vain.
Mind you, he was not disrespectful. Mr. Washington was a real gentleman. He was probably in his fifties, with kind eyes and an avuncular bearing. It’s just that he was so confident in his skills — rightfully so — over mine that he was cruise control. I didn’t blame him. I was out of my league — but I had this one play.
I let another two minutes burn from my clock, wondering if I could sell the “fake mistake” I’d have to use to bait the trap. If he did fall for it, I’d have him. But if Mr. Washington saw through the ruse, I’d lose the game in about six moves. He’d launch a relentless assault, and my castled defense would quickly crumble. Yet, if I just kept fending off his attacks one at a time, without finding a way to punch back, I’d get beat anyway — so there was no real choice.
I had to do it.
But for success, I realized that I’d have to play him psychologically, as well as on the board. I would have to rely on his overconfidence and his belief in my incompetence against a far more skilled player. I’d have to use his expectation of me as a rookie. I’d have to make him believe I was even worse than I was and would make a move so stupid that even an 1100 ranked player would never do it.
But maybe a nervous kid in his first tournament might.
As part of his assault on my Queenside fortress, Mr. Washington advanced his Queen’s Pawn to the fifth rank (D4). That specific position allowed my move to work, and from original position, I played Queen-Bishop Pawn to Queen-Bishop 4. (C2-C4).
My gambit was established by intentionally offering an en passant capture, masked as a blunder by a fool. The en passant rule is literally the last rule you learn in chess, and it is the only time in gameplay that a player can capture material not by occupying the opponent’s square but by moving a pawn “in passing” by it. Precisely, you move your pawn diagonally from the fifth to the fourth rank of the neighboring file and grab the pawn that just tried to run past you with a two-square jump. (If you need help visualizing that, the internet will be your salvation. It makes sense once you see it and is meant to mimic the dangers of an over-aggressive charge on the field of battle by infantry.)
But remember, this was a trap. I had to make Mr. Washington believe that I DIDN’T know that rule. I had to make it look like I’d FORGOTTEN that final, rarefied lesson of the novice.
In short, to sell it, I had to do a bit of acting.
I pushed my bishop’s pawn up two squares with confidence. It was a logical move, as it allowed me to threaten one of his knights. But then, as soon as I let go of the piece, I gasped — as if I’d just realized my stupid, stupid mistake. I put my hand back on the piece like I wanted to retract the move. Of course, you can do that in a friendly game — but tournament rules disallow it. In a federation-sanctioned tournament, once you touch a piece, you need to use it, and once you take your hand off that piece, the move is complete.
Those are the official rules — and I needed them all for my plan.
It worked. I took my hand off the piece for a second time and slumped back into my chair, defeated. It looked as if I’d just realized my mistake and had unnecessarily sacrificed even more material to a superior, older, wiser opponent.
Mr. Washington looked at me with some loving pity. He was a good man, a kind man. But he also wanted to win, so he butted his cigarette in the ashtray, shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “Kid, you know I’ve gotta do this,” and he took my pawn.
I will never forget how I felt when he did that.
The scheme worked!
I’ll also never forget how his jaw just fell slack when I burst forward in my seat to throw the next move. He responded under force. Then I played the second move. Then he answered in retreat, and I make the third move of the grand transposition.
It was then that he understood what was happening. He finally saw the payoff of my gambit and knew I would grab his queen — then the game.
To his credit, he let me take his queen from the board before resigning. He clearly understood that this win was a huge deal to a 15-year-old kid. By tricking him, I’d just slayed a dragon, and as word of my gambit spread, a small crowd of players gathered around our table. My mentor — like a proud teacher — was standing behind me when Mr. Washington resigned. I was so proud.
After I cleared his queen, Mr. Washington tipped over his King, stood up, and shook my hand, saying that if we ever played again, he’d not underestimate my skills or my audacity.
Also, I supposed, my acting talent.
He was a mensch about the whole thing, taking the loss with equanimity. He was done in that tournament, but for Mr. Washington, it was just a sloppy Saturday afternoon of play. I’d imagine he forgot about the whole thing by the following morning.
What he didn’t do — what no honorable player would ever do — was to complain that I’d somehow tricked him.
He wouldn’t do that because chess is all about hidden tricks. That’s the magic of the game. Your job is to be opaque. If you want to be victorious, what you show on the surface can’t be the actual plan. If you’re going to avoid defeat, you need to see past the adversary’s individual moves to know the scheme they’re developing underneath.
That is how you play the game — and you sure as hell don’t whine when you lose. You don’t tip over the board. You don’t scream and shout. Instead, you recognize the skill of the other player and learn from your missteps for the next round.
Oh, that the world was filled with Mr. Washingtons. Oh, that the city of his namesake could be stocked to the rafters with his like.
— — —
It’s actually funny to me that the Republicans are now howling about Democratic “betrayal” of the bipartisan infrastructure bill by their linking it with a Dems-only reconciliation bill. The Democrats didn’t betray anyone. Rather, they FINALLY saw an opportunity to screw Mitch McConnell before he screwed us. And just like in my chess match more than 30 years ago, the GOP negotiators fell for the trap because they were overconfident in their ability to beguile the bumbling opposition.
And who can blame them? Seemingly for decades, Republicans in the Senate have been outplaying and overmatching Democrats on every level. As they did, they came to develop certain expectations. They were just better at the parliamentary games.
But think about this in the value-neutral world of a chessboard.
For months now, while the GOP furiously tried to pin Biden and the Democrats down to a smaller infrastructure bill with a regressive tax that would hurt our voters and drive a wedge between our centrist and progressive wings, Biden has been planning to do the same thing to them. Only what he wanted was a bigger plan, a progressive tax increase on the rich, and a way to jam a wedge between some vulnerable senators and a crazy MAGA base.
That is the game we’re playing — and there should be no doubt about the goals of either side. We want to crush them, and they want to crush us.
What happened this week is that the GOP negotiators thought they’d led the Dems into a trap, but Biden read the play, devised a counterstrike, and rammed it back down their throats. He offered them a feint with the bipartisan bill — his gambit, his seeming blunder. Then he brought down the hammer, and momentum suddenly shifted. Now there’s reporting that the GOP might pull out of the bipartisan deal — but it doesn’t matter much now. They’ve already stepped into the part of the trap where there are forcing moves.
If they go along with what Biden’s laid out, the Dems win. If they pull out of the bipartisan deal, the Dems roll that package into their reconciliation bill, get what they want anyway, and then say to voters in 2022, “Look, we had a bipartisan deal, but McConnell pulled the plug.”
As icing on the cake, if the GOP pulls out now — from a bill that Sinema and Manchin themselves actively negotiated — then the pressure on those Senators grows exponentially to recognize the fact that a McConnell-led Republican Senate Caucus will simply never move on anything that is truly bipartisan. Maybe they’ll even agree that it’s time to rewrite the filibuster.
The best thing for them to do, and truly the noble thing for them to do, would be to accept the defeat with grace. They should tip over their King, shake Joe Biden’s hand, and vow never to make the mistake of underestimating his legislative skills ever again.
Somehow, I doubt that will happen.
Either way . . . checkmate.
