An interview with Daniel Gormally (2/2)

Daniel Gormally

Alexey Root: You once wrote: “I play chess, to compete against the best and achieve some admittedly moderate level of fame. To be in the spotlight, rather than dwell in the shadows.” By tying for second in the 2015 British Championship, you came close to the chess-playing spotlight. But Insanity, passion and addiction: A year inside the chess world shines a harsh light instead of a spotlight. The writer Daniel Gormally seems to be very critical of Daniel Gormally, the chess player and person. In many of your annotations you emphasize your mistakes. Why do you write about yourself in this way?

Daniel Gormally: I think a lot of my writing is self-deprecating, and I also try to look at things from the humorous side, so inevitably you are going to get such comments.

But it’s true that I suffer from low self-esteem. Recently I tried to lose some weight as we exist in a world that puts looks on a pedestal. Unfortunately, in the chess world (as you can imagine) it’s very hard to meet girls, and the ones I do meet aren’t interested in me anyway. I have nothing to offer them.

“Loneliness” is mentioned about 100 times in your 248-page book

Yes, it’s true, I’m lonely. In effect, the book is rather written from the viewpoint of the tragic anti-hero from Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther but brought to a modern setting. I think I’m not the only chess player who feels this way. I know of one English grandmaster who quit playing chess because he wanted to get a job, so he could meet people and get a girlfriend. He subsequently got married.

This was why in the book I talk about maybe doing other things, because it’s true that if you stick to chess it’s a very lonely existence. There’s no support team, you are essentially on your own. On the other hand the people I have met in chess are probably the most interesting people you could meet, maybe because they are as crazy and obsessive as I am (smiles)

Why did you call yourself “lazy” in "Insanity" with regard to chess?

Probably because I am! I wish I had the work ethic of a Kramnik or a Matthew Sadler, for example. I probably have as much passion for the game as they do. I just have less of an ability to drive myself.

That’s why I think the very top players are set apart from us because of their ability to work so hard, to put in 12 hours a day working on chess, for example. I don’t think that’s normal. So, actually in being lazy, I’m probably just being like everyone else.

But I got to the point where I was doing so little work on chess and never studied at all, that it was starting to impact my results. So recently I’ve forced myself to do some work, and I talk about this in the book.

Daniel Gormally, Insanity, Passion and Addiction, Chess Evolution 2016, 248 pages, 24.99 Euros

But to be one of the very best you need to be consumed by that activity, to make it your whole life. I guess I just don’t have that obsession, that drive to be the best, anymore. If I ever did.

In "Insanity" you wrote that you have considered giving up drinking during tournaments and that you don’t drink when you are at home. What do you think about alcohol and chess?

Recently, I started to get a very negative view of drinking at chess. Because I noticed I could directly attribute a lot of my losses to drinking during a tournament.

I don’t drink directly before a game, but if you are going out drinking every night which tends to happen on the British chess scene, then that’s going to make you sluggish over the course of a long tournament. So my best advice is to stay away from alcohol altogether.

What is one day in your chess life that you would like to forget?

Unfortunately, I’m not the sort of person who can just have one or two pints of beer and stop, I have rather an addictive personality. Drinking a lot tends to bring out my bad side, which at the Turin Olympiad got me into trouble and into a fight with Levon Aronian.

I don’t think getting into fights in itself makes you an irredeemable person. What would make you an irredeemable person is if you didn’t recognize that you need to avoid fighting in future and the behaviour that leads to it. That you don’t realize you made a mistake.

Turin was the worst moment of not only my chess career but also my life. I was ashamed of it, why wouldn’t you be? But now I want to move on from it and not be constantly reminded of it at every turn. While at the same time addressing the behaviour that lead to it in the first place, which directly means drinking less alcohol.

What is one day in your chess life that you would like to remember?

Probably the day that my dad got out a chess set and taught myself and my sister chess. It was one of those magical moments where you just pick something up straight away.

I guess that’s when I realized I had a talent for the game, because I understood the game immediately. And of course this set me on a path that few others go on, that you meet these crazy people and have these amazing experiences.

I think from the playing point of view, certainly beating Alexey Dreev at Gibraltar to get the grandmaster title was a special moment.

Not only beating such a great player but also to get the grandmaster title at the same time was something very special. I recall after the game I wandered down to the quayside next to the hotel and just gazed out into the Mediterranean Sea. Just reflecting, chewing over what I had achieved. Money cannot buy such a feeling.

Your book has an unusual title, Insanity, passion and addiction: A year inside the chess world. What does the title refer to?

I think it refers to how I approach life, that it’s with passion and obsession. You should only really do something if you enjoy it and if you approach it with passion. Otherwise you will inevitably get very bored, and move on to something else.

I think a lot of people regard chess players as rather staid, almost robotic characters, but in the book I hopefully get over that this is not the case. That chess is full of rather unusual characters, but they are rarely boring.

Even if I occasionally view chess in a negative light I guess that’s because it’s all I’ve done for the last twenty odd years. Maybe I need a break. But I haven’t lost sight of the fact that I realize that I was lucky to have this life, to meet these interesting characters, to go to these amazing places, which wouldn’t perhaps have been the case if I had been stuck in an office my whole adult life.

But essentially the essence of the book is trying to present the life of a chess pro who is struggling. We all know about the stories of Magnus and so on, but what about 99 percent of chess pros who are making a hand-to-mouth existence, who are surviving from week to week, maybe an article here, a chess lesson there. That’s what I wanted to convey to the reader, that it’s not all sweetness and light, that there’s this hidden struggle that we don’t always see portrayed by the chess media, who like to make out the life of a chess player to be one glorious cycle. And I hope I have achieved it in the book!

For ChessBase Daniel Gormally recorded a critically acclaimed
and popular DVD on the English Attack

Sample Video:

Daniel Gormally: English Attack • Video running time: 7 hours (English) • With interactive training including video feedback • Training database with 50 essential games and analyses • Including CB 12 Reader €29.90 €25.13 without VAT (for Customers outside the EU) $28.68 (without VAT) This DVD can be purchased as a hard copy or it can be downloaded directly from the Internet, that way sparing you the few days needed for it to arrive by post. Order this Fritztrainer in the ChessBase Shop