[click to see Shankaranda Bio]

Q1) It’s unusual, to say the least, to meet a Swami who is involved in chess. What is your chess history?

A) My father taught me the moves as a very young child growing up in Brooklyn, New York. I enjoyed playing the game through high school, but became really interested in it at university where my playing strength developed. I played on the Columbia university team, which was the USA Intercollegiate champion at the time. I was rated as a high expert - 2100 plus.

After going to India and spending many years practicing meditation and Self-inquiry I had the opportunity to play tournament chess again in LA. I wanted to see if my new understandings of my inner world would help me achieve my long-term ambition of becoming a US Master. In fact I was able to do that and my playing had greatly improved.

When I first came to Australia ten years ago I played in a few tournaments and won a few senior tournaments, but I haven’t played serious chess in at least six years.

Q2) We hear that you knew Bobby Fischer in your youth. Can you say how that came about?

A) Yes. My father, who was an artist, was getting a brochure done at his printers. He met a woman there and somehow they got talking about how much their sons loved chess. Suddenly the woman said, “You may have heard of my son. His name is Bobby Fischer.” That was around 1962. Bobby would have been about nineteen and already US champion for about five years, so my father was gob-smacked. Mrs Fischer gave my father Bobby’s phone number and I called him up to invite him over to my parents’ house. I was more nervous making that phone call than I ever was to ask a girl out.

To my shock he accepted. The night he came over, I had the whole Columbia chess team down. It was great. Bobby was such a character. He read everybody’s palm and spoke very bluntly about everything. He told one of my friends after reading his palm, “You’re going to die young.” My father and he really hit it off. My team-mates were playing five-minute chess on the floor and Bobby was pretending not to watch them. Of course, they were very excited to be playing under the eye of the Grandmaster. One of the guys made a nice sacrifice of the exchange and Bobby, who had been watching out of the corner of his eye, said, “Very good, very good. I thought you were a weakie.” I thought my friend would die of bliss. Bobby explained, “I don’t like to watch weak players. It ruins my game.”

After that we became friends and we went to chess clubs together and even to the beach. One time we were at the beach and Bobby saw a pretty girl sitting by herself. He went up to her and said, “I’m Bobby Fischer, the great chess player.” It was a good opening gambit, but she had never heard of him. Her reply made him realise she was foreign, so he asked where she was from. She said, “Holland.” Bobby said, “Do you know Max Euwe?” (The Dutch former World Champion). She’d never heard of him. Now Bobby had run out of ideas. He shrugged his shoulders and walked away.

Bobby liked his friends and he liked to be admired. One night, a friend of mine and I were sitting outside the ropes while Bobby was playing Hans Berliner in the U.S. Championship. At one point, Bobby played bishop takes knight. My friend whispered to me, “Why did he do that?” since you usually didn’t want to give a bishop up for a knight. I said, well maybe it’s so and so, or such and such, pointing out some positional advantages that Bobby was getting. My friend considered it for a bit and then said to me enthusiastically, “He’s a genius!” Bobby won and after the game we went out to eat with him, and as we walked up Broadway, he turned to us and said, “You liked bishop takes knight, didn’t you?” He’d heard it and felt appreciated.

Another time, I visited Bobby at his house. He was living with his mother at an apartment in Brooklyn. He played over some games for me from the Russian publication, Schachmaty Bulletin. He saw so much so quickly that it was breathtaking. On several occasions, he went four or five moves ahead of the game and had to take back the moves because he assumed play would be along other lines. That night he showed me what he said was a refutation of the King’s Gambit. He was about to go off to play in a tournament in Argentina where the great Spassky (not yet World Champion) would be his main rival. Bobby said he thought that if Spassky had white, he would play the King’s Gambit against him, and then he said, “I’ll take his pawn, hold it and win.” It all happened that way with one major difference. Spassky had white, he played the King’s Gambit, Bobby took his pawn, he held it, he established a winning position, but Boris broke through and won. Bobby was so disgusted with himself. The next time I saw him, he showed me how completely busted Spassky had been in line after line, much of it beyond my chess comprehension.

Speaking of Bobby’s grasp of the board, I saw him play speed chess at the Marshall Chess Club with Bernard Zuckerman. Zuckerman later became an IM, and was then a strong master with a reputation as a speed player. Bobby gave him five minutes and took half a minute for himself. He crushed him game after game, all the while keeping up an endless flow of chess heckling. His hand moved way faster than my eye could see.

Bobby was very peculiar and certainly marched to his own drummer. He wasn’t always polite. One time the Chess Federation gave him a gift of a suitcase before he went to represent the US in the Leipzig Chess Olympics. The MC called him up and made the presentation, and Bobby looked at the suitcase and said, “It’s too big.”

He was stubborn and a bit paranoid, but underneath it all, he was very likeable. He had a kind of innocence, and I don’t think he ever understood why people reacted the way they did to some of his behaviour. Bobby was certainly the greatest genius I have ever met in any area of life, outside of yoga. But I think it was his innocence that made people feel sympathy for him. I’m very glad that he came out and played Spassky in 1992 and I hope he’s happy in Budapest, or Japan or wherever he is. I am sad to hear he has racist obsessions, but not surprised. His thought process served him well in chess, but he didn’t recognise that in life they were often vitiated by his paranoia.

Q3) Did you ever play Bobby?

A) Not at chess, but I did play him at table soccer at an arcade. He was unbelievably competitive at everything. When one of my friends beat him at arm wrestling, he looked around for a weaker player that he could beat. When I beat him at a game of table soccer, he said, “Yeah, now you can say you beat Bobby Fisher!” So I said, “Well, I did, didn’t I?”

Q4) Do you still play chess and what was your greatest achievement?

A) As I said, I haven’t played serious chess for years, but I do play five-minute chess on the Internet, which I’m not very good at. We recently bought a giant size chess set for the ashram, exactly like the one on Swanson Street, so I’m looking forward to some chess afternoons at the ashram. Public chess of that kind is a lot of fun.

As far as achievements in chess go, I think being a U.S. Master was as far as my talent and desire could take me. I’ve won a few tournaments and beat a few good players in tournament play, most notably, grandmasters Michael Rohde and Ken Rogoff. But my best achievement would have to be my victory over Mikhail Tal. It was only in a simultaneous game of twenty players at the Santa Monica Chess Club, but given that he is a chess immortal and one of my heroes, and that my play was really good in that game, it has to be my highest chess moment (see below).

Q5) What have you learned about chess from your years of involvement in yoga and meditation?

A) Quite a bit. Chess is a highly emotional activity and this aspect of it has been largely overlooked. I don’t think any other game or sport is so highly competitive. Sometimes it seems as though you’re fighting for your ego-life. Bobby used to say that he loved to crush people’s egos at chess. It may look as though two chess players are sitting at the board peacefully, calculating possibilities, but in actuality they are seething with a kaleidoscope of emotions -- fear, desire, exaltation, despair, fantasy and so on. Any tournament chess player will agree with this. Some of these emotions can contaminate the thought process and indeed make tournament chess a very disagreeable experience. For some people, a chess loss is like annihilation.

Recently in sport, there has been a lot of investigation of the psychological aspects. There are books like The Inner Game of Tennis, and The Inner Game of Golf. Since chess is such an intellectual activity, it seems as though it is already an inner game. But chess players generally focus on the opening, the end game and the middle game, and are completely oblivious to the fact that there is an “inner game” of chess beyond these aspects. I recall two games from my university chess days; both were crucial games and had opposite results.

In one game, I played really well, sacrificed a pawn for the initiative, and was winning. In the tension of time pressure, I overlooked the winning move and then made a series of weak moves. I quickly went from a won game to a lost game. In a different tournament, I was playing against Harvard in a crucial game and was being thoroughly outplayed. The harder I tried to extricate myself, the more constricted my position became. On top of that, I had five minutes left for about fifteen moves, and my opponent had forty-five minutes left. At that point, I said to myself, “I am lost,” and as I became resigned to this fact, all my tension left me and my mind became peaceful and very clear. Just to complicate matters, I sacrificed a bishop. I saw that the sacrifice could be refuted and I expected to resign in another move or two. To my surprise, it appeared that the tension that had left me had entered my opponent. He sat writhing at the board. He seemed to be thinking, “I’ve played such a masterpiece so far, I don’t want to screw it up.” Several times his hand went out to grasp a piece and then went back. It took him half-an-hour to take the bishop. By this time I was aware of what was happening and quickly played another move with a show of confidence. Again he agonised. This time he sat tortured by fear and doubt until his clock fell. These two games brought home to me how important the emotional factor in chess is.

In my later games of chess, after I had studied meditation, I began to ask different kinds of questions at the board and look for positions that made me feel harmonious and peaceful. Sometimes the objectively best move is not right for your style of play. By studying your inner process during play, you will discover under what emotional conditions you play the best. It’s easy to blunder when you feel frightened or stressed. Hence, to cultivate a certain state of mind is important.

Sometimes it’s important to calculate variations and sometimes it’s better to play “natural moves.” Chronic time pressure too, is an inner game problem. I would call all of this “the yoga of chess” and it’s an area well worth investigating for any player. Think of the emotions as the fuel and the analytic mind as a computer that runs on that fuel. The computer runs best on the fuel of peaceful emotions and runs very poorly indeed on the fuel of anger or fear. In other words, in chess as in life, we are more likely to make bad choices when agitated than when we are calm.

Let me say one more thing about the inner game. The bliss of victory in chess is always accompanied by the pain of defeat on the part of the opponent. By the law of compensation in the universe, no one can always win. There is an evening-out effect that takes place over the long haul. I think that the reason Bobby Fisher quit was because he intuited this and having become Top Gun, he couldn’t bear the inevitability of some young gunslinger overtaking him. This being the iron law of chess, an intelligent yogi-chessplayer will learn not to bank everything on winning. Instead he will find ways to enjoy the process of playing and also the investigation of truth that chess is. This will make losing much less catastrophic and probably make him a better player as well.

Game against Tal

I’m proud of this nice positional attack against the former World Champion from a simultaneous display he gave on 23 boards at the Santa Monica Bay Chess Club on November 28, l988.

Mikhail Tal - Shankarananda
Santa Monica 1988
Alekhine’s Defence

1.e4 Nf6 2.e5 Nd5 3.Nc3 Nxc3 4.bxc3 d5 5.d4 c5 6.Nf3 Bg4

Now we have a French pawn formation but without the QB hemmed in by the e-pawn.

7.h3 Bxf3

Playing Tal, I am expecting the board to erupt into flames at any moment.
Trading the Bishop keeps things simple and solid.

8.Qxf3 e6 9.Rb1 Qc7 10.Be2 Nc6 11. Qe3

Protecting d4 and preparing f4. We've lasted ten moves with Tal, and he
hasn't sacrificed a piece, everything seems rational. Wait a minute! Is that
a little combination I can play against the wizard?

11…cxd4! 12.cxd4 Bb4+ 13.Kf1

He saw it! If 13.c3 Nxd4! wins. Tal looked hard at me, trying to work out
whether I had seen it or made a lucky move. I kept a poker face.

13.O-O 14.c3 Be7 15.g4 Na5

Black will protect b7 then enter c4 with the Knight forcing the Bishop to take it, weakening the white-squares significantly.

16.Kg2 Rab8 17.Bd2 Nc4 18.Bxc4 Qxc4 19.Rb3 Qa6!

Black has big edge. He swings his Queen around to attack the King. This
move attacks the a-pawn, protects the b-pawn, protects the e-pawn for the
coming f5, brings the Queen around for kingside play, and continues to
watch the weak white diagonal!

20.Ra1 f5 21.exf6e.p. Rxf6 22.Rab1 Bd6!

The black squares are weak too.

23.Qe1 Bc7! 24.Be3 Qd6 25.f4 g5

Black wins a pawn and the attack continues. Tal seeks refuge at f3.

26.Bd2 gxf4 27.Kf3 b6

The Rook is freed to participate in the attack.

28.R3b2 Re8 29.Qh4 e5 30.dxe5 Rxe5 31.Re1 Rh6! 32.Qf2 Rxh3+ 33.Kg2 Rg3+ 34.Kf1 Qh6!

Square h6 is the doorway to the King.

35.Rxe5 Qh1+ 36.Ke2 Bxe5, 0-1.