Personality, Oct. 20, 1952

WHEN the police pounced on Willie Sutton last winter, they found in his hideout a book entitled How to Think Ahead in Chess. In this way, some 8,000,000 U.S. chess players learned that Bank Robber Sutton was a member of their cold-eyed fraternity. They were not especially surprised. As devotees of one of the oldest and most intellectually satisfying games ever invented, they assume that chess appeals to every thinking man, whether he uses his talents to crack safes or split atoms. But most of these thinking men, from Einstein to Humphrey Bogart, are Patzers—a German word that can best be translated as "duffers." Several million light-years above them in ability are the chess masters. Above these stand a handful of grand masters. There are scarcely a dozen in the world, and only two in the U.S.: the relatively inactive Dr. Reuben Fine, and Samuel Reshevsky.

Grand Master Reshevsky is a neat little man of 40, with delicate fingers and a bald head. He wears glasses, stands a shade over five feet, and generally has the inoffensive air of a Casper Milquetoast. But at the chessboard Reshevsky becomes a thinking machine. Smoking cigarettes, sipping gallons of ice water, he plays his own special brand of relentlessly logical chess with all the lethal poise of a cobra. Said an opponent: "I think the ice water he drinks goes right into his veins."

Because chess is the struggle of one intellect with another, victory brings a sense of achievement unequaled in any other sport. Conversely, defeat lays bare a man's most homicidal instincts. Legend has it that after a chess game a prince of Bavaria was brained by a son of the King of France. Reshevsky appears impervious to these emotional tides. He is both admired and detested for his glacial self-control. "He acts as though he can save any game, no matter how hopeless the position," complained one master bitterly.

All chess masters have, roughly, an equal knowledge of technique, openings and variations of play. Therefore games between them usually develop into a war of nerves and a search for small advantages that are not always on the chessboard. Spain's Bishop Ruy Lopez recognized this as early as the 16th century when he recommended that an opponent always be seated so that the light shone in his eyes. Reshevsky's icy calm has a similar unsettling effect on his opponents. But the calm is only skin-deep. After match play, Samuel often breaks into a heavy sweat. When he has lost a game, or drawn one he should have won, sleep escapes him: "I go over and over it in my mind, searching for what went wrong. If I find it, I stay awake kicking myself. If I don't find it, the insomnia's even worse."