All the Wrong Moves

by Sasha Chapin

  But I am a sufferer of what’s called aphantasia: the total lack of mental imagery. There are only words in my head; there are no pictures whatsoever. When I close my eyes and try to visualize a beach, I am trying to divide murky darkness into water and sand. My memories are film treatments. My former loves are concepts. So, while others picture bright lines and dancing dots when they’re working on chess, I’m playing in the dark. Occasionally, I do attempt closed-eye calculation, but it’s futile—nothing happens. I only do it out of a sense of longing, like how children attempt to fly by running around in circles and flapping their arms, hoping that gravity will depart at some moment, allowing their ascent.

  Soon, my initially sluggish progress became completely stalled. And since chess was, at that moment, the only way I was measuring myself, my poor play made me sad, and then sadder. The spindly fingers of real despair began poking me in the head. Even toothpaste tasted a little bitter. Deep down, I started wondering whether I was worthless.

  This was a sensation I knew well. Not just because of my childhood, but also because I’ve got another significant neural issue on top of aphantasia—bipolar disorder, which had rubbed my face in moods like this before, throughout my early twenties. Having had more than a few episodes, I’d become quite familiar with the stink of futility that lives right next door to suicidal thoughts. And, in turn, I knew that this darkness was often preceded by a period of ecstatic intellectual absorption. Over and over again, I’d become totally fascinated by something and dive into it until the fascination withered abruptly, at which point I’d start missing meals and thinking in a sort of low-key way about how I could maybe kill myself.

  So, it occurred to me, in Bangkok, as I started feeling like a sack of fatback left under a heat lamp, that I might be in the middle of this cycle again. Perhaps my chess infatuation was just another vanishing fancy—another instance of my manic mind urging me to adopt an unlikely persona that would be discarded as soon as my self-loathing dictated that it should be.

  But this wasn’t supposed to happen, because a few years before I’d been placed on mood stabilizers, which had proven very effective. I hadn’t had these feelings in a long time. So either chess had a unique power over my neurochemistry, or the powerful heat of Bangkok had been breaking down the active ingredients in my medication. To this day, I’m not sure which is more likely. I do wonder, now and again, how my life could’ve been different if I’d kept my pills in the fridge.

  Regardless: I was becoming frightened of my increasingly hostile interior landscape, so I decided that I needed counsel. Therapy occurred to me, but I didn’t know whether any clinician could fully grasp the importance of the French Defense. Instead, I decided I needed the presence of other chess players, who would steer me in the right direction. I took a shower, got on the Skytrain, and went to meet the Bangkok Chess Club.

  The club met on the upper floor of a pub on the far end of Soi Cowboy, one of Bangkok’s high-efficiency sex markets. Pink lights illuminated pink banners over bars where pink drinks were served by women wearing pink bikinis. Reality was painted one color. Up and down the neon-coated avenue, the working women preened with numbers pinned to their chests. It was a slow night, so the salesmanship was particularly energetic. One woman in a barely existing spandex onesie took my hand and asked me where I was going. When I didn’t offer a distinct answer, she took hold of my crotch. I gently removed her hand from my person, saying something like, “Excuse me, ma’am, I have to go to chess club.”

  You might have a stereotyped conception of what a chess club looks like. You might imagine that club players tend towards the bespectacled, the dramatically ectomorphic, and the pimpled. You might envision yawning holes in shirts worn by men with improperly thriving facial hair.

  You would be correct. There are, in fact, some pretty hot chess masters—if you’re inclined towards verifying this statement, do a google of Robin van Kampen and/or Sopiko Guramishvili—but chess doesn’t, I think, tend to attract the attractive. After all, chess is a sport that rewards seclusion. To be any good at all, you have to spend a lot of time studying. And to really be great, you have to wrap your mind around the Database—the fearsome database of all chess possibility.

  See, one fact about the game that seems like a basic formality but is actually tremendously consequential is that every move of every serious game is recorded. Every time you put down a piece, you write down what you did on a scorecard. Your opponent does too, for the sake of consensus, and then somebody—a tournament organizer, or whoever—types in the moves and puts the game online. In this way, the great mosaic—the Database—is formed. It’s big. To give you an idea, ChessBase, the main chess database company, includes eight million games in its Mega Database. And that eight million is a teensy slice of all the games ever recorded. It’s just the essential stuff, the games that a grandmaster might want to look at. After all, you can’t leave home without knowing what ten thousand people have done with the Botvinnik Variation of the Semi-Slav Defense.

  Also, like religious scripture, the important games are annotated by the game’s luminaries, and then the annotations are annotated. This mass of commentary is included in the Database, too, and thus chess lovers converse with each other across the decades, discovering the truth of chess through the investigation of its minute details. Players who don’t spend time absorbing this conversation are less armed than those who do, meaning that they can’t attain the heights of the game.

  If you’re pretty, there are more easily obtainable joys. So there’s a sort of brain drain—some would say a reverse brain drain—of the gorgeous away from the ranks of players. Accordingly, as I climbed to the second floor of the pub, I found a group of homely people clustered around a dozen boards—geeky Thais of all ages, a clutch of Bangladeshi adolescents, and paunchy English retirees whose hands were always around a beer.

  I found the unloveliness lovely. While, as I’ve mentioned previously, I’d figured out how to modify my behavior so I could hang out with pretty artist types, I’d also long felt unsure about the worth of this masquerade—I often found it more tiring than fulfilling. You’ve got to be conversant in the latest of both conceptual art and R & B. Your clothing has to be nice but not too nice. You’ve got to air the required progressive platitudes whenever a remotely political subject comes up. And so on, and so on.

  At chess club, there’s none of that. Social affiliation has only one cost: the game of chess. Friendship in chess is simple. It isn’t about smartly signaling that you’ve got the right opinions about recent topics. It’s about examining small areas of the game’s infinite tapestry—finding each other in a landscape that transcends the complexities of cultural taste, as well as every geographical boundary. This common bond engenders a positive spirit. With the exception of a few petty jerks, chess players tend to be cooperative creatures.

  True to this tendency, I was given a warm welcome by a player named Mike after he saw me wander in with a confused look on my face. He was one of those wiry little men who seemed like he’d be handy in a hypothetical knife fight. He also wore a knife holster on his calf. He suggested we play a casual game. “I’m not very good,” I told him. “I’m just okay,” he said, “don’t worry.” As it quickly turned out, his “just okay” was more than okay enough for me. He smiled as he captured my pieces with the joy of a child advancing on a butterscotch. His concentration was absolute—his tiny eyes spun in their sockets as his pupils conversed with every square on the board. We played what’s referred to as “blitz”: games where each player must make all their moves in no more than five minutes total. After a bit of blitz, it was determined that I wasn’t adequate competition.

  Looking for a more suitable matchup, he paired me with Jim, a player who was mildly intoxicated after one drink, which impelled him to brag loudly about being very drunk. He was, in other words, eighteen—a spindly guy with a grating, somewhat rodential voice. “You will be a good challenge,” he said, then beat me in two blitz gam
es.

  “You suck at fast chess,” he said, “let’s play slow.” He dialed back the timer, giving us each fifteen minutes. This added thinking time gave me a huge advantage. I started seeing flaws in the sloppy excitability that was the essential feature of his style. In response, he became steelier, and spoke without apparent self-consciousness or innuendo about wanting to “grind” in the “holes” in my position. “I want that hole,” he said, pointing to a gap in my pawns where his knight might nestle.

  “You should enter the tournament,” he said, during our last game. “When you’re not playing like a dickhead, you’re not bad. You could learn something by being crushed by a grandmaster.” He was referring to the fact that the upcoming tournament, the Bangkok Open, was, as the name indicated, an open tournament, where any lonely essayist could play alongside real competition—experienced veterans or very young chess assassins practically suckled on the game’s classic offensive maneuvers. Previously, playing in the tournament had seemed like a preposterous idea. I’d seen it advertised on the club’s Facebook group, but I hadn’t seriously considered entering. But Jim’s retainer-contained smile was strangely convincing. Following his backhanded compliment, I checkmated him with a flashy piece sacrifice—a sequence in which I allowed the capture of one of my rooks but undid his position by waltzing through the resulting chaos. “I guess you’re right,” I said, as I cornered his king. “I guess I’m not as bad as I thought.”

  “Strong finish, very strong,” said Mike, who was quietly watching over my shoulder. Seeing that I was, in fact, capable of not playing like a dickhead, he rejoined our company. “We both play the French Defense,” he said. “What lines do you like?” Until the bar closed, we engaged in fervent debates about our favorite positions.

  “You have some potential,” he said, “some of your moves are very good. You just don’t have confidence in yourself. You play like a weak man. You are not a weak man. You are not fast, but you have the power of intelligence.” He told me to call him Teacher Mike, then gave me his phone number, in case I wanted to meet up for a chess hang. He gave me an unexpectedly earnest hug, his nose landing right between my pecs. I filled out the tournament forms as soon as I got home.

  * * *

  That first night at chess club brought me back from the edge of melancholy. The presence of a purpose—a potential victory at the Bangkok Open—changed everything. Even though I was still suffering many painful losses, the pain presented itself as the cost of striving, rather than as simple punishment. I was fighting a hard battle, instead of just incurring damage, as I had been before. I studied hard every day and went to the club weekly, sponging up all the wisdom I could from Teacher Mike. But in spite of my improved mood and my renewed dedication, my self-administered education was still somewhat ineffectual. My relationship with chess was still in a stage characterized by lust and terror. The game’s breadth both wowed and dismayed me. I felt tiny in its grasp. And, lost as I was, I couldn’t figure out what kind of player I wanted to be.

  There are different kinds of players, and broadly, you can sort them by how crazy they are. Some players, like Vladimir Fedoseev, are all about bloodthirsty verve, preferring complicated struggles that end with a dramatic demise, whether theirs or their opponents’. They’re here for a good time, not for a long time. Others, like Dutch wunderkind Anish Giri, are brooding rationalists, engaged in an unhurried hunt for a series of small advantages that might, together, ensure domination.

  But beyond that, there’s a world of individual quirks, like those belonging to my favorite player, the brilliant and beloved Vassily Ivanchuk, otherwise known as “Chucky,” a fearful opponent who tends to wear either beautifully tailored formalwear or bright pink Adidas tracksuits. His lovability stems from an unlikely combination of inhuman genius and an all-too-human inconsistency. Depending on the day of the week, he plays either like Prometheus, capable of making World Champions cry, or like a bumbling nincompoop, capable of losing seven games in a row to inferior opposition. At his best, his moves seem incomprehensible—awkward maneuvers and seemingly dubious tactical thrusts—but they reveal themselves to be part of an unconventional plan that ends in your seemingly unavoidable demise.

  That’s how I wanted to play, I’d decide, for a day or two. I wanted to be complicated and idiosyncratic. But soon I’d completely reverse that decision, assuring myself that I should adopt a resolute, defensive style, a shift that would then last a couple of days until I changed my ways once again. Now, looking back, this inconstancy seems impossibly silly. I was like a child who couldn’t draw a house with crayons deciding whether to be more like Jackson Pollock or Francis Bacon. But that’s where I was at—wheeling around wildly, gaining little.

  It’s worth noting briefly that I was still writing some essays for money, but they didn’t make much of an impact on me, or probably on anyone who read them once they were released. The work felt as perfunctory as grooming. The only real non-chess thing that I paid attention to was sesame soy milk, which was the foundation of my diet during this time. Every day, I really miss sesame soy milk—the fact that it’s generally unavailable in North America is probably why we have so much violent crime. Homicidal people all over the Americas, when dealing with runaway emotions, drink Coca-Cola, which inflames their already chaotic emotions with its corrosive acidity and carbonation. But there’s another possible world, where the maniacs who commit gruesome atrocities are swaddled in the felicitously innocuous flavor of thick, khaki-colored sesame soy milk. Available in any 7-Eleven in Bangkok.

  Strangely, I now remember those pre-tournament days fondly, and not just because of the specialty beverages of Southeast Asia. When you’re devoting your life to chess, even if the devotion is as troubled as mine was, there’s a satisfying purity to it all. You’re surrendering yourself to a search for aesthetic pleasure as well as mental fitness. Chess, to the seasoned player, is pretty like poetry is pretty—it bears the wonder of indelible combinations arising from a simple language. Just like how phrases like “fuck you” or “pass the salt” use the same language as phrases like “Time held me green and dying, though I sang in my chains like the sea,” the rules of chess are simple, but the combinations they yield are ecstatically various. And, just like a line of Dylan Thomas inflicts elation on a poetry lover, the surprises that are revealed across the board unleash little quanta of delight in the chess player’s heart.

  This monomania created a significant temporal distortion. The week before the tournament seemed to go by in seconds. And when the fateful morning arrived, I awoke tired, barely roused from a half-sleep, feeling as human as a gum wrapper. The sky was empty of clouds, the sun blared as ever, and the anxiety was incredible. I would have told you, that morning, that this was my first real test on earth. Every other standard by which I’d been measured was bankrupt—including, and especially, the opinions of my loved ones. People are easily fooled, after all. They can’t tell how corrupt you really are—they don’t know about your disgusting thoughts or your impure intentions. But chess can’t be charmed. You can’t fake chess.

  My emotional state swung between various extremities, never quite cohering. Leaving my apartment, I was shot through with an incandescent cockiness—I was sure, at the end of the commute, that I would utterly bulldoze my unfortunate opponent. My hubris was such that I dreamt of what I’d do with the prize money. It was about three thousand Canadian dollars—enough, I figured, for a half-dozen Michelin-starred meals in Paris with a ravishing date. But by the time I got off the Skytrain, the excitement had turned toxic—my stomach was in the process of violently rejecting my coffee. There was a taste of nascent vomit in my mouth. My inner life was entirely consumed by a high, pure sense of terror. I couldn’t recall any of the opening theory I had painstakingly studied. When I went looking in my memory, I could only recall that bishops move diagonally.

  The tournament was held in a giant ballroom at a fancy-ish hotel. I got there three hours early. An insipid bossa nova trio wa
s playing “Hey Jude,” slightly fudging the lyrics—the singer sang “Hey dude” instead of “Hey Jude,” which was all right with me. I bought a sandwich, and then, suddenly skeptical about the whole concept of ingestion, threw it out. The whole morning went by in this fashion—me doing nothing, quietly losing my shit.

  As the players filed in, Teacher Mike greeted me in the lobby.

  “I’ll be watching you,” he said.

  “Do you have any advice?” I asked.

  “Be calm,” he said. “Ignore psychology, ignore yourself, ignore the face of your opponent—just play a good move.”

  His advice was sound, but following it was far beyond my capability. I was slipping into the kind of full panic in which my physical coordinates were somewhat mysterious to my conscious mind, and time became unaccountable. Somehow, as if placed there by a fastidious tornado, I was sitting at one table among many, alongside a placard bearing my name, with a slot accommodating a small tabletop Canadian flag, upon which I wiped my forehead.

  My opponent was a friendly Scot named Joseph Diaphragm.