Explained (2018–…): Season 3, Episode 6 - Chess - full transcript
For centuries, chess has captured hearts and minds - and pawns - and it's more popular than ever. What makes this ever-changing board game so special?
[Rainn Wilson] In an average year,
more than 7,000 new movies are released
and over a thousand new TV shows,
thousands of new video games,
hundreds of thousands of new podcasts,
and more than 60,000 new tracks
are uploaded to Spotify every day.
Among all these options
for pleasure and diversion,
the one that experienced
the greatest surge in popularity in 2020
is over 1,500 years old.
A boom is taking place in chess
like we have never seen.
[reporter] The game is topping wish lists
this holiday season,
and retailers say they're having trouble
keeping it in stock.
Even internationally,
it looks like downloads for chess
are up by 11%.
[narrator] For a brief period,
it was the most popular genre
on the streaming platform Twitch,
surpassing video games
like League of Legends and Fortnite.
Thousands even tuned in to watch me play.
He blunders to H4.
Logic's gonna see the checkmate, I think.
[Wilson] What was that? Idiot!
When I look at chess through its history,
it was considered a game
that people who were very smart played.
Great leaders have been drawn to it.
And thinkers,
and artists,
and elite athletes.
[man] Celebrities who come to play chess
in the store.
Marcel Duchamp
used to come and play in this address.
Stanley Kubrick used to come and play.
But also Bobby Fischer
used to come and play.
To be a good chess player,
you do not have to be a genius.
I think that's a very big myth.
[Wilson] But chess has always been
more than just a pastime.
One that transcends
age, creed and culture,
but somehow never gets old.
It's fascinating.
It's like escaping from your real life
into this new world of 64 squares.
[Wilson]
So why does this ancient board game
continue to capture our imagination?
What's so special about chess?
[man 1] Chess is a great game.
A game and a sport for the mind.
[man 2] One needs to give
all one's time to it to make
the top players in the world.
I like to play chess
because it's a nice game.
We now realize that anyone with
a normal one of these pieces of equipment
can become a Grandmaster.
[man 3] The chess-playing machine
learns the best moves
by using its past experience to analyze
a number of different moves.
And then selects one.
[crowd clamoring]
[Wilson] A kingdom is under attack.
The enemy's cavalry
has stormed the castle.
The king already fled.
Nobody's sure where he's going,
but they'll fight
until they learn he's dead.
For the first time in her life,
the queen is entirely helpless.
An empire brought to its knees
so spectacularly,
it's the kind of thing
future generations should study.
And they have.
That's all happening on this chess board.
And this moment in this game
is the stuff of legend.
[man] It was a beautiful game.
And to beginners, of course,
it just looked miraculous.
[Wilson] Edward Lasker, a German engineer,
had no idea he was about
to make chess history
when he got off the boat in London
on that fateful day in 1912.
And his first stop
was the city's top chess club.
Lasker didn't speak a word of English,
but here,
it didn't matter.
A man invited him to play a quick game.
Lasker didn't know
it was Sir George Alan Thomas,
arguably the best player in England.
It was a casual, offhand game
that happened to be recorded.
It was not in a tournament,
and it was not for money.
[Wilson] Today, it's nicknamed
"The Perfect King Hunt"
because it's so exquisitely brutal.
Or sometimes "Fatal Attraction,"
because it's beautiful at the same time.
And to really see the beauty of it,
it first helps to know how to play.
Am I teaching a six-year-old
or a 20-year-old?
[woman] A six-year-old.
Definitely a six-year-old.
[Wilson] At your disposal are eight pawns,
your foot soldiers.
[Saidy] The six-year-olds
identify with the pawns.
They're the weakest little pieces,
but they can overcome the enemy king.
Then you have the rooks,
the powerful castles.
It just goes in a straight line.
It's not the most exciting piece.
[Wilson] Next to the rooks
are your knights.
They look like…
Horsies. Everybody loves horsies, okay?
[Nakamura] They move in an "L" shape.
-[Saidy] They hop around.
-Kind of like a horse.
[Khachan] Next player is the bishop.
[Nakamura] Very far distance. They can go
from one end of the board to the other end
and attack your opponent's pieces.
[Wilson] Next to the bishop
is your most powerful piece.
Prior to the late 15th century,
that piece only went one square.
[Wilson] But then a lot of powerful
female leaders emerged all over Europe.
And suddenly that weak piece…
[Saidy] Was replaced by a queen
that could go all over the board
in one move.
Without a queen, unless you are good,
you might as well resign.
[Wilson] And then there's
your most important piece of all.
[Saidy] The little king,
that can only go
one square in any direction.
He seems like such a weakling,
but if you don't protect him,
you lose the game.
[Wilson] In ancient Persia, they'd say,
"Shah mat,"
"The king is dead,"
which became "checkmate."
And that's it.
This is your army, same as your enemy's.
Now, you just have
to make your first move.
Edward Lasker drew white pieces,
which meant he would go first.
And there were 20 things he could do.
Same for Sir Thomas.
But already those two choices
could result in 400 different games.
Lasker and Thomas played this one.
A move later, the number of possible
board configurations shoots up
to 71,852.
After each player makes their third move,
it's around nine million.
With that many options,
how do you decide what to do?
For centuries, the answer was
"You're out for blood."
[Saidy] In the 18th century,
that was considered
the only gentlemanly way to play the game.
And you attack the opponent
with complete abandon,
you give away pawns at will.
We call that the Romantic era of chess.
[Wilson] It roughly coincided
with the Romantic era in the arts.
Music, painting, poetry
focused on emotional expression
rather than technical mastery.
Chess wasn't just about winning.
It was about winning beautifully.
[Saidy] Then Steinitz came along.
[Wilson] Wilhelm Steinitz,
the first official world chess champion,
and he said…
[Saidy] "Well, this is a little crude."
[Wilson] Steinitz ushered in a new era,
the scientific school of chess.
Just as artists moved away from drama
in favor of realism and precision,
chess players set about laying down
fundamental principles of the game.
Look at these moves again.
Lasker goes for the center of the board.
Trying to control the center
is principle number one.
It's the heart of the battlefield.
Then Lasker moves his knight.
That's a second principle.
Get your more powerful pieces
into the action as soon as possible.
But in the opening,
you're not on your own.
The great players of the past have
already done a lot of the heavy lifting.
[Nakamura] There's the Danish Gambit,
the Evans Gambit.
[Saidy] Sicilian Defense,
the French Defense, the Ruy Lopez.
[Wilson] And yes, the Queen's Gambit.
Hundreds of openings have been codified,
and it helps to know some opening theory.
[Saidy] If your opponent knows it
and you don't,
you may fall into a trap.
You don't want to be in that boat.
[Wilson] But by move four, the number
of distinct board configurations
is already at 315 billion.
Sooner or later,
you have to abandon the book moves
and start fending for yourself.
[Saidy] The middlegame is
the main fighting arena,
where plans and strategies
are carried out.
The middlegame usually decides
the outcome of the game.
[Wilson] Lasker's bishop is out for blood.
But the triumph is short-lived.
A pawn bravely enters the bloodbath
and is instantly slaughtered.
The white queen
almost had the king in her sights,
before he ducked for cover.
This was an exhilarating game
for the time it was played.
Remember, this was 1912.
The scientific school was at its peak,
and chess had been transformed
into something more sophisticated,
calculated, and…
boring.
But a whole new era
was just about to begin.
The age of rebellion in arts, music,
politics, and chess.
Meet the hypermodernists.
[Saidy] They were iconoclasts,
and they said,
"We're going to play differently."
[Wilson] Like leaving the center
of the board open,
but positioning their pieces
in such a way that the center
became a death trap.
"We're not giving up the center,
we're just controlling it differently."
[Wilson] The hypermodernists did to chess
what surrealists did to art.
Taking things that seemed ordinary
and reimagining their possibilities.
Nothing had to be what it seemed.
We have to keep in mind that chess
is the oldest war game in history.
At the highest competitive level,
it's really a blood sport.
It's hard.
[Wilson] During a tournament,
a chess player's blood pressure
can stay as high
as a competitive marathon runner's.
And they can burn
up to 6,000 calories a day,
more than a world-class tennis player.
All while sitting down,
simply thinking.
So in the 1940s, a Dutch psychologist,
Adriaan de Groot,
set out to study
what goes on in a chess player's mind.
He presented players
of various skill levels
with an unfamiliar position like this,
and then asked them to think aloud
as they decided their next move.
And he found that Grandmasters
and regular pros
considered around the same number
of options for their next move.
And they plotted out an almost
identical number of moves ahead.
So, what made the great players great?
Well, they saw better options.
[Saidy] Richard Réti,
one of the great hypermoderns,
was asked how many moves
did he look ahead.
And he said,
"Only one. The best one."
I think, first and foremost, you have
to be very strong at memorizing.
Almost everybody
who's a very strong Grandmaster
will have some way of recalling games
they've played over their long career,
so oftentimes will look at the placement
of where the bishops and knights are,
where the pawns are,
and try to compare it
to games we've played in the past.
[Wilson] To a chess player,
the positions of pieces
are like piano chords to a composer.
After each chord,
the player might consciously consider
just a few options,
because they've stored deep down
how dozens would sound.
And that comes
from studying scales and keys,
wisdom codified centuries ago
about what patterns of notes sound good.
And it also comes
from playing.
It's a matter of experience.
And believe me,
there's a lot of playing and studying
that goes into making a master player.
[Wilson] And in the 20th century,
nobody studied harder than the Soviets.
Chess was studied in schools
and played in the parks,
and along riverbanks.
Clubs emerged all over the country,
and magazines reprinted
famous games and analyses.
Chess is one of the things
that nations compete in,
because it's, in a way, a reflection
of the progress of the nation.
[Wilson] For the regime, chess dominance
wasn't just about the fight on the board.
It was the proof
of communist intellectual superiority
over the decadent West.
For 24 years, they didn't
just win the World Championship.
Nobody else qualified
to even play against them.
Until 1972
and Bobby Fischer.
In the US,
chess was suddenly prime-time material.
Russia's Boris Spassky,
the world champion,
is to meet America's Bobby Fischer
in a 24-game championship match
this summer.
At stake,
immense prestige for the Russians,
who jealously guard their reputation
as the country of the chess masters.
The International Chess Federation wants
word by tomorrow morning from Fischer
on whether he's agreeable
to 24 games in Iceland,
and Fischer is taking his time answering.
He had had a reputation
for being extremely finicky and demanding
throughout his career.
[Wilson] Bobby Fischer
finally did agree to go
and traveled to New York
to catch the flight, but then
changed his mind.
Nobody knew what to do.
He wouldn't get on the plane.
[Wilson] Leaving Boris Spassky
and the rest of the world,
in suspense.
Is it upsetting your routine,
this waiting?
No, thank you.
Thank you very much for your questions.
[reporter] You don't seem very worried
by what's going on. Are you?
[Saidy] We were stuck,
and we didn't even know
where he would sleep.
Called up my mother
in the middle of the night,
and true to her Lebanese hospitality,
she said, "Sure you can bring him over,"
not knowing that our home
would be turned into
the new center of the world,
as hundreds of journalists
camped outside,
as Henry Kissinger called up
to try to get him to move his ass.
And um, the rest is history.
[Wilson] The tournament stood
for a lot more than a game.
This was the Cold War,
which itself was often described
like a chess game,
with potential traps everywhere.
And lots of things were pawns
in the bigger power struggle,
including chess itself.
After snatching the world title,
Bobby shot to stardom.
The king is dead!
[audience laughing]
Not yet, he isn't.
I'm sure the entire world
knows the name Bobby Fischer by now.
He is the best chess player
in the entire world.
How did Bobby Fischer beat you?
He was a better player?
Yes, he is a better player.
[Wilson] But in one crucial way,
the Cold War wasn't like
a chess game at all.
With chess, you know
all the information at the start.
Nothing is hidden.
Nothing like cards, where you keep
the cards close to your chest.
You're not relying on a dice roll.
You're not relying on luck of the draw.
You are staring at the question,
and you are staring at the answer,
if only you see it.
[Wilson] Lasker's queen
decides it's time to strike.
She boldly crosses into enemy territory.
But the black queen
steps forward to defend her man.
The king is now safe in his corner,
guarded on all sides.
If you play chess,
what would you do in this position?
Lasker says he knew
this was the decisive moment of the game,
that he had to do something drastic.
He had five minutes to decide,
and, sadly, we don't have that time.
Lasker did this.
His queen is now
face-to-face with the king.
Check.
And Sir Thomas did
what most people would probably do.
He killed her.
It looks like Lasker made a fatal blunder.
It's not yet apparent
that this is the beginning of the end.
We've been teaching computers
to play chess for decades,
feeding them billions of games.
And endowed them with memories
that far surpassed ours.
While a human Grandmaster
can consider tens of moves per decision,
a machine looks at tens of millions.
What would take you
maybe years to figure out,
the computer could look at it
within less than a second.
[Wilson] And on May 11th, 1997,
in the final tiebreaking game
between the world chess champion,
Garry Kasparov,
and IBM's supercomputer, Deep Blue,
the machine prevailed.
We'd basically been beaten
by a giant calculator.
There is no psychological pressure
that can reverse this opponent.
Except, you know, if it's unplugged.
[Wilson] Human players, on the other hand,
are prone to weakness.
The king didn't realize
he'd walked into a trap,
and thus the perfect king hunt begins.
The knight gallops forward,
putting the king in double check.
If the king retreats,
the next move would be checkmate.
So he only has one option.
And then Lasker attacks again.
And again.
And again.
Chased out of his kingdom,
his queen abandoned.
When you pass the point of no return,
first, there's shock,
and then acceptance.
As computer power increased,
and as the computers
played more against each other,
they would improve and improve.
Now, no human would really dare to take on
a computer in a match at all,
because the computers are gonna win.
[Wilson] And in 2017,
a new kind of chess player
took the world by storm.
Its name was AlphaZero,
and it wasn't a supercomputer.
It could only consider
a tiny fraction of the moves
of the mightiest chess engines,
but it had been taught very differently.
AlphaZero meant zero human knowledge.
[Wilson] It was just given the rules,
and then it had played itself,
over and over,
and over again.
[Regan] Forty-four million games
at lightning-fast speed against itself.
At first, because it was random,
quite a lot of the games
wouldn't even reach any conclusion,
'cause it wouldn't know
how to checkmate, for example.
But, by chance, some of the games
did reach a conclusion,
so it would look at the moves
on the winning side
and try and play a bit more like that.
In nine hours of training,
it learned kind of the whole
of human chess history.
[Wilson] And AlphaZero,
it didn't play like a computer at all.
It engaged in bold attacks
and daring sacrifices,
like the Romantics.
And it seemed to follow
some of the basic principles
laid out by the scientific school.
And, at the same time,
it sometimes broke them,
because it didn't have
any preconceived notion
that general rules should always apply.
When I was growing up, there were certain
moves that we considered completely crazy.
And now computers have taught us
that you can do these things
that for centuries
were thought to just not be possible.
[Wilson] Computers didn't kill chess.
They fueled the greatest explosion
of chess knowledge in history.
The number of Grandmasters
has been going up,
and they achieve that high rank younger.
[Nakamura] In the past,
almost all the top chess players
were from the former Soviet Union,
because that was
where the top players were.
You had to be around the best players
to obtain that experience.
[Wilson] But now, you just need
an Internet connection.
I think Rubius has been putting in
a lot of work off-stream as well,
because he's playing this very, very well.
[Wilson] And countries that don't have
a history of competitive chess
are producing
some of the world's best chess players.
[Nakamura] Countries like India.
You have countries like Iran,
for example, as well.
Of course, even Norway.
Prior to Magnus Carlsen,
they had no chess players,
I would say, in the top 20 in the world.
It really has leveled the playing field,
and you see that people can get good,
no matter where they are in the world
or what the circumstances are.
[Wilson] Within the strict confines
of the rules,
bound by just 64 squares,
the total number of unique chess games
is estimated to be
around ten to the 120th power.
Or in plain English,
a thousand trillion trillion trillion
trillion trillion trillion trillion
trillion trillion trillion games.
More possibilities
than there are grains of sand on Earth,
or dust particles in the Milky Way,
or atoms in the observable universe.
The beauty and I think the magic
of the game is this fluidity.
With every move, the whole game changes.
You have to reconfigure,
you have to keep looking at the board.
There's enough richness to it
that you'll never be the perfect player.
And there's always ways to improve.
Even though I've spent much
of my career playing the game
and I've spent many,
many years studying it,
there's still a lot of "Aha" moments
where I look at a game or I study,
and there's something
even I have not seen before.
Chess has this addictive quality,
I admit it.
I didn't get rich,
I didn't get famous,
but it was very satisfying
to play a good game.
And I remember those moments
with happiness.
[Wilson] After a series of forced moves,
the black king reaches
the opposite end of the board
in the heart of the white kingdom.
With his royal grace,
the white king advances one step forward,
letting his rook,
which hasn't made a single move
the entire game,
deal a mortal blow.
Checkmate.
[closing theme music playing]
more than 7,000 new movies are released
and over a thousand new TV shows,
thousands of new video games,
hundreds of thousands of new podcasts,
and more than 60,000 new tracks
are uploaded to Spotify every day.
Among all these options
for pleasure and diversion,
the one that experienced
the greatest surge in popularity in 2020
is over 1,500 years old.
A boom is taking place in chess
like we have never seen.
[reporter] The game is topping wish lists
this holiday season,
and retailers say they're having trouble
keeping it in stock.
Even internationally,
it looks like downloads for chess
are up by 11%.
[narrator] For a brief period,
it was the most popular genre
on the streaming platform Twitch,
surpassing video games
like League of Legends and Fortnite.
Thousands even tuned in to watch me play.
He blunders to H4.
Logic's gonna see the checkmate, I think.
[Wilson] What was that? Idiot!
When I look at chess through its history,
it was considered a game
that people who were very smart played.
Great leaders have been drawn to it.
And thinkers,
and artists,
and elite athletes.
[man] Celebrities who come to play chess
in the store.
Marcel Duchamp
used to come and play in this address.
Stanley Kubrick used to come and play.
But also Bobby Fischer
used to come and play.
To be a good chess player,
you do not have to be a genius.
I think that's a very big myth.
[Wilson] But chess has always been
more than just a pastime.
One that transcends
age, creed and culture,
but somehow never gets old.
It's fascinating.
It's like escaping from your real life
into this new world of 64 squares.
[Wilson]
So why does this ancient board game
continue to capture our imagination?
What's so special about chess?
[man 1] Chess is a great game.
A game and a sport for the mind.
[man 2] One needs to give
all one's time to it to make
the top players in the world.
I like to play chess
because it's a nice game.
We now realize that anyone with
a normal one of these pieces of equipment
can become a Grandmaster.
[man 3] The chess-playing machine
learns the best moves
by using its past experience to analyze
a number of different moves.
And then selects one.
[crowd clamoring]
[Wilson] A kingdom is under attack.
The enemy's cavalry
has stormed the castle.
The king already fled.
Nobody's sure where he's going,
but they'll fight
until they learn he's dead.
For the first time in her life,
the queen is entirely helpless.
An empire brought to its knees
so spectacularly,
it's the kind of thing
future generations should study.
And they have.
That's all happening on this chess board.
And this moment in this game
is the stuff of legend.
[man] It was a beautiful game.
And to beginners, of course,
it just looked miraculous.
[Wilson] Edward Lasker, a German engineer,
had no idea he was about
to make chess history
when he got off the boat in London
on that fateful day in 1912.
And his first stop
was the city's top chess club.
Lasker didn't speak a word of English,
but here,
it didn't matter.
A man invited him to play a quick game.
Lasker didn't know
it was Sir George Alan Thomas,
arguably the best player in England.
It was a casual, offhand game
that happened to be recorded.
It was not in a tournament,
and it was not for money.
[Wilson] Today, it's nicknamed
"The Perfect King Hunt"
because it's so exquisitely brutal.
Or sometimes "Fatal Attraction,"
because it's beautiful at the same time.
And to really see the beauty of it,
it first helps to know how to play.
Am I teaching a six-year-old
or a 20-year-old?
[woman] A six-year-old.
Definitely a six-year-old.
[Wilson] At your disposal are eight pawns,
your foot soldiers.
[Saidy] The six-year-olds
identify with the pawns.
They're the weakest little pieces,
but they can overcome the enemy king.
Then you have the rooks,
the powerful castles.
It just goes in a straight line.
It's not the most exciting piece.
[Wilson] Next to the rooks
are your knights.
They look like…
Horsies. Everybody loves horsies, okay?
[Nakamura] They move in an "L" shape.
-[Saidy] They hop around.
-Kind of like a horse.
[Khachan] Next player is the bishop.
[Nakamura] Very far distance. They can go
from one end of the board to the other end
and attack your opponent's pieces.
[Wilson] Next to the bishop
is your most powerful piece.
Prior to the late 15th century,
that piece only went one square.
[Wilson] But then a lot of powerful
female leaders emerged all over Europe.
And suddenly that weak piece…
[Saidy] Was replaced by a queen
that could go all over the board
in one move.
Without a queen, unless you are good,
you might as well resign.
[Wilson] And then there's
your most important piece of all.
[Saidy] The little king,
that can only go
one square in any direction.
He seems like such a weakling,
but if you don't protect him,
you lose the game.
[Wilson] In ancient Persia, they'd say,
"Shah mat,"
"The king is dead,"
which became "checkmate."
And that's it.
This is your army, same as your enemy's.
Now, you just have
to make your first move.
Edward Lasker drew white pieces,
which meant he would go first.
And there were 20 things he could do.
Same for Sir Thomas.
But already those two choices
could result in 400 different games.
Lasker and Thomas played this one.
A move later, the number of possible
board configurations shoots up
to 71,852.
After each player makes their third move,
it's around nine million.
With that many options,
how do you decide what to do?
For centuries, the answer was
"You're out for blood."
[Saidy] In the 18th century,
that was considered
the only gentlemanly way to play the game.
And you attack the opponent
with complete abandon,
you give away pawns at will.
We call that the Romantic era of chess.
[Wilson] It roughly coincided
with the Romantic era in the arts.
Music, painting, poetry
focused on emotional expression
rather than technical mastery.
Chess wasn't just about winning.
It was about winning beautifully.
[Saidy] Then Steinitz came along.
[Wilson] Wilhelm Steinitz,
the first official world chess champion,
and he said…
[Saidy] "Well, this is a little crude."
[Wilson] Steinitz ushered in a new era,
the scientific school of chess.
Just as artists moved away from drama
in favor of realism and precision,
chess players set about laying down
fundamental principles of the game.
Look at these moves again.
Lasker goes for the center of the board.
Trying to control the center
is principle number one.
It's the heart of the battlefield.
Then Lasker moves his knight.
That's a second principle.
Get your more powerful pieces
into the action as soon as possible.
But in the opening,
you're not on your own.
The great players of the past have
already done a lot of the heavy lifting.
[Nakamura] There's the Danish Gambit,
the Evans Gambit.
[Saidy] Sicilian Defense,
the French Defense, the Ruy Lopez.
[Wilson] And yes, the Queen's Gambit.
Hundreds of openings have been codified,
and it helps to know some opening theory.
[Saidy] If your opponent knows it
and you don't,
you may fall into a trap.
You don't want to be in that boat.
[Wilson] But by move four, the number
of distinct board configurations
is already at 315 billion.
Sooner or later,
you have to abandon the book moves
and start fending for yourself.
[Saidy] The middlegame is
the main fighting arena,
where plans and strategies
are carried out.
The middlegame usually decides
the outcome of the game.
[Wilson] Lasker's bishop is out for blood.
But the triumph is short-lived.
A pawn bravely enters the bloodbath
and is instantly slaughtered.
The white queen
almost had the king in her sights,
before he ducked for cover.
This was an exhilarating game
for the time it was played.
Remember, this was 1912.
The scientific school was at its peak,
and chess had been transformed
into something more sophisticated,
calculated, and…
boring.
But a whole new era
was just about to begin.
The age of rebellion in arts, music,
politics, and chess.
Meet the hypermodernists.
[Saidy] They were iconoclasts,
and they said,
"We're going to play differently."
[Wilson] Like leaving the center
of the board open,
but positioning their pieces
in such a way that the center
became a death trap.
"We're not giving up the center,
we're just controlling it differently."
[Wilson] The hypermodernists did to chess
what surrealists did to art.
Taking things that seemed ordinary
and reimagining their possibilities.
Nothing had to be what it seemed.
We have to keep in mind that chess
is the oldest war game in history.
At the highest competitive level,
it's really a blood sport.
It's hard.
[Wilson] During a tournament,
a chess player's blood pressure
can stay as high
as a competitive marathon runner's.
And they can burn
up to 6,000 calories a day,
more than a world-class tennis player.
All while sitting down,
simply thinking.
So in the 1940s, a Dutch psychologist,
Adriaan de Groot,
set out to study
what goes on in a chess player's mind.
He presented players
of various skill levels
with an unfamiliar position like this,
and then asked them to think aloud
as they decided their next move.
And he found that Grandmasters
and regular pros
considered around the same number
of options for their next move.
And they plotted out an almost
identical number of moves ahead.
So, what made the great players great?
Well, they saw better options.
[Saidy] Richard Réti,
one of the great hypermoderns,
was asked how many moves
did he look ahead.
And he said,
"Only one. The best one."
I think, first and foremost, you have
to be very strong at memorizing.
Almost everybody
who's a very strong Grandmaster
will have some way of recalling games
they've played over their long career,
so oftentimes will look at the placement
of where the bishops and knights are,
where the pawns are,
and try to compare it
to games we've played in the past.
[Wilson] To a chess player,
the positions of pieces
are like piano chords to a composer.
After each chord,
the player might consciously consider
just a few options,
because they've stored deep down
how dozens would sound.
And that comes
from studying scales and keys,
wisdom codified centuries ago
about what patterns of notes sound good.
And it also comes
from playing.
It's a matter of experience.
And believe me,
there's a lot of playing and studying
that goes into making a master player.
[Wilson] And in the 20th century,
nobody studied harder than the Soviets.
Chess was studied in schools
and played in the parks,
and along riverbanks.
Clubs emerged all over the country,
and magazines reprinted
famous games and analyses.
Chess is one of the things
that nations compete in,
because it's, in a way, a reflection
of the progress of the nation.
[Wilson] For the regime, chess dominance
wasn't just about the fight on the board.
It was the proof
of communist intellectual superiority
over the decadent West.
For 24 years, they didn't
just win the World Championship.
Nobody else qualified
to even play against them.
Until 1972
and Bobby Fischer.
In the US,
chess was suddenly prime-time material.
Russia's Boris Spassky,
the world champion,
is to meet America's Bobby Fischer
in a 24-game championship match
this summer.
At stake,
immense prestige for the Russians,
who jealously guard their reputation
as the country of the chess masters.
The International Chess Federation wants
word by tomorrow morning from Fischer
on whether he's agreeable
to 24 games in Iceland,
and Fischer is taking his time answering.
He had had a reputation
for being extremely finicky and demanding
throughout his career.
[Wilson] Bobby Fischer
finally did agree to go
and traveled to New York
to catch the flight, but then
changed his mind.
Nobody knew what to do.
He wouldn't get on the plane.
[Wilson] Leaving Boris Spassky
and the rest of the world,
in suspense.
Is it upsetting your routine,
this waiting?
No, thank you.
Thank you very much for your questions.
[reporter] You don't seem very worried
by what's going on. Are you?
[Saidy] We were stuck,
and we didn't even know
where he would sleep.
Called up my mother
in the middle of the night,
and true to her Lebanese hospitality,
she said, "Sure you can bring him over,"
not knowing that our home
would be turned into
the new center of the world,
as hundreds of journalists
camped outside,
as Henry Kissinger called up
to try to get him to move his ass.
And um, the rest is history.
[Wilson] The tournament stood
for a lot more than a game.
This was the Cold War,
which itself was often described
like a chess game,
with potential traps everywhere.
And lots of things were pawns
in the bigger power struggle,
including chess itself.
After snatching the world title,
Bobby shot to stardom.
The king is dead!
[audience laughing]
Not yet, he isn't.
I'm sure the entire world
knows the name Bobby Fischer by now.
He is the best chess player
in the entire world.
How did Bobby Fischer beat you?
He was a better player?
Yes, he is a better player.
[Wilson] But in one crucial way,
the Cold War wasn't like
a chess game at all.
With chess, you know
all the information at the start.
Nothing is hidden.
Nothing like cards, where you keep
the cards close to your chest.
You're not relying on a dice roll.
You're not relying on luck of the draw.
You are staring at the question,
and you are staring at the answer,
if only you see it.
[Wilson] Lasker's queen
decides it's time to strike.
She boldly crosses into enemy territory.
But the black queen
steps forward to defend her man.
The king is now safe in his corner,
guarded on all sides.
If you play chess,
what would you do in this position?
Lasker says he knew
this was the decisive moment of the game,
that he had to do something drastic.
He had five minutes to decide,
and, sadly, we don't have that time.
Lasker did this.
His queen is now
face-to-face with the king.
Check.
And Sir Thomas did
what most people would probably do.
He killed her.
It looks like Lasker made a fatal blunder.
It's not yet apparent
that this is the beginning of the end.
We've been teaching computers
to play chess for decades,
feeding them billions of games.
And endowed them with memories
that far surpassed ours.
While a human Grandmaster
can consider tens of moves per decision,
a machine looks at tens of millions.
What would take you
maybe years to figure out,
the computer could look at it
within less than a second.
[Wilson] And on May 11th, 1997,
in the final tiebreaking game
between the world chess champion,
Garry Kasparov,
and IBM's supercomputer, Deep Blue,
the machine prevailed.
We'd basically been beaten
by a giant calculator.
There is no psychological pressure
that can reverse this opponent.
Except, you know, if it's unplugged.
[Wilson] Human players, on the other hand,
are prone to weakness.
The king didn't realize
he'd walked into a trap,
and thus the perfect king hunt begins.
The knight gallops forward,
putting the king in double check.
If the king retreats,
the next move would be checkmate.
So he only has one option.
And then Lasker attacks again.
And again.
And again.
Chased out of his kingdom,
his queen abandoned.
When you pass the point of no return,
first, there's shock,
and then acceptance.
As computer power increased,
and as the computers
played more against each other,
they would improve and improve.
Now, no human would really dare to take on
a computer in a match at all,
because the computers are gonna win.
[Wilson] And in 2017,
a new kind of chess player
took the world by storm.
Its name was AlphaZero,
and it wasn't a supercomputer.
It could only consider
a tiny fraction of the moves
of the mightiest chess engines,
but it had been taught very differently.
AlphaZero meant zero human knowledge.
[Wilson] It was just given the rules,
and then it had played itself,
over and over,
and over again.
[Regan] Forty-four million games
at lightning-fast speed against itself.
At first, because it was random,
quite a lot of the games
wouldn't even reach any conclusion,
'cause it wouldn't know
how to checkmate, for example.
But, by chance, some of the games
did reach a conclusion,
so it would look at the moves
on the winning side
and try and play a bit more like that.
In nine hours of training,
it learned kind of the whole
of human chess history.
[Wilson] And AlphaZero,
it didn't play like a computer at all.
It engaged in bold attacks
and daring sacrifices,
like the Romantics.
And it seemed to follow
some of the basic principles
laid out by the scientific school.
And, at the same time,
it sometimes broke them,
because it didn't have
any preconceived notion
that general rules should always apply.
When I was growing up, there were certain
moves that we considered completely crazy.
And now computers have taught us
that you can do these things
that for centuries
were thought to just not be possible.
[Wilson] Computers didn't kill chess.
They fueled the greatest explosion
of chess knowledge in history.
The number of Grandmasters
has been going up,
and they achieve that high rank younger.
[Nakamura] In the past,
almost all the top chess players
were from the former Soviet Union,
because that was
where the top players were.
You had to be around the best players
to obtain that experience.
[Wilson] But now, you just need
an Internet connection.
I think Rubius has been putting in
a lot of work off-stream as well,
because he's playing this very, very well.
[Wilson] And countries that don't have
a history of competitive chess
are producing
some of the world's best chess players.
[Nakamura] Countries like India.
You have countries like Iran,
for example, as well.
Of course, even Norway.
Prior to Magnus Carlsen,
they had no chess players,
I would say, in the top 20 in the world.
It really has leveled the playing field,
and you see that people can get good,
no matter where they are in the world
or what the circumstances are.
[Wilson] Within the strict confines
of the rules,
bound by just 64 squares,
the total number of unique chess games
is estimated to be
around ten to the 120th power.
Or in plain English,
a thousand trillion trillion trillion
trillion trillion trillion trillion
trillion trillion trillion games.
More possibilities
than there are grains of sand on Earth,
or dust particles in the Milky Way,
or atoms in the observable universe.
The beauty and I think the magic
of the game is this fluidity.
With every move, the whole game changes.
You have to reconfigure,
you have to keep looking at the board.
There's enough richness to it
that you'll never be the perfect player.
And there's always ways to improve.
Even though I've spent much
of my career playing the game
and I've spent many,
many years studying it,
there's still a lot of "Aha" moments
where I look at a game or I study,
and there's something
even I have not seen before.
Chess has this addictive quality,
I admit it.
I didn't get rich,
I didn't get famous,
but it was very satisfying
to play a good game.
And I remember those moments
with happiness.
[Wilson] After a series of forced moves,
the black king reaches
the opposite end of the board
in the heart of the white kingdom.
With his royal grace,
the white king advances one step forward,
letting his rook,
which hasn't made a single move
the entire game,
deal a mortal blow.
Checkmate.
[closing theme music playing]