Chess

The thing I find most interesting about chess is that it has held my interest for so long, and it has held the interest of so many people all over the world for so long. It is, after all, a simple game in many respects, with relatively simple rules that are easy to learn. But somehow chess has just the right balance to be easy enough to play, but impossible to master completely, that has kept people working on it for centuries.


I grew up in the age of Bobby Fischer, but the real inspiration for my interest in chess was my brother. Mike and I learned the rules, when I was about ten, from my dad, although I don’t really remember playing against him; he stepped back when we quickly became better players than he was. From there, we began to teach ourselves from chess literature and to learn from each other and from playing our friends. Mike has always had, from a young age, the ability to throw himself into a task and pursue it with a competitive spirit that I have never possessed, so he began to study the game and collect chess literature, compiling a pretty good chess library while he was still in high school. I was just swept along for the ride, trying to keep up with him. By the time Bobby became world champion, we were already pretty good.

In fact, I would say that two of my three greatest chess triumphs involve my brother. First, when I was a freshman in high school, I won the school chess championship. I won a rare game against Mike on the way to that victory, although the final game was against an easier opponent, Mr. Schulman, a teacher and our academic sponsor. I don’t remember all of my games by any means, but forty years later I still remember the winning moves from both of those games. Second, I played a few rated games years later and achieved, and still have, a higher rating than Mike does. But let’s be clear: those are accomplishments precisely because he has always been clearly the better player.

The third triumph was beating 14-year-old prodigy and Chess Master Kenny Fong (when I was in my twenties.) The first time I played him, it was in a simultaneous exhibition, and I was the first of his 40 or so opponents to win against him. I played him many times after that, often in conditions that favored me, and he crushed me every time.

Over the years, I have set chess aside many times, but I have also gone back to it. I have twice joined chess clubs and have played hundreds of games against computers, but my favorite chess activity is to play through books of chess puzzles; I have literally worn out several chess books, discarding them when they fell apart because I went through them so many times. My latest quest is to beat every level of Chess Titans, which came with my computer, 50 times. On levels 2 through 4, I have a record right now of about 170 wins, 1 draw, and 1 loss (should have won those two too), so I can still beat a lousy opponent.

I have thought over the years about getting into playing shape and competing again. When I was in high school, my strength was knowing my openings and end games; when I played again in my twenties, I had forgotten the openings and relied on the middle game. If I put those things together, perhaps I could be better, who knows? But getting and staying sharp at chess requires a lot of time, more than I am willing to give it while I am working. It’s something to think about for retirement.