How chess took over my life

Checkmate! How chess took over my life
Joseph Lord |2:15 PM, Jun. 21, 2011

There are things I’m good at.

I can entertain toddlers, generate mean-spirited nicknames for strangers, type quickly with my thumbs and make a nice omelet.

Then there’s chess.

I am awful at chess. It’s unfair, really, because I’m also woefully unathletic. And if “Saved by the Bell” taught us anything, it’s that you must either be good at sports or chess.

It’s a problem because I’m in a rare moment in life where I can play a lot of chess. Not with humans, but my iPhone. The reason is the recent birth of my second daughter. When you’re holding a 10-pound kid whose continued sleep relies on your capacity to stay immobile, TV is the standard refuge. I have a tough time vegging out in front of a television; I can only watch when there’s something I want to watch. Otherwise, I pull out my second-gen iPhone and check the ol’ Twitter and Facebook, scan The New York Times and see if I feel like reading something in my Kindle app. And then what?

“Words with Friends” gives me a headache while playing at 1 a.m. on an hour of sleep. “Angry Birds” is glib clean fun that doesn’t satisfy for long.

Chess works. There’s no clock — or, at least, there doesn’t have to be. I can stare at the illuminated board on my touch screen for as long as possible before making a move. If the baby wakes up, I can save the game and come back to it later. If the game gets too easy, I increase the difficulty setting until the app’s not-so-impressive A.I. is back to squashing me in eight moves or less. It’s challenging and not the least bit labor intensive, and the game carries a cultured air to it that you don’t quite get from flinging birds at targets.

I started to play chess after the birth of my eldest daughter. I taught myself to play by reading the game’s Wikipedia entry and honed my skills against the trolls on the Yahoo Games website, holding Sophie in one arm and moving my pieces with the other. (This was pre-iPhone.) I didn’t learn much chess, but I did learn that online chess enthusiasts could talk smack with the biggest mouths of the boxing world.

I knew “Call of Duty” on Xbox Live would be like this, but this was online chess.

It was good to learn against humans, because humans screw up and even the worst player — i.e., me — can win after some veteran drops his queen on his fifth move because he’s playing six games simultaneously and not paying the least bit attention to a “noob” like me, but I quit after a while. Mostly because Sophie started running and talking and has yet to stop, leaving little time for games. Also, I got tired of being told to get my “weak b—- ass” off my opponent’s board after every loss. And some wins.

Now I have an iPhone and a few chess apps, and they never make fun of me for sucking. At least not to my face.

They’d have a right to. I’m really, truly awful. Still, Chess keeps popping on my phone and my life. Recently, a Louisville theater group launched a too-brief run of “Chess,” the obscure-but-beloved ’80s musical. And HBO aired “Bobby Fischer Against the World,” a fine documentary on the chess great’s rise to world champion and fall to exile, paranoia and idiocy. I even stumbled on and started reading “The Royal Game,” an English translation of Austrian Stefan Zweig’s engrossing novella regarding a political prisoner who kills time mastering chess.

The documentary and novella are loaded with a warning that spending too much time on opening strategy and endgame tactics warps the mind and ruins your life. I’m not exactly worried about becoming a chess obsessive. As much as I enjoy a quick game, improving my skills requires more thought and effort than I have to give while holding an infant.

Soon, baby Amelia will be running and talking and I’ll have to wait until she and Sophie are old enough to play before I start playing again.

I just hope they don’t smack talk too much when they beat me.

Joseph Lord is a native Louisvillian who writes about pop culture, music and other pressing issues for Velocity.

Source: http://www.courier-journal.com