In my good chess years, I made some inquiries about substances – you might call them doping if you wish – which might be useful to me. Certainly not with the illusion of getting smarter, but more stability in the fifth hour of the game; that seemed possible. This was when we used to play 40 moves in 2½ hours. In the fifth hour accidents would happen.
It didn’t occur to me that there could be anything wrong with my inquiries. Rather, it seemed to be almost a moral duty for a professional to equip himself as well as possible for the fight, and I still think so.
But it didn't work out. Experts told me that the drugs which were supposed to help didn’t really do so and that nasty side effects could be real. I think other players came to the same conclusion.
This was long ago and maybe since then science has provided some gifts to chess. I wouldn’t know what’s wrong with that. Anyway, as far as I know, no chess player has never been caught for doping.
It was never a problem in the chess world. I remember Kasparov at a press conference suggesting that Karpov had used some dubious substances during their first world championship match of 1984/1985 to keep him afloat, but this was generally considered bad manners from Kasparov. That match had been aborted prematurely, but even so it had lasted more than five months, and Karpov was not a young athlete in great physical shape as Kasparov was. Would Kasparov have wished that Karpov would pass out because of physical exhaustion?
In 2008 at the Dresden Olympiad, Vasily Ivanchuk was summoned to a doping check. He had lost his game, was immersed in his own world and rushed out of the tournament hall without paying notice to the doping officials. Normally a refusal to submit to the humiliating procedures is considered an admission of guilt, but not this time.
“One does not arrest Voltaire,” said the French president general De Gaulle, having Jean-Paul Sartre in mind, and one does not condemn Ivanchuk. The following year in January a doping team headed by Jana Malypetrova and Jon Speelman came to the Corus tournament in Wijk aan Zee. They had not come to condemn Ivanchuk, but to save him. Ivanchuk obediently peed and all was set right.
As I said, doping is no issue in chess, but doping fighters sometimes are. When I read about the punishments that the anti-doping agency WADA recently handed out to Russia, I naturally wondered what that means for us.
For the next few years, Russia is not allowed to organize major international sports events, but look what was scheduled for chess. At the end of December 2019 there were the world championships in rapid and blitz in Moscow. As I write this, they are going ahead as planned. Next year there will be the candidates tournament in Yekaterinburg, the Olympiad in Moscow, the first chess Paralympics in Khanty-Mansiysk and half of the women’s world championship match in Vladivostok. It is clear that FIDE can hardly do without the Russians.
FIDE president Arkady Dvorkovich assured us that all these events will go through as planned. That is probably true, but FIDE could still be hit hard in the coming years by a problem with which the chess players have nothing to do.
Unsuccessfully I tried to find an immortal doping game. Maybe an immortal alcohol game then. A good candidate is Fischer-Kholmov, from the 1965 Capablanca Memorial in Havana, when Fischer played from the Marshall Club in New York by telex.
In his fine book Smart Chip from St.Petersburg, Genna Sosonko relates that Ratmir Kholmov told him that after a night of heavy drinking of Cuban Bacardi rum he was saved by Vasily Smyslov, who showed him a good variation of the Ruy Lopez, though after their session, Smyslov was convinced that Kholmov, the next day, when he had to play Fischer, wouldn’t remember a single move of their analysis.
Kholmov said to Sosonko: “I sit down to play the next day, and think to myself, what did you do yesterday, there’ll be hell to pay for your behavior, and it had to be right before the game with Fischer. They’ll say, you son of a bitch, you were drunk as a skunk. I sit there, gritting my teeth and clenching my fists, not getting up from the chair. So you can imagine, the entire variation that we’d looked at that night came on the board.” This fine victory by Kholmov over Fischer is well-known.
There is another story about Kholmov’s drunken chess which I am sure is spurious. It goes like this: somewhere, sometime, Kholmov, in a bad state of intoxication, played a game as Black that started 1.e4 Nc6 2.f4 b6 3.Nf3 e5 4.fxe5. Then, when Kholmov was on the point of playing 4...Nxe5, he realized that his knight could be taken there and he burst out: “That's weird! I’ve been playing the Grünfeld Defense my whole life and never had such a horrible position after just four moves!” In fact it wasn’t so horrible.
Implausible as this story is, it made me wonder if the fictional Kholmov with his Mirrored Grünfeld might have come up with a viable new opening. In the game viewer I try to make sense of it.
Click here for Hans’ comments on the Mirrored Grünfeld.