by Sasha Chapin
We lay down on the warm sand, and as the psilocybin kicked in, the day’s green and blue grew bolder, becoming a ridiculous shade of lime and an implausible, unearthly ultramarine. Across the water, the buildings danced and broke apart, reassembling as they saw fit, often congealing in the shapes of punctuation marks drawn from alien alphabets. Katherine, after a long fit of giggling, was invited to a conference with a vein of horrid regrets that had been polished by her subconscious for this particular occasion. She started crying, so I brought her close to me. Her hand found mine in the dirt. Behind us, below a setting sun that was also the mouth of a mountain in the sky, a bunch of teens drank beer and laughed at us. They were comically long of limb, and their sinister faces were staticky and indistinct. Katherine suggested we hide from their judgment in her attic bedroom.
The walk took years, because the street before us kept growing longer as we pursued its end, and the houses on either side each had long and important messages to give us, which left deep grooves on the wax of our personalities. Resultantly, we were much older and much changed when we came up to her bedroom, and we sat in the purple dusk, amazed. We made it to her bed, where we lay side by side sobering up, listening to Drake, watching scattering motes of dust becoming tiny plumes of flame under the influence of the last of the light.
“I keep wondering whether we’re gonna make out,” I said. So we did.
With that, the rest of my life was all worked out. Katherine and I would be in love, because love is nice. We would remain together through the dimming of our initial lust. We would keep each other chuckling through our disappointments, and appreciate each other’s little achievements. We would kiss some morning in Buenos Aires, and, on some other evening, lend each other warmth in a sketchy hotel room in Mongolia. Nothing stood in the way of our happiness.
Except, that is, for chess. That was the only exception. It was a big exception. My life was dominated by two forces that summer, like two magnetic poles, whose sway instilled in me a wobbly course. Some days, I was completely taken over by love and utterly involved in the banishment of my solitude. On other days, I fled inside myself and communed with the French Defense. But most of the time it was somewhere in between—I’d lose focus during a long game and think of the elegant slope of Katherine’s stomach, or drift away, during a conversation with Katherine, to the mental composition of a middle-game strategy. This annoyed her, because it was annoying, and it annoyed me, too.
She tried to close this gap between us by picking up chess herself. But it didn’t work out, because she didn’t like how my personality changed when I sat down at the board. My usual persona during our relationship—goofy, supportive, affectionate—dropped away, replaced by a narrow seriousness. She hated it, so we only played a few times.
This was another great argument for quitting chess—that it was damaging to my new relationship, whether it took the form of a private emotional affair or a shared activity that Katherine didn’t enjoy. I wanted to get with the plan, be a good boyfriend, and make some money so that we could get a cute house and a useless, stupid dog together. That kind of lifestyle was incompatible with playing eight hours a day. But I wasn’t entirely persuaded by my best intentions.
I lived two lives: a public, romantic one with Katherine, and a private, shameful one with chess. Summer went by in a flash. Fall, which is clearly the reason for the rest of the year, said hello and then left abruptly. And the whole time, I was quitting chess about every other week. It was a big chunk of my year—dealing with the stresses of entertaining two different kinds of love. Everything else, as always, I did halfway.
As winter became a real threat, I started to realize that my rebellion was in vain—while I’d quit smoking once again, my chess addiction was brutally immovable. Chess was simply in me. Evidently, I couldn’t do anything about that at the present moment. I wasn’t done with it yet. Thus, the only question was what I was going to do about the overall state of affairs—what form of addicted life I would end up pursuing. Up until that point, with the exception of my one tournament game in Bangkok, my chess life mostly consisted of playing thousands of games at my computer, huddled and nonplussed. This was not satisfactory. It was lonely and unglamorous and possessed no drama beyond the momentary rages of one game or another. When I told my children about my twenties, I didn’t want to explain that I spent big chunks of it in my bedroom staring at digital chess pieces, surrounded by granola bar wrappers, occasionally noticing the snow drifting by the window. And more importantly, I didn’t want Katherine to see me abasing myself in such a fashion.
No. If I was going to be a victim of chess, like Duchamp, I was going to be a proud victim, like Duchamp. If I was going to waste my hours, I was at least going to waste them flamboyantly. Rather than skulking alone in my room, I decided, I would hold my head high. I would play in real tournaments, in countries near and far, for real money, against live, breathing opponents, hopefully with Katherine at my side, if she had nothing better to do and decided not to break up with me—if she didn’t turn into my Lydie Sarazin-Levassor. Maybe I’d lose most of my games. Maybe I’d lose every game. But that would be okay, if not preferable. If I was to be remembered as a simpering incompetent, dismembered with comically simple tactics, so be it. Better that than be a vanishing piece of data on a server in an air-conditioned data center.
Furthermore, though I had been thinking of chess as a diversion from being a human being, I realized that this wasn’t altogether correct. After all, what do you think makes us human, exactly? What differentiates us from all the other carbon-based organisms merrily reproducing all over each other as much as possible? What makes us better and more interesting than a cloud of glowing fish?
One answer is: language. We’re better because we talk so pretty. And because I make a living off language, it’s tempting to agree. But, of course, the conversations of animals are pretty cool. Whales melodiously scream each other’s names across the ocean currents. Mockingbirds, when they get tired of singing their own attractive songs, master the sayings of nearby toads. Fireflies’ bodies are the canvases on which their messages flash. Although animal language might not possess the combinatorial depth of human language, it’s still pretty faceted. So this isn’t so clear.
Another answer is: tools—all of our intricate machines. Cordless drills are great. Any day I make a hole in something with a cordless drill is a good day. But tool use is found throughout the animal kingdom—the tools are less sophisticated, but they are tools. Crows sometimes make food-retrieving hooks out of discarded wire. Bottle-nose dolphins stir up the sea floor in search of lunch with marine sponges held in their beaks. Chimpanzees, alarmingly, occasionally fashion spears for spearing galagos out of their galago-holes. Again, humans aren’t alone in this category.
Our fashions are pretty cool—our cute little outfits—but decorator crabs craft intricate camouflage out of stray materials with an arresting sense of natural style. Skyscrapers have always stirred a certain wonder in me, but I’m also intrigued by the carefully woven huts made by bowerbirds, or the lumpy castles built by termites.
And so on. Most human activities aren’t uniquely human. They’re different in degree of realization, because we’ve got opposable thumbs and a particularly sparkly topsoil of brain, but not different in fundamental kind.
In light of all this, in my opinion, if there’s one particular thing that distinguishes us, it has to be abstraction. The way we take our fleshy, silt-covered world and cover it with metaphors, maps, formulas, and poems—how we incessantly make wickedly complicated models of everything we live in. According to us, the sea is wine-dark, the earth is composed of metropolitan areas, and some numbers are irrational.
If you accept this, I submit that chess is about the most human thing you can do. Lots of animals fight. But we say, okay, just as an experiment, instead of fighting with our actual bodies, maybe we could spar with teams of funny little wooden dolls, each of which moves in a different fashion, in a simu
lation of the stratification of human society. Then perhaps we’ll come up with a whole language describing our imaginary battles, such that we might say, “Sasha played a subtle knight maneuver in the Czech Benoni.” Eventually, someday, it’s even possible that we’ll develop computer programs that play this game better than we do.
Chess takes the most banal act of all—violence—and makes it a symbolic ballet with a culture entirely of its own. If there’s anything that makes us better than butterflies, it’s this kind of thing. We make cathedrals of pure thought from the bloody, nitty-gritty matters of simian life.
So then, rather than think of chess as a diversion from more important matters—politics, money, love—I could think of it, instead, as time spent worshipping the most remarkable properties of our species.
If you’re not entirely convinced by this, I’m not either. Maybe semi-convinced. But it was something I could tell myself during the less glamorous moments of my journey.
Also, I girded myself with the knowledge that my first tournament game, in Bangkok, was definitely the worst game that I’d ever play. Although sickening defeats might yet follow, none would be as bad as my first devastating loss, which was more of a mental health episode than a competitive activity.
You should never do this. Never tell yourself you’ve been through the worst of anything.
* * *
I decided to set myself an ambitious goal that I would almost certainly fail to achieve, the key word being almost. I’d strive for the very edge of possibility. I couldn’t become grandmaster, or a master at all. Becoming a surgeon was more likely. Becoming a frog was probably more likely. But I thought I could maybe, maybe, achieve a level of skill sufficient enough that I wouldn’t immediately crumple, when playing the sport I love most, against any significant opposition. Enough that my brother, if we ever sat down for a serious game again, would have to watch his ass. Enough so that maybe I wouldn’t completely hate myself.
Yes, I thought: in roughly a year, I would play in the Los Angeles Open, and I would beat a player whose rating was at least 2000. That would represent a violent assault against the limits of my truly meagre talent.
Why a 2000-rated player? Well, it’s just such a satisfying number: those three zeroes standing neatly in a line. Also, the prospect brought me a sort of vicious glee, because I imagined that whoever had taken their rating past that second thousand would be quite proud of themselves. Proud enough that they’d feel extra bad when their position came crashing down before me.
For a first step, making it through a tournament game without crying or shitting my pants seemed like a good idea. This, I decided, was a simple matter of dulling my nervous system with experience. My knuckles needed quite a bit of bloodying before I frolicked with my fate in wonderful, dehydrated California. For the first few months, I resolved to play in any tournament I could get to, whether it was in Cairo, London, or under a nearby banana crate.
The world is lousy with chess tournaments. Almost everywhere on earth, you can get checkmated and lose rating points. Mostly this is because setting up a tournament is really easy. Blinking requires only slightly more qualification. All you need is a chess federation—a bureaucracy that keeps track of who’s great or terrible at chess—and an “arbiter,” a rule-enforcing person certified by that organization who watches over the proceedings. Most of the rules are along the lines of “Don’t talk” and “Don’t touch your opponent” and “Don’t make illegal moves.”
Although the aforementioned FIDE is the major international bureaucracy, there are smaller bodies as well—many, many countries have federations of their own: Andorra, Ecuador, Tanzania, and even Canada, if you can believe that. Exploring the subject of chess governance more thoroughly is a tedious affair, so I won’t do it. All you need to know is that FIDE-rated tournaments can take place in any country, but that rated tournaments aren’t necessarily FIDE-rated tournaments. Playing in an Andorra tournament might just get you Andorra points, for example—each federation has a rating system of its own.
Not all tournaments are created equal. Most are inglorious little affairs conducted in church basements on weekends. You do battle with a crowd of local yokels at some pit stop in Michigan for a first-place prize of maybe five hundred dollars. Competitions like this don’t attract elite players because it’s not worth their time. They’re busy playing closed invitational tournaments, like the prestigious Bilbao Masters, for a chance at 150,000 euros, or occasionally destroying all comers at open tournaments, like the Reykjavik Open, for a mere five grand or so. Economically, chess is sort of like acting: top people make money, second-rate people teach, and everyone else receives spotty compensation at best.
The two types of tournaments have completely different emotional valences. Low-level tournaments are resplendent with spiritual hunger. Nobody is so concerned with their place in the pecking order as the middling player—the middle-aged accountant who’s out to prove that he’s the best of his city’s almost-masters. Adding to the fervor is the fact that young players are sometimes in competition for a chess scholarship from an American school, meaning that a good showing against the regional competition might be one step towards a full ride at the University of Texas.
Meanwhile, top-tier tournaments are calm, buttoned-down affairs, sponsored by energy companies and banks, taking place in spacious, teal-carpeted venues. The players are eminently comfortable professionals who are treated as such: they’re flown in and put up in four-star hotels. Although they’re looking to play their best, they’re mostly not that worried, partially because, at the top level of the invitational circuit, even a fifth-place showing is financially rewarded. Assured, charcoal-blazered, and regal in their bearing, the stars of the game are followed across lobbies by the chess press gang, a strange microcommunity that watches their movements closely, whether in London, Qatar, or Baku. Closing ceremonies typically feature jazz combos and plastic cups of cheap prosecco. In terms of atmosphere, these events are halfway between Wimbledon and a spelling bee.
My first tournament in Canada was one of the local yokel–type affairs, taking place a short walk from my apartment, a few weeks after my decision to play real chess like a real person. The night of my first game, big, thick snowflakes were falling all around, coating everything. It was one of those winter nights when the density of weather obliterates all the specifics of your surroundings, when you might as well be walking through any other storm in any other year.
Katherine came along. While she didn’t really care about watching the games themselves, she liked that I was regarding chess as a legitimate love rather than a shameful and private disease. It was a change in attitude that made me a bit less of an asshole. Previously, the more I resisted chess, the more it seized my consciousness. It grabbed the end of every train of thought, pulling each partial sentiment downwards to the corner of my mind where the chessboard resided. But when I finally gave in, and earnestly decided to study, improve, and checkmate an intercontinental fleet of nitwits, I found myself more able to enjoy other parts of life, knowing that after a dinner out with Katherine at our favorite restaurant, I wouldn’t have to apologize for wanting to look up the score of the latest Ivanchuk game when we got back to my apartment.
Out of the snow, we arrived at a meeting of the Annex Chess Club in Toronto. It was a group of charming, mostly sedate people playing blitz games in a community center. After paying my registration fee, I sat in the corner, wondering who would soon destroy me. Would it be the mop-topped kid with the cool military jacket? Or the old woman with pearl earrings? Katherine brought me coffee, played with my hair, and told me I’d be fine.
There’s a menacing lull that precedes all open chess tournaments—a silence tinted by the excitement of incipient conflict felt by a roomful of dorks awaiting their fate. That fate is determined, during those long moments, by the arbiters, who run an algorithm that determines the pairings. Then, when the arbiters print the pairings and tape them to the far wall, the players fo
llow and form a clump, all briefly squinting together at the future they’ve been assigned before scattering to meet it. Also, the computers are always beat up old PCs. There are no Macs in the chess world. The anthropological significance of this is left to the reader.
GAME 2 SASHA CHAPIN VS. LASAGNA DAVIES
I sat down at board 45. (The boards at a tournament are ranked based on tournament standing, with the leaders playing at board 1.) My opponent was a little late. Since I couldn’t contain myself, I asked a friendly man at the next board whether I should be scared of him.
“He’s a really nervous guy,” he said, “so just play calmly and you’ll be fine”.
“Calm is one thing I absolutely cannot do,” I said.
“Just be calmer than he is.”
“Do you think I can do that?”
“It would be hard not to.”
“So just play solid until he falls apart.”
“Exactly.”
As soon as that last word was uttered, Lasagna showed up. He was a short man of maybe thirty whose face was fixed in an expression of gleeful fear.
“You are probably strong player,” he said.
“I’m actually unrated in Canada,” I said.
“So you are one of these Internet guys.”
“I, well, yeah, I play on the Internet.”
“Learning all your Internet things, now you come kill me.”
“That, uh, may be accurate.”
“I see this in your eyes. This will be very difficult.”
“For one of us, I’m not sure who.”
He buried his head in his hands.
“Oh no,” he said. “No.”
