for a couple years, starting when i was around 10, i would come home from school and take chess lessons. we could call my connection to the game, hmmm, thoroughly un-modern.
i just finished playing a match with a stranger on chess.com. this is something i should not be allowed to do, legally speaking. i’m irrepressibly competitive and when this energy is directed at someone i do not already love, admire, enjoy the company of, etc it is much harder to contain.
i didn’t win the game so i came here to mope.
in about the middle of our match, my opponent requested to chat with me… a rush i haven’t felt since MSN times! i accepted, only to see that they’d only invited themselves in to — as the sportsmen say — shit talk. this is a GAME of the MIND, there’s no space for that! i disabled the chat.
my old chess teacher, a man whose sole flamboyant characteristic was his pride over sharing a full name with the musician Paul Simon, was memorably dopey. the way he moved indicated that he was uncomfortable with how tall he was. i picture him leaning over so that he could fit inside the door of my house, though this must be an exaggeration my memory is responsible for. i’d be surprised if he owned more than one outfit: the big baggy black pants, black tennis shoes, and black t-shirt that had lost the intensity of its youth, leaning further toward deep gray as the days passed.
Paul emphasized the fact that chess is in direct opposition to the swift rush of time. it was a game built on consideration, or as new players may think of it, overthinking. since my understanding of it is so rooted in Paul’s sense of unassuming calmness, my opponent’s decision to IM a stranger to talk shit felt particularly vulgar.
at the end of the game, i felt slightly vindicated when the computer analysis told me that a handful of moves my opponent played were book moves, meaning that they were rather predictable, conventional. woof! chess is just as much about style as anything else — i’d rather lose than be riding high on book moves.