This year’s summer issue of the Dutch magazine De Groene Amsterdammer, for which I write a weekly chess column, was devoted to the delights of doing nothing, and all regular contributors were gently urged to embrace this theme in their article.
A saying attributed to several players, including Max Euwe, states that tactics are what you do when there’s something to do, and strategy is what you do when there’s nothing to do.
Euwe himself was often praised as a tactician for his quick and accurate calculations, but I suspect he preferred to see himself as a strategist.
“Strategy requires thinking, tactics requires looking,” he once wrote. Perhaps he considered tactics ordinary, just because he was so good at it. Thinking about nothing is paradoxical and mysterious and therefore held in high esteem.
“How is it with this Nothing? The Nothing nothings and further Nothing” wrote the enigmatic German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), and I have witnessed good and intelligent friends seriously discussing the meaning of this sentence.
The practical chess player will primarily strive to ensure that his opponent can do nothing, at least nothing dangerous. Aron Nimzowitsch wrote about prophylaxis, blockade, and other concepts related to limiting the opponent’s options.
These became common chess terms, but there may be more to them. The Russian writer Alexei Konakov pointed out in the German magazine Schach that Nimzowitsch’s famous My System could also serve as a self-help guide for people with obsessive-compulsive disorders: build a new life through prophylaxis and Überdeckung!
This fits well with how Nimzowitsch was described by contemporaries: as someone with a manic fear of being shortchanged. The Austrian-Dutch-American player and writer Hans Kmoch, generally regarded as a reliable reporter, recounted in his memoirs that at a dinner party, Nimzowitsch wanted to swap his plate with the person next to him, because he thought there was more on it, and that after the meal, he was still dissatisfied because he had made the wrong swap and hadn’t received enough.
The king of prophylaxis was world champion Tigran Petrosian, who was said by Yasser Seirawan to have anticipated his opponent’s threats, not only many moves before the opponent had thought of them himself, but even many rounds in advance.
A contemporary protagonist of prophylaxis is Ulf Andersson, born in 1951. What Ulf especially liked in his heydays was demonstrating a game in which he had doomed his opponent to powerlessness, and then he used to say with a radiant smile: “He can do nothing, absolutely nothing!”
The game below was played in the traditional tournament in Hastings around the turn of 1974/75. Andersson wasn’t yet the big star he would later become, but he was well on his way. In 1975, he was the first to defeat Anatoly Karpov as the new world champion. Michael Basman (1946-2022) was the great eccentric of English chess. Mikhail Botvinnik, who was outplayed by Basman in Hastings 1966/1967 and by the skin of his teeth escaped with a draw, called him the most extraordinary and creative English player.
He was of Armenian descent, which I discovered when we both played in the Israeli city of Netanya and he pleasantly surprised me with an invitation to come with him for a visit to his Armenian family in Jerusalem.
If he hadn’t played all those strange openings, like the Grob, the Borg, and the De Klerk and whatnot, he would have achieved more as a chess player, but he might have become a bit bored and we would have missed out on many beautiful and surprising things.
His Quixotism was once again evident towards the end of his life in 2017, when he ran as an independent candidate in the British general election. He came last in his constituency with 200 votes, 0.2% of the total.
The game in Hastings that I show here was between someone who was ecstatic when his opponent couldn’t do anything, and an opponent who shamelessly and provocatively demonstrated that he indeed could do nothing.
Basman, of course, had to make moves, but he showed as conspicuously as possible that his moves meant nothing. The British commentator Cenek Kottnauer called it subversive passivity.
Andersson was free to do whatever he wanted, but he was doing it badly. During almost twenty moves of inaction by Basman, Andersson ruined his own position. Then the lion inside Basman awoke.
The chess world knows many kinds of immortal games.
Here is the immortal game of doing nothing.
Click here for Andersson-Basman, Hastings 74/75