Today in History – 6 November

A masterful chess player

İsmet İnönü was a masterful chess player, who began playing chess at an early age and trained himself well in the game. One of the people to have personally witnessed this lesser known mastery of İnönü was Prof. Dr. Sami Büyükgökçesu, a former player of the Turkish National Chess Team.

The incident transpired in 1972 as two global chess masters, namely American player Bobby Fisher and Russian player Boris Spassky were playing “the chess game of the century.” Perceived as an extension of the power struggle between Russia and the U.S. at the time, the game was viewed with much interest across the world. Fischer lost the first two games as though he was committing suicide; however, his four consecutive brilliant wins brought the score to 4 to 2 in his favor.

İnönü, who was staying in Maltepe, İstanbul at the time, was watching the game day to day like the rest of the world. However, İnönü made no sense of Sapssky’s voluntary resignation in one of the games and asked his aides to find a masterful chess player to explain this move. The task fell upon Büyükgökçesu, who was merely 21 at the time. Büyükgökçesu describes his admiration of İsmet Pasha’s astonishing grasp of the game as follows:

When the Russian player resigned from that game, there was no apparent reason for such a move. Many chess players that would call themselves “masters” could have easily continued the game and not let go of it. However, the Russian player could see that he would lose and thus resigned from the game. The position was not an easy one to see or understand.

Yet, İsmet Pasha saw it. I was most surprised by the depth of his understanding of the game. I re-played him the game from beginning to end. At the position where Spassky left the game, Pasha said, with a five-move variant on behalf of the American player, “This is why he resigned from the game.”