The internet’s down at my house — happens a lot, thanks Mediacom! — so I’m blogging to Wordpad. Doesn’t feel the same.
And I’m only blogging because the internet’s down; if it weren’t I’d be playing chess. This will make perfect sense to you if you’re familiar with the various forms of internet chess; if you’re not it probably sounds like a non-sequitor, doesn’t it? But then if you’re reading this particular blog I guess you know all about internet chess. It’s difficult to stop writing for the sixth grade when you’ve spent a decade or two as a journalist.
Yeah, I guess I do still consider myself a journalist — that’s another thing it’s probably hard to stop doing once you start. I still do the random freelance job here and there, still read the “papers” every day (only now the print’s smaller, the graphics are better and they’re easier to fold). But back to chess.
I’d LOVE to play chess in my RL, but real people won’t play with me. Pathetic, huh? But the fact is I know only a handful of people who actually play the game, and among those only the few who can beat me with any frequency will still play with me. And since my friend Eddie died and my friend Ernie’s degenerative eye disease degenerated, that leaves the fat man.
The Fatty will play occassionally when he’s a)drunk enough but b)not too drunk and c)nobody will talk to him on the phone. I’d say he’s won maybe 30 percent of our games. What do you think, fatso? His buddies laugh at me but I believe my estimations are generally pretty close to the mark. And to be fair I will admit that he beats me at pool approximately 75 percent of the time.
He’s a good natural chess player and could be much better than me if he would only take a little instruction. I know a certain amount of chess theory and strategy and even a little history, and he knows how the pieces move and what the object of the game is. And he can beat me with some consistency … I think if we played more he’d average around 40 percent after a while, maybe 45, even in his current state of ignorance. And let me remind you that ignorance is a state that can be cured. Except when the patient is a mule.
So I have only rare opportunities for RL chess. And internet chess is a knight of a different color.
For one thing, if you play on the ‘net you’re going to wind up playing multiple games. I’m playing like 28 right now. And there may be as much as ten days between moves in some games, or as little as 24 hours. So when you come to the board, you have to stop and recall just who this is you’re playing, what the style has been, the dynamic of this particular game. You have to get your head back into it each time, and you may have ten boards waiting when you log on so you might have to do it ten different ways. That’s a lot of getting my head into anything.
Which is not to say I don’t love ‘net chess too. I do. It gives me the opportunity to play, which to me is a wonderful thing, like having a wise old besweatered neighbor who loves to play chess with me at his kitchen table … and also sometimes a little like having a creepy neighbor who’s doing nasty things to himself while spying on me from an upstairs window. There’s always a price.
Here’s where everybody always gets to play and nobody ever gets picked last:
The Wrat Stuff 