To The Best Of Our Knowledge; More Than Just A Game

It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Anne Strange -Champs. In 1995, a new board game came on the market called Settlers of Catan. Today, 20 million people play it on a regular basis. For some, it's almost a language. We were in Florida in a hospital. This very quiet, tense and thick space. My grandfather was going to pass away very soon. And so we sat down at one of the tables and just pulled out the game and set it up and played most of the game before we had to go in and say our goodbyes. And I think that that was a way for the three of us to be together in that moment without needing to say anything. Board games say so much more than we think. About our relationships, our politics, our histories. This hour, why it's more than just a game. First is. This hour, why it's more than just a game. This hour,

why it's more than just a game. This hour, why it's more than just a game. This hour, why it's more than just a game. This hour, why it's more than just a game. This hour, why it's more than just a game. This hour, why it's more than just a game. This hour,

why it's more than just a game. This hour, why it's more than just a game. This hour, why it's more than just a game. This hour, why it's more than just a game.

This hour, why it's more than just a game. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Anstrane Champs.

There are two games I've played my entire life. Scrabble and solitaire. I've played them with four generations of my family, which is maybe true for you too. Board games are a tradition for a lot of us. But have you ever thought about where those traditions come from? How do you do it? This is producer Angela Patista. Every new year after the ball drop, all the Filipino moms at the party would break out this towel game with all these Chinese symbols. Majong. They play for hours, always screaming and laughing like Filipino moms do. Sometimes they play till like six a .m. I never got it. I never played. Until about a year ago, when all the moms taught all the kids, and now we're addicted.

So, what even is Majong? Well, there's a lot of rules and etiquette when it comes to Majong, and it can get a little confusing at first. But basically, it's a matching game, similar to Rummy, but instead of cards, you have these ornately carved block tiles. Instead of hearts, spades, diamonds and clubs, you have bamboo, sometimes called bam or stick, ball, sometimes called dot or circle, and characters, sometimes called car or crack. Confused yet? Four players take turns picking up and discarding tiles to build different matches or sets until someone gets a winning hand. But actually, it's a little more complicated than that. Hi! How are you? I was itching to play Majong recently,

and I found this small group in Madison that gets together every month. And I have to point out that I was the only Asian person there, and I was primarily playing with some very lovely older white women. What I learned really quickly is that they play American Majong. I didn't even know that there was an American Majong. She said it was totally different. It is totally different. Like that there was no Charleston? No Charleston? So, how did we get here? How did this Chinese game end up being played with an American version? We have to go all the way back to ancient China to the time of Confucius who actually invented the game, and no. That is a legend that began in the 1920s with the marketing of Majong to a broader American public by other Americans. This

is Annelise Heinz. She's a historian at the University of Oregon, and she's writing a book all about the history of Majong in America. She told me that what we know as Majong is actually a fairly modern game, and it emerged in the late 19th century. It was mostly played by Chinese men in cortisone houses and social clubs in cities like Shanghai and Beijing. And it wasn't even that popular there. It was not necessarily well known throughout China. It didn't hold any particular significance different from many other games. But after World War I, more and more Americans started coming over to China to do business. And when they weren't doing business, a lot of these foreigners started hanging out in these social clubs and cortisone houses and started playing Majong, including this standard oil business guy, Joseph P. Babcock. Babcock saw that this could potentially be a popular game in the United States, and he and his wife worked together to float an idea, the

possibility of a fad by marketing it to the socialites who vacationed on Catalina Island. Basically, they started a focus group with a bunch of rich white people, and they loved it. So Babcock founded the Majong sales company and started importing thousands of dollars worth of Majong sets. He wrote his own book of simplified rules, and he even tried to patent the game as his own invention, which I think is pretty much textbook cultural appropriation. This was all happening in the early 1920s. Orientalism was a huge fashion trend. Americans went nuts for Majong because of its exotic Oriental mystique. Other game makers wanted in on the Majong action so they put out their own version of the game with their own rule books. Each version was spelled or pronounced differently, but they all claimed that theirs was the

genuine or authentic version of the game. That's where the myth of Confucius comes in. The question of which was the, quote, real and authentic game of the ancient royal Chinese court as created by Confucius was widely repeated over and over again by many different marketers of the game. If you look at early ads and rule books, you had all these images of Chinese court officials, Mandarin. It looks a lot like Fu Manchu, the nefarious villain popularized in the early 20th century in books and films. So there's the mustache, slanted eyes, and long fingernails, and of course, very often an emphasis on the Chinese cue, the long ponytail worn by Chinese men. And these are all images of a China that didn't exist anymore. China was already becoming a modern republic. People in China are not wearing cues anymore because the Chi

Empire has ended. And yet we have this very then anachronistic vision that is widely circulated as a marker of authenticity to an American audience. Some of these claims were downright ridiculous. There was one marketer, L .L. Har, who claimed that any version of the game called Ma Zhang was actually a low -class inferior version played by Chinese laborers. Except he didn't use the word laborer, but the more offensive term, Cooley. Har claimed that his version of the game, which he called Pang Chao, a made -up name, was actually the superior, genuine, authentic version that descended from Confucius and the court of the King of Wu, even though his sets were manufactured entirely in the U .S. and made out of plastic. Americans may have bought it, but the Chinese were not fooled. And you can see how and why, in terms of a business choice, he's deciding to do that

because the stakes are high. This is a massively profitable fad. So profitable that it created an entire Ma Zhang economy. For a time, the American market of Ma Zhang was the largest in the world, even larger than the Chinese market. Ma Zhang's sets became the sixth largest export out of Shanghai, which was the largest port in China. Congress passed a tax law specifically targeting Ma Zhang's sets in 1924. And these tiles that were being made in China were made out of bamboo spliced together with cow shin bone and the domestic Chinese supply of cow shin bone quickly ran out. But what did the U .S. have a lot of? Cows and cow bones. So the U .S. started exporting cow bone to China to import in the form of completed Ma Zhang sets. And during those peak years, the value of bone skyrocketed

2000%. So who are all these people buying up and playing Ma Zhang in the U .S.? Well, primarily women, wealthy white women, which is kind of ironic considering it was more of a men's game in China. But in the U .S., it was marketed especially towards women. There were ads and vogue for Ma Zhang. Women would have these Ma Zhang parties where they would dress up in Chinese dresses and pretend to be Chinese aristocrats. Macy's department stores had Ma Zhang lessons. There was a Ma Zhang ballet. First lady Harding played it at the White House. So many women were playing that there was even a hit song making fun of them. It was called since Ma is playing Ma Zhang. And it had some really reprehensible racist lyrics. Ma is playing Ma Zhang. No, we're not doing this. If you want to listen to this, you can probably look it up yourself.

Here's the thing. Ma Zhang was blowing up all over the U .S. White Americans were more than happy to take these fun, exotic, Chinese cultural exports. But what they didn't want was actual Chinese people. This is one of the great paradoxes of the Ma Zhang craze. The peak of the Ma Zhang fad happened at the very same time that you get the passage of the Johnson Read Immigration Act. The most restrictive immigration act that was passed in 1924. And that further solidified anti -Asian immigration exclusion. Still for Chinese immigrants and their descendants already living in the U .S. Playing Ma Zhang during the Ma Zhang craze was much different. In places like Stanford and USC, you had young Chinese college students leveraging their Chineseness to be Ma Zhang instructors. Because, well, what other options did you have? You could be a college -educated Chinese

-American person and still not be hired for the things that you were trained to do. This was a way that college students could make money during the summer. Much more money than they might be able to working in the family restaurant or working in a curious shop dressed in Chinese costume, which was often their other choices. But it wasn't just a job. It was still fun for them. Louise Liang Larson, who was the first Asian -American woman to work for a major American newspaper, she would play all the time with her parents and with her friends in the USC Chinese Students Club. And at the same time, she talked about how if they played it out in public as Chinese appearing people, they could get stared at. And so, again, this sense of heightened scrutiny of what it meant to be a Chinese -American person playing this game very explicitly marked as Chinese was complex.

By the late 1920s, the Ma Zhang Fad kind of dies out. But clearly, it's still being played in America today. So, how did it persist? Coming up, the story of Ma Zhang's next incarnation in New York City. I'm Anne Strange -Champs. It's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX. I'm Anne Strange -Champs. Okay, when we left the 1920s, the Ma Zhang

craze was dead. But someone had to keep it alive. Angela Batista picks up the pieces and phones a friend. This is Linda Feinstein. She runs the Manhattan Ma Zhang Club in New York City. It's just all about Ma Zhang. In 1937, there's this small group of Jewish -American women that wanted to bring Ma Zhang back. So these women got together. And they started what's called the National Ma Zhang League right out of New York City. And they standardized the rules because everybody was playing a little bit differently. A large amount of Jewish immigrants came over in the 40s and the 30s. A lot of them. A majority of them settled in the lower east side. And it became a very, very Jewish community. Women

didn't work. They stayed home. So, you know, it was something to take their mind off things. They would play Ma Zhang. And I think it became quote -unquote a Jewish game. After World War II, Ma Zhang became an integral part of Jewish life. The GI Bill and Access to Housing Loans opened the doors for Jewish Americans to move from the crowded cities to the more lonely isolated suburbs. The women took their Ma Zhang sets with them. And it was like their social network. I think women needed other women. Life was hard back then. So what didn't mean for Jewish women to play Ma Zhang together? I think it met a lot. I think it was one of their highlights of their day. My husband still remembers when his mother would get together in their kitchen. And, you know, everybody was smoking cigarettes and he got everyone together. You can talk. It was a marvelous thing. And, you know,

there have been people I know that have been playing with the same women for over 50 years. So, after a while, they become your best friends. They go to their weddings, barmishes. It stayed that way for the longest time. I think it was tradition. You know, most of the women I know, they are playing with their mother sets. And their mother probably got her mother sets. It really brought women together. Can you tell me the story of how you first learned how to play Ma Zhang? Yes, absolutely. I think it was the luckiest day of my life. You know, I was born in Brooklyn. And then we moved when I was four years old to Flint, Michigan. Believe it or not. But every summer, my father would drive my sisters and I to Coney Island because I had an aunt who lived here. And we stayed at a bungalow column. And I was a game player. My family and I were big game players. My sisters,

we always played games. So, I really loved the sound, the tiles, the way the women interacted with each other. It was like, it made it like a real community. I don't know. I feel like I brought Ma Zhang back to New York City. I know that sounds crazy. But nobody was playing it when I moved to New York in around 2000. But I feel it's changed in my life. I might have told you this, but I run a Ma Zhang club in New York City. And I get 80 to 100 women every single week. And they all send me little notes and thank yous for making such a difference in their lives. You know, what can I say? I'm just a very happy Ma Zhang person who's glad that it's back. And I think it's back to say. You win like

your mother? I only played once with some Jewish friends in college. Jewish Ma Zhang. Not the same thing. And totally different. Now, Chinese Ma Zhang, very tricky. That's a scene from the 1993 movie adaptation of Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club. Ma Zhang played a central role in that story. And 25 years later, Ma Zhang was back on the big screen. So your family is rich? We're comfortable. That is exactly what a super rich person would say. Maybe you've heard of this little movie? Crazy Rich Asians? These people aren't just rich. They're crazy rich. And you really should have told me that you're like principal in my patient. That's ridiculous. Much more of a hurry. If you haven't seen crazy rotations by now, stop right now and watch it. Because I can't really talk about it without some spoilers. Okay, basic plot. Rachel Chu, who is Chinese American, goes to Singapore to visit her boyfriend Nick's family, who is surprised, crazy rich. And Nick's mom, Eleanor,

ain't all that thrilled about Rachel. I know you're not what Nick needs. And the whole movie comes to a head in this Ma Zhang game. My mom taught me how to play. She told me Ma Zhang would teach me important life skills. Negotiation, strategy, cooperation. Rachel and Eleanor are talking about Nick and his happiness. But there's something else happening on the table. You asked me here. I assume it's not for a Ma Zhang lesson. There's also this other conversation that's taking place, both metaphorical and tactical in some fashion, in the Ma Zhang game itself. This is Jeff Yang. He's an author and cultural critic, and he wrote this amazing, in -depth article, breaking down just this scene. Well, he proposed to me yesterday. What's really amazing about this scene is that none of this goes explained on -screen itself. That is, the game takes place, and if you're not paying attention to it, if you're only listening to the conversation. He said he'd walk away from his family and from

you for good. You don't really know what is happening in the game itself. Don't worry, I'll turn them down. And yet, the outcome of the game really changes everything about that conversation. Only a foolful swimming hand. There's no winning. You made sure of that. I should preface this by saying that I saw the movie around seven times. And the first time I saw it, I knew there was something special about the game. I looked at the final tiles, the hand that Rachel reveals, and I said, oh my god, you know, I knew instantly what had happened. But the people I was sitting with, who were not fans of the game, didn't quite get it. So, I just wanted you to know that it was because of me. A poor, raised by a single mother, low class, immigrant. Nobody.

What does it mean for Majang to be seen by so many people that saw this movie, which went on to be a very big success? Majang is something that has such a deep hold in some ways, on Chinese tradition and culture, that it is literally a part of how people celebrate the most important time of year, Spring Festival, otherwise known as Lunar New Year. It's something that has such a deep interconnection to history that even Mao Zedong said that, if you want to understand China, you kind of have to play Majang, right? If you want to succeed in life, you have to play Majang. So, adding this to the narrative, and this was a scene that was not in the original book, right? Adding this to the narrative really anchors the larger conversation around what is going on in the sort of war of worlds, East and West, into Chinese -ness, sort of diasporic Chinese -ness, in a way that

very few other things could have. Essentially, the scene isn't just about Rachel's relationship, but about Rachel reconciling her identity as an Asian -American woman. Through this Majang game, Rachel shows that, yes, she is Chinese, and yes, she is American. And that should be enough. I think any child of an Asian immigrant knows this feeling, which is why I can't stop thinking about this scene. Three, two, one. How is Julia? In doing all this research about Majang, how it came to the U .S. and took on different meanings in people's lives, I started to think more about what it's meant in my life. Every new year, I would see the moms playing Majang, and for the longest time, I didn't really care to learn because I didn't think it was a game meant for me. My mom grew up in the Philippines, and she told me that she learned how to play Majang when she was three or four. She remembers

when her grandma passed away, and all these elders came to visit, and they would play Filipino Majang. The version she would eventually teach me. So much had to happen for me to learn this game. And now here I am. A Filipino American who proudly plays Filipino Majang and American Majang, and I couldn't tell you which is better. What's unique about Majang is that it's not just one thing. It is a Chinese game, no doubt. It always will be. It's also a Jewish game, an American game, a Filipino game, and so much more. Over 100 years in the hands of different players, it's a game that's taken on so many different histories, including my own. And as long as we're playing Majang, that history is still being written. That's producer Angelo Batista, winning at Majang.

So clearly, the games we play say a lot about us. So what does it mean that one of the most popular games in the world right now is Katan, the game where players compete to build settlements on a mythic island. Eric Thurm discovered it in college. He and his roommates never looked back. My roommates a few years ago had ordered this lantern. And for a while, we would play set of letters of Katan. And every time we did, we would turn off all the lights and set up this lantern. And it would be the only light in the room and someone would play probably the Lord of the Ring soundtrack. Maybe something else that sort of

gives the sense that there are like hobbits in the area somewhere. The board set up is very heavily ritualized. And at various points, I would read passages from the set of letters of Katan historical novel. The characters all have names like Kandemir and Ozman. And occasionally the paragraphs would be like, Kandemir was afraid of the woman because he thought she might be a witch. And that creates the environment in which you are most willing to be swept along by the game. Everyone was maybe not in the best state to make game time decisions, which is maybe a polite way of saying that everyone was kind of drunk. There would just sort of be a lot of arguments about trading and it becomes very serious. I sort of have gotten a little bit past

that. Maybe not that much past it, but a little bit past it. Portrait of a board game geek. Eric Thurm is a writer and cultural critic. He does his best to keep up with the expanding global board games market. Did you know that like 5 ,000 new games are introduced every year? Somehow he also found time to write a book in which he makes the case that games carry subliminal messages and are a lot more political than we think. He stopped by the studio to show me. This one's got a lot of old pieces. And some cards. This is actually one of my favorite parts. Setting up a board game. It's very ritualistic. Yes. You read about players entering the magic circle is that kind of what you're talking about? A little bit, yeah.

The magic circle is a concept has been really helpful in terms of explaining to people who are interested in board games but don't necessarily think about them that much. The type of interaction that you're being expected to have. When you're quote unquote in the magic circle, everyone is agreeing to the rules of the game. We're not literally buying and selling properties, but everyone has just sort of decided to suspend disbelief and engage with each other. One of the things I love so much about your book is that you start with this idea that board games communicate ideas. How did you even begin to think like that about board games? I think that the first place that I thought about it was when I sort of learned about this Nazi -propic and a game, Youden Rouse. I stumbled upon this Wikipedia page called Nazi board games and I vaguely remember yelling to whoever was in my house at the time that they needed to come read this thing over my shoulder. It just never occurred to me that that could exist.

Youden Rouse. She was get out. Yeah, and I did some research about it. Essentially the way that it works is you are in a city that is not named but is ostensibly Berlin and you go around and find these spaces on the board that are marked as shops or houses or places where like Jewish families live and then you take these pieces that look like hats that in the original version have these very sort of anti -Semitic caricatures painted on them. You pick them up and then you go back to your collection point, drop off the family and then they ostensibly you're going to get deported to Palestine. So you're going around as a player? Like imagine this little Aryan kid they're going around basically plucking up Jews. Yes. And for that they get points. The winner is the first person who I think it's five but I could be wrong about that. It's between four and six I believe. You actually wound up tracking it down. Yeah, so there are two copies of it in the world. One of which is at Yad Vashem and the other one is at the Wiener Holocaust Library in London. And I

basically just asked them to send me a scan of the board and then had it printed at a print shop near my house and then had a friend of mine who speaks German, translate the rules. So you actually wanted to play it? I did play it. I had a bunch of my Jewish friends came over and we had a Shabbat dinner and then we played this game. On Chopps. Yes, on Chopps. Okay. The whole point was that we were going to talk about it and sort of have this conversation, what does it feel like to play this now? Does it raise any questions for us? The mechanic is really similar to any other standard board game that you would play. The thing that's different is just that the board looks different and the thing it's telling you to do is a little bit different. But fundamentally it's not that different than say Candyland. Right, exactly. I spent a lot of time thinking about that. That especially when you're a child, you just will interact with whatever's put in front of you. You just will play because it's what you have available. You don't really think about the story that's telling you. The conversation that we ended up having was really interesting because you start

playing it and it feels terrible. And then because all you're really doing is rolling and moving your pieces within 10, 15 minutes, you just forget that the thing that you're doing is just like going around and picking up Jewish families. I'm just kind of playing this game. That's the creepiest thing you've said yet about it that it can normalize it. Right, exactly. A couple of my friends said, I don't think this would have been very successful as propaganda because it's a bad game. And other people said what you just said, which is that it is scarier in some ways that the game makes the act of rounding up these families boring and sort of very banal and something that you would do over the course of an evening's family entertainment. Does anybody know whether Aryan kids really did play Youden Rouse? Like how many games were made or bought? The most common numbers I did and the one that I saw the first time I read about it was that it sold a million copies. Oh my God. But there are people who have studied it and think that maybe those two copies are

the only ones that exist and that they were made as prototypes. I think that from my perspective, it doesn't actually matter that much. I think the thing that matters is just that it just is a pretty standard board game that was capitalizing on something that was really trendy at the time. But the thing that happened to be really trendy was anti -Semitism. So this is a really good introduction to thinking about games as a form of propaganda. That's a really overt example. But you write quite a bit about how games train us to think from inside their rules, which I don't completely understand. Yeah. So especially in sort of basic competitive games, the point of the game is to win and you sort of get trained to do what the game expects you to do in order to win. So let's say you're talking about monopoly. The point of monopoly is to get the most money. If you play a lot of monopoly, the best way to play the game is to be really ruthless and take other people's properties to do a lot of really

aggressive trading, to undermine people, to be really vicious, which is why I hate that game. Well, it's why a lot of people hate that game. And it's a reason why I like cooperative games so much. So I talk a little bit in the book about this game, The Grizzled. That is a... No, we have it right here. That's right here. It's a cooperative game about World War One. Every character in the game is a member of this unit. And you don't win battles. You just are surviving. And there is snow and hail and gas attacks and all these terrible things. And the point of the game is really just that you and the other players are sharing the burden of existing. So wait, here, show me. Sure. Here. The point of the game is to get rid of all of the cards and the cards have what are called threats on them. So let's show me one. Okay. So this one has two threats on it. One of them is the shell and one of them is knight. I could also play

this that has snow and a shell. And a rocket shell. If those show up, what do you do? The way that you successfully complete rounds is by retreating and by stopping the mission, which you do by putting down a token that says, I want to lend support to one of the other players. And at the end of every round, when everyone has withdrawn, you look and see who has gotten the most support and that person gets a very, very small bonus from the game. But this is like an anti -war game. I mean, if you think about it compared to, I don't know, access and allies, the goal isn't to win. The goal is to survive. Yes. Exactly. I see what you mean. It's so different from monopoly where you're just trying to screw everybody else. Yeah. It's really, really different. And I think it does a really fantastic job of taking the thing that it's about and making it the rules of the game. The point of the game and the way that you play it is by thinking about the theme of, can French it be stronger than war? And the answer is often no, because it's very hard. But I think that's also part of what's good about it. It's difficult.

Yeah. So what's this one? This is class struggle. It sort of was marketed as the world's first socialist board game. It was created and published in 1978 by Bertel Ullman, who at the time was a political science professor at NYU. And still is a political science professor at NYU. And he encountered the early history of monopoly and thought, why isn't there a game that teaches people about why either monopolies are bad or about what do we look like to really engage in this kind of struggle? Because it says class struggle to prepare for life in capitalist America. Yeah. In a picture of Karl Marx engaging in arm wrestling with Norman Rockefeller. Okay, so we've got the board game out. One side says socialism workers win. And the other is barbarism. Yes. Just so we know where we are. Yeah. So there's a die here that has all of the classes on it. And the way that you start playing is by rolling the class die and simulating the genetic lottery. Because you don't get to decide what class you're born into. Yeah.

I rolled the capitalists. So I didn't get to choose this. I just am the capitalists. Oh, what's that? That's the farmers. The farmers are part of the workers. Okay. Then what? But the capitalists also ostensibly get to decide what order the game goes in, who serves as banker, the capitalists get a lot of capitalists. Why did they get to decide? Because they're the capitalists. It's not fair. Exactly. That's what I think he would say. That's the whole point of the game. And I think the capitalists also get to go first. Two, three, four, five. So I got a chance card. Let's see which capitalist chance card I'm going to draw. So this one says farmers are fooled into blaming consumers instead of the profits of capitalist middlemen for the low prices they get for their crops. Move directly to the next space that allows an alliance with the farmer class. Oh, it would be this one. Now's your turn. I was going to say, is it my turn? Yes, it's your turn. Okay. Three.

State regulatory commissions controlled by capitalists. Capitalists get two assets. Well, you're just raking in the assets and I have nothing. Well, I'm a capitalist. I started and I own the means of production. Well, the game is rigged. It is rigged. You would say that's a, the game is just rigged. Okay. Look, I rolled double. Oh, this is a fun one. Your boss died, but the new one acts in much the same way. You begin to understand the problem is not a mean boss, but the class of bosses. Two assets. That's a life lesson. What are the chance cards for the capitalists? Let's see. Cold mind disaster caused by absence of safety equipment that you refused to put in because you said it was too expensive. Send roses to the funeral and move back three spaces until the public outcry blows over. Jesus. That's awful. Oh, or this is a fun one too. You get caught with your hands in the public's pocket. They're in deeper than usual. In an attempt

to whitewash your reputation, you set up a charitable foundation. Tax exempted named after your family. But our force to make a public announcement of your assets and debits. Oh, my God. This is all sitting a little too close to home. Right. And a lot of this is very blunt, but also I think that a lot of it is pretty accurate and still pretty accurate in a lot of ways. And also just very funny in a way that makes communicating a lot of ideas that are often treated as very stuffy, really accessible because it's all done sort of through jokes. I think what you're saying is we should have game literacy in the same way that we have media literacy. Just like if you're going to play a game, spend some time thinking about what it's actually teaching you. I think it's complicated. I think if you think that the game having an idea or a message is inherently sort of nefarious, that it becomes very depressing, which is in some ways, but also that you can just say, okay, what kinds of games do we want to be playing? And I also think it's okay to say there should be more games that have propaganda for sort of my

preferred ideology. There are definitely games that have ideas that I think are good. And the fact that a game is propaganda or has ideas I don't think is a reason to not play it. When he's not playing board games, Eric Thurm is a writer. His book, Board Games, is part of the Avidly Reads series. Do you feel like board games ever get a little heated? Mine do, but not like this. This is a dangerous moment. Taken upon on F4. Allow me... Well, seconds. Allow me a chance on F4. Even Queen of Two is not working here. Wow. Coming up, the Cutthroat World of International Chas. I'm Anne Strange -Champs. It's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio. And PRX.

I'm Anne Strange -Champs. I'm Anne Strange -Champs. I'm Anne Strange -Champs. I'm Anne Strange -Champs. I'm Anne Strange -Champs. I'm Anne Strange -Champs. I'm Anne Strange -Champs. I'm Anne Strange -Champs. I'm Anne Strange -Champs. I'm Anne Strange -Champs. I'm Anne Strange -Champs. In 2016, journalist Bryn Jonathan

Butler took a break from covering boxing. To spend time at a more rarefied sporting event, the World Chess Championship. The Norwegian Grandmaster, Magnus Carlson, whom many consider the greatest chess player of all time, was playing the Russian Sergei Karyakin. It was an intense, grueling, mind -breaking game. Steve Paulson, a longtime sports fan, wanted to know more. Bryn, you've covered a lot of sports, especially boxing. So chess would seem to be a very different kind of thing to write about. But I'm wondering if you see any parallels between two boxers getting in the ring and two chess grandmasters facing off against each other? Oh, I saw a man's overlap. The intensity of it. I mean, you don't have the physical manifestation of it. But watching these two guys for five or six hours, only a couple feet away from one another, you'd watch them almost age a decade. It was grueling to watch what they were doing. And to know that just one mistake being followed around the world by chess fans, I mean, chess

has such an extraordinary audience. Hundreds of millions of people. It was really palpable in this sort of death chamber -like setting that the World Chess Championships were they took place. You're talking about the 2016 World Championship between Magnus Carlson and Sergei Karyakin. That's right, yeah. What makes this kind of high -level chess match so intense? You're just looking at, you know, a one -in -a -billion type person in terms of the cast of mind that's required to operate at that kind of level, like Magnus Carlson could play with his back turn to ten tables of grandmasters and keep it in his head. All of the games being played simultaneously and just trounce any kind of competition. It seems almost otherworldly, these kind of mental feats. You know, Sergei Karyakin, both of these guys are child prodigies identified extraordinarily young, who then have to submit to this kind of indentured servitude of 10, 12, 14 -hour days

for many, many years in order to get where they were in 2016. Well, it raises the question, is this a game or is it a sport? Yeah, I think it's fair to qualify. I mean, I don't know if I'd go toward all these games bowling or golf as sports, but I mean, I think there are many elements where I was responding to it the way I do with other sports, so very quickly I was internalizing it as a sport. You've also written about how some of the most famous names in the history of chess from Bobby Fisher to the current champion, Magnus Carlson, haven't just wanted to win. They wanted to crush their opponent. They wanted to destroy their opponent's ego. I think that that was the biggest takeaway that I had is just how incredibly sadistic chess players are at the elite level. And I don't think that's exclusive to chess. I find most of the people that I've interviewed who are excelling in any arena of ambition, it requires a kind of sadism that is really frightening. We like to think that virtue is what

drives these people to get on top. It's rare. Looking back with Bobby Fisher, a lot of his interviews, him being asked by Dick Cavett, what's the home run in chess? And he said, it's breaking a man's ego, as you mentioned. But I think it goes further than that because when he went back on Dick Cavett's show after winning the World Championship in 1972, he asked if he had that moment, that thrilling moment of crushing a man's ego. And he said, it wasn't right there because I just didn't feel like he gave up, which suggested to me it's not just murdering your opponent. It's creating enough hopelessness that they commit suicide. Wow. Good God. But I just found chilling. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, haven't there been some cases in some pretty high -stakes chess games where someone just cracks. They just can't deal with the pressure. Absolutely true. There's a historic match where a doctor actually had to stop what was happening to save the life of one of the players because Sparov was playing against his opponent and the opponent lost something like 25 pounds over the

course of the championship. So they had to sort of recalibrate the rules of how championships are played, so it wouldn't just extend in perpetuity. But I mean, it's extraordinarily draining. I think I read one study where chess players can burn about 30 or 35 % of their calories just from mental working. Really? I didn't know that was possible. So what about you? Do you play chess? I do play chess very hesitantly because I find it tremendously addictive, which was a pretty big theme of this book, is that these were some of the most highly addictive people that I'd ever come across. And I come from a family of several alcoholics. And that kind of predisposition. But there's a wonderful chess shop, the chess forum here in New York City in Greenwich Village. And the man who owns it said to me, I'm like a bartender to alcoholics. And this is a far more addictive substance than cocaine

or alcohol or any other drug I've ever seen. People are throwing away their families, they're throwing away their lives. These are highly educated, highly capable people, and very, very quickly life kind of telescopes into having one purpose, which is that next game of chess. And it's quite something to see. Well, you write about some famous instances in history where rulers of countries were so engrossed in their games of chess that they had battles, wars on their doorstep, and they kind of ignored them, ending up in dire situations. You want to tell us about some of those? I opened the book actually with a couple of famous instances where going back just over a thousand years or several hundred years, there was a battle of brothers in what is now Baghdad in that area. And these two caliphs were fighting. And the losing brother, as everything outside of his castle was falling apart, had a much cleaner battle going on

in the board. So as the messenger delivered the news that things are not going well. And if they continued to not go well, you're going to lose your head, which he soon did. He just completely disregarded this messenger and just kept trying to finish this chess game, which he was in the lead. And then several hundred years and several hundred miles away in England, you had the first king who was being delivered the news that Oliver Cromwell had been successful. And he was not long for this world, and it was the same kind of thing, just disregarding the news and continuing on with the chess board. And he loved the game so much that the two objects he brought with him to the scaffolding to be the first English monarch put to death was a chess board in a Bible. And that chess board sold a few years ago as the most expensive board ever sold in history, I think, for over a million dollars. Wow. So why is chess so addictive? I think it's just

such a perfect game. I think it's such an interesting counterpoint to life. If you look at a game like poker, poker is a game of incomplete information. So it has this chaos at its heart, which I think mirrors life in a way that attracts people. Well, and then there's an element of luck, obviously, in poker. Absolutely. Whereas there's no luck in chess, right? I don't know if I would say luck, there can be human fallibility that you take advantage of, but you're right. It's a game of complete information. Unfortunately, it's so vast that after only a handful of moves, you're going into the potential for billions of possibilities. So it's this ocean without a horizon. So what makes Magnus Carlson such a great chess player? What qualities of mind does he have? What can he do that even other top players can't do? I think it was said of Bobby Fisher that he was Achilles without the heel problem. And I think Magnus is very similar. He's just so incredibly methodical. His preparation is

just, I don't think the world has ever had anybody with his degree of preparation. In the most recent world chess championships where he struggled against the American Fabiano Caruana. Once you sped up the time, he was overwhelmingly dominant against Fabiano. Well, tie after tie happened in sort of the regulation games. So it's interesting that when you speed up the time and it becomes more human and less about preparation, he's even more powerful. It's just really hard to find a weakness in Magnus. Interesting. What's Magnus Carlson like as a person? Well, his reputation being a little smug, doesn't he? Yeah, he does. And I interviewed a photographer who had been around him before he was a world champion who said, you know, Magnus is not the most pleasant person to be around. He's a very insular person. There are some YouTube videos that are quite something to watch of him losing games. And it's very interesting to see the body language of him cracking

in the context of, oh, I'm trapped. There's nowhere to go. And he starts his hands and fingers start gesticulating in odd ways to himself like everything's becoming a blur. But I think what has been required of him to become what he is in such a narrow focus. And that's a really big thing about chess. One of the things that makes it so elusive is, is us trying to understand what else they're good at because they're exceptional at chess. And it's never been answered in 1500 years. What else could Magnus Carlson be doing based on that he's arguably the greatest chess player who ever lived? Nobody knows. And I don't think he knows. And maybe that's something that really might frighten him. As I think it did with Bobby Fisher, after winning his title is, what if I lose? Who am I? In my experience interviewing people, I have learned that winning requires no self -awareness whatsoever, which is a big

reason why people become obsessed with winning. But you say that again, winning requires no self -awareness. Another self -awareness will get in the way of winning. Well, I think internality questioning what you're fighting for, if everything isn't just about winning, it becomes a lot more challenging to become sort of so monomaniacly single -minded. And what I've discovered is people who lose are forced to be confronted with who they are. It almost seems like a zero -sum game culturally. You're a winner or you're a loser, and we have killers and losers and winners and losers. And in chess, I don't think I've ever been amongst a group where status was more paramount. Bryn Jonathan Butler is a sports writer and author of The Grandmaster. That's it for this hour.

To the best of our knowledge comes to you from Madison, Wisconsin, and the studios of Wisconsin Public Radio. Angelo Bautista produced this hour and gained a lot more majong friends in the process. He had help from Charles Monroe Kane, Mark Rickers, and Shannon Henry Clyburn. Joe Hartke is our sound designer. Steve Paulson is our executive producer, and let me pause to note that Steve is also such a competitive backgammon player that nobody will play with him anymore. And I'm Anne Strange -Champs. Happy gaming! PRX