What is The Italian Game?
Simple, almost banal: it is a story about second chances, self-confidence and love. And, above all, it is a story about chess.
Kayden, the victim of an infamous and unfounded accusation, returns to play a chess tournament a...
The main line of the Italian Game. Three moves for white – pawn, knight and bishop –, two moves for black. One of the most known and most played games in the history of chess. Anyway, from this moment on anything can happen...
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Damn it.
His hands were sweaty. Freezing cold and sweaty. He hadn't realised it until he ran his fingers over his chin to stroke it. The coffee in the paper cup was cold and wouldn't be enough.
Keep your mind on it, Kayden.
The only thing he had in front of his eyes was a system of lines. Trajectories, actually. Traces marked with surgical precision from box to box, from piece to piece.
Moves and countermoves, from the most plausible to the least. He traced them all for the umpteenth time. All of a sudden - who knows why - it all seemed too simple, too obvious. Almost too obvious.
He lifted his eyes and met Stevenson's sardonic gaze, fixed on him. Familiar faces appeared again and again around their table. Durac, the world's second best, then Niyagara, the Japanese, Finck, the German. Then the others, whether he knew them by name or not. Everybody there, back and forth. After all, his was the most important game. Not for him, obviously, he was a nobody. But he was playing Stevenson, and Stevenson was not only the incumbent world champ: he was possibly the greatest player of all time. He was stronger than Fischer, stronger than Kasparov. Stronger than anybody else.
Vultures.
His mind kept telling him that his position was good, that he was somehow ahead. Too bad it wasn't possible. Too bad that all the other players in the room were there to see him lose, to see how Stevenson was able to turn around for the millionth time a game that had been played badly from the start. Annoying. Annoying, but bearable. He should be happy to have been given the chance, to have found an advantage, however illusory, against someone so much stronger than him.
Keep your mind on it. Keep your mind on it, Kayden.
Lines, again, trajectories. The knight, in a great position, and the bishop behind him, ready to cover his back. His black pieces, eager to be deployed, and that open road, all-too open, that he kept seeing in front of him. Too easy. There had to be a trick, some kind of trap. There must have been some kind of preparation on Stevenson's part. He must have studied him, he must have known that he was a positional and defensive player. A big part of the game, at times, was the search for an imbalance. And Stevenson had done it. He had played an opening so preposterous that it had shocked him, and he had continued to string together a series of incomprehensible moves to the point that more than once he had wondered if he wasn't just doing it to make a game with a foregone conclusion more interesting.
Another glance around the room. There was Durac again, with his famous lost expression, barely shaking his head. Stevenson hadn't moved an inch, the untidy forelock still in front of the right half of his face and the coffee-stained shirt he hadn't bothered to change since the day before. Damn it.
