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Topic: Chess from the Dutch School
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7.
He was already at the front door, never again to set a foot
in Wilhelmus Lyceum, when a small boy approached him;
"Mr.Jacobs, may I ask you a question?" the boy hemmed and hawked,
so shy he was barely intelligible;
"May I challenge you to a correspondence game?"
"No" Jacobs said.
In the boys eyes there was such shocked disappointment, already mixed
with resignation, that Jacobs felt bad about his curt reaction.
"I don`t have enough time.", he said "People often ask me,
I am a professional chess player, but if I would agree to play every..."
"I see" said the boy, "I thouhgt..."
"My father said..."
I regonized him. It was the mousy little kid, who had helped
with the boards. There he stood, his transparant face awe-struck
and twitching as he confronted Grandmaster Jacobs.
"You were one of the players, weren`t you?"
"Yes sir, you won."
"Which game were you?"
"Kings-Indian sir, you got your knight to d5 and then
I could hardly do anything anymore."
He remembered the game, it was the only one that had even
resembled a chessgame. For a while, the kid had followed
a well-known chess game by Klooster, developed his pieces neatly,
made no glaring mistakes, but then let himself be reeled in
without a fight. He had resigned appropriately, but surprisingly
early from someone of his strenght.
"I will always add a self-adressed envelope and a stamp.
That way it won`t cost you anything!"
That way it won`t cost you anything! Jacobs bristled at the thought.
The eternal naivete of the amateur, who thought that you were
already making enough if it didn`t cost you anything!
"All right then" he said, to his own utter amazement.
"Really?" said the boy, an incredelous,
joyful expression transformed the face.
"In that case, may I play White? I`ll send you my first move
right away. Thank you very much!"
At the tram stop, Jacobs realized that he had left his
bottle of whiskey at the table-tennis scene.
What a waste of an afternoon.
How could he possibly have agreed to this correspondence
chess game? Because there had been a flash in which he had seen
the boy as a reincarnation of Japie Klooster, age twelve?
Certainly not because of his talent.
But soon he remembered his idea for the Bottomless Pitt,
and his irritation dissolved. He longed to be home,
to set up the position, see if it worked,
and so let as many hours pass as he wanted to.
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8.
It did not work, which didn`t suprise Jacobs.
With interruptions, he had already spent a year on his
Bottemless Pitt. An idea for a beautifull chess problem
would come to you in a flash, a position that would show
what you wanted, could be set up in a quarter of an hour,
but it could take months to actually make such an idea work correctly.
The pieces were stubborn opponents;
Certainly, in the Bottomless Pitt, which had to couple the brute force
of an harvesting machine, with the precision of a ladies`watch.
There was a certain urgency.
In five months, entries had to be submitted for the
"World Composition Tournament". If the Bottemless Pitt was ready in time,
and if it were to be declared the winner in the more-mover section,
then Jacobs would be -in a way that the world never take
too seriously of course, but even so- World Champion.
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9.
When Jacobs, a few days after his Wilhelmus visit, received a letter,
adressed to I.M.Jacobs, in which the writer said, his name was
Pepijn de Jong, his age twelve-years-old, and his first move e2-e4,
he had completely forgotten about the correspondence game.
His first reaction was to offer a draw, and then,
rejecting that as childish, to write pressure of work forced him
to abandon the idea after all.
Even more then Klooster, he was a professional.
Whoever wanted to avail himself of his chess expertise,
had to pay for it. Articles, lectures, analyses, acces to his
archives, simuls, it all came to a price.
At one time he had determined a rate for correspondence games;
20 euros a move!
Incidently, Pepijn had kept his word. He had enclosed
a self-adressed return-envelope, and a self made notation sheet
on which he had filled in for White, "Pepijn de Jong" for Black,
"I.M.Daniel Jacobs" and for the first move, 1.e2-e4
He had also added two drawings, one an original, and the other
a copy of a chessplayer behind a chessboard, on which e2-e4 was visual,
and from whose head emanated a balloon with the words;
"My move; .......says I.M.Jacobs"
Coming from a twelve-year-old, it was not altogether without talent.
Could he dissappoint such a child?
A small boy who had been the only one to help, to set up the chess boards?
Who had played, at least over one of Klooster`s games?
Whose love for chess could be crucially stimulated
by a correspondence game against a real Master?
And then that I.M.Jacobs. By using his real title,
Pepijn touched on a sore point, but also showed that he was
no stranger in the world of chess.
The ordinary public thought, that anybody who could think
three moves ahead, or was able to play no fewer then twenty
children simultaniously, had to be a Grandmaster.
By the skin of his teeth, Jacobs had managed to earn the
International Master title, but he was so consistently
called Grandmaster, by the editors of his newspaper,
simul organisations, and the general public, that he had given up
correcting everyone. Anyway, whoever called him Grandmaster,
probably had something in mind that was much inferior to the
Master title he really possed. "GM" had become a household term,
something like "genius", a word used to expres awe in general.
People had no clue that it was an official title.
Only in that little boy was the flame of Wilhelmus chess
still flickering!
Jacobs chose the Sicilian, the best opening for Black
against 1.e2-e4 to defeat a weak opponent quickly.
He couldn`t quite bring himself to filling in "c7-c5"
on Pepijn`s dots, and wrote his move on a postcard.
Drawings and notation form ended up in the waste-paperbasket.
He mailed his move that same day,
and forgot about the correspondence game again.
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10.
"The Brisbane Bombshell" may have been a vulgar sports slogan,
desighned to allow a public, that didn`t even know how
the pieces moved, to gloat over Klooster`s successes,
but it was defenitly on target. Chessplayers theirselves were
talking about the Brisbane Bombshell, and although Jacobs
would never call it that in writing, at times the term would
come to mind when he happened to be thinking of Klooster`s miracle move.
In Brisbane, Australia, not long before Jacobs`s simul at Wilhelmus,
Jaap Klooster, fourty-two years, had achieved the biggest succes
of his life, by winning his match against Feoktistov,
and becoming the challenger of the World Champion Neuishtadt.
It was a completely unexpected and somewhat undeserved victory,
but mostly what was still creating a buzz in the chess world
was the way Klooster had pulled it off.
With the score even, Klooster had won the last game with Black,
no less, thanks to an extremely bold pawn sacrifice
in the early opening, 8...d5!_precisely the move White had been playing
to prevent. It was the "Novelty of the Century". In the fifty years
that this position had occured in games, no one from club player
to the World Champion, had even considered that d5 might be possible.
It was as if Klooster had demonstrrated that a parachute was not
needed to jump out of a plain.
Immediately after the sacrifice, Feoktistov could have forced
a dead-drawn ending, but didn`t. Perhaps with White he thought,
that would have been to much honour for Klooster.
Instead, he had played to keep the pawn, and that had proven to be a mistake.
Klooster had played around the pawn, as if it was an old chair.
He had paralized and humiliated Feoktistov,
and won the most beautifull and important game of his life.
Almost a month had passed since the game, and no one had discovered
anything better for White than the drawing line.
Jacobs too had started for hours analysing Klooster pawn offer,
without finding a refutation. It must have been the same for
chess players all over the world. No one had found anything yet,
at least no one had published anything.
Jacobs was wondering who actually had come up with the
Brisbane Bombshell. Imagination and daring were anything but
characteristic of Klooster.
It had to be Fajnman, a Russian who had immigrated to
the Netherlands, and had been the secondant of Klooster for many years.
Though Fajnman had never won any tournament, he was famous
for his brilliant and bizarre ideas. He looked the part too,
the crazy scientist in a comic strip.
Klooster had done the right thing. Fajnman added something to his game
that he lacked himself; the artistic element.
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11.
At the press conference Klooster had given at Shiphol Airport
upon his return, no one came away any wiser.
More then ever, Jacobs was struck by Klooster`s air of insignificance.
At the long table, where he sat with Fajman, his other two secondants
Loyd and Lindgren, and his business manager Quinten de Jong,
any other outsider, without hesitation, would have pointed at him,
as the person which didn`t belong there.
The chessplayers looked like chessplayers, Klooster looked
like a small town mayor. A reception on that scale was new to him.
But he showed no trace of nerves or excitement.
With superior humility, the little bourgeois faced
the roomful of reporters, phothographers and television camaras,
all with the while greeting acquaintances with brief, still nods.
Jacobs got one too, but in that nod there was a special aloofness
of their 1-0.
With his characterestic incapability of self-glorification,
Klooster, his eyebrows raised in perpetual mild surprise,
described his victory over Feoktistov in terms of change.
What was measured in a chess match wasn`t who was the better player,
but who scored the most points. In Brisbane Feoktistov had
certainly not played any worse than he had.
In various terms, Klooster was asked whether he was going to be
World Champion. In equally varied terms, he said he hoped so,
that Neuishtadt was the stronger one on paper, but that
that was no more then an indication of the possible outcome.
Even if Neuishtadt had four sides of the die, and he only two,
it remained a die, and one of his sides could come up.
It was interesting that one of the regular journalist`s asked
questions, while the chess reporters kept quiet.
Most of them were Klooster`s personal acquiantances,
and of course each of them was hoping to get the exclusive story
of the Brisbane Bombshell from him personally.
Besides, you didn`t ask a Grandmaster about his opening secrets,
certainly not in public.
But suddenly a young Journalist, not a chessplayer,
asked the question that was on everybody`s lips.
"Mister Klooster, this Brisbane Bombshell,
was it actually bluff?"
It was if someone had asked the Queen her bra size.
After a bewildered silence, the entire audiance burst out laughing,
even Klooster. He leand towards Fajnman, evidently to translate
the question, because Fajnman also broke into a whinny.
The interviewer himself joined into the laughter,
while his face had turned beet-red.
It took at least a minute before it was quiet enough to answer.
"Bluffing is impossible in chess" said Klooster,
All the information is visible. You can`t pretend to have
a possibility if you don`t have it."
You could always count on Klooster for a sober thought,
but this was nonsense!
Of course you can bluff in chess, even he knew that.
You could speculate that the opponent would not use the
information correctly, make him believe that you
have a possibility you didn´t really have.
And although it didn`t fit Klooster`s profile at all,
Jacobs believed more and more strongly, that the
Brisbane Bombshell had been exactly that;
"Pure Bluff"
(to be continued)
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