by Sasha Chapin
For a chess player, Lasagna didn’t like chess very much. Every move seemingly caused him physical pain. His hands shook as he reached for each piece, and when he hurriedly deposited each one on its chosen square, he winced and clenched his fists. “Oh no,” he murmured again, after I’d made a completely routine move. He stared at the board, dumbfounded by a fairly sedate position. It was a Queen’s Gambit Declined, the same sort of solid, boring setup I’d had in my game with Diaphragm.
But in this game I wasn’t so self-destructive. The first fifteen moves were pretty normal. We engaged in quiet maneuvers, gently jostling for space on the board, sizing each other up. But it was a quietude that didn’t last long. Most games between lower-rated players end when someone misses a simple trick. While higher-rated players are like seismographs, capable of responding precisely to the most distant tremors, lower-rated players are like drunkards playing with dynamite, as liable to blow themselves up as to accomplish anything else.
In this case, Lasagna missed what chess players call a “pin,” a situation in which your piece can’t do anything because it’s shielding a vital piece standing behind it. After a series of moves I tricked him into, one of his most important pawns couldn’t move, because it had to remain in place and protect his queen. This meant it was unable to defend a pawn next to it, the capture of which would immediately destroy his position.
Fifteen minutes passed while I stared at the obvious winning move, because I didn’t quite believe that an obvious winning move could occur in a game I played. Eventually, I took the pawn, after checking and rechecking my calculations.
“What is this?” he said.
(Lasagna always talked during his games, an illegal habit that continued no matter how often he was chastised by the arbiters, who, in lily-livered Canadian fashion, never actually ejected him.)
“Just a simple tactic,” I said.
After squinting at the pieces for a moment, he realized what had occurred.
“Why do they play such moves against me?” he asked, to which I offered no reply.
It was all over after that. The game wasn’t technically lost—a computer, given his position, probably could’ve figured out a draw—but he was facing an uphill battle in a state of unabating misery. Every subsequent breath he took at the board was pulled through clenched teeth. He played like a hooked fish for the rest of the game, then resigned.
“You are strong player,” he said, afterwards.
“I just got lucky,” I said.
“Good player is always lucky.”
“Bad players are occasionally lucky also.”
After further objections, he began ranting non-specifically about rating points, before being interrupted by Katherine embracing me.
“Good job, baby,” she said.
“I can actually win games sometimes.”
“Yeah you can.”
“It feels so weird.”
Lasagna followed us out into the adjoining hall, still speaking loudly about all of the wonderful numbers I would receive. We politely said words and then left. Outside, the snowstorm was over. My face was freezing, but I couldn’t feel anything but a pure, childlike enthusiasm. I wouldn’t have believed you if you told me I wasn’t the mayor of all existence. Diamonds filled the air, I was sure, which I could pluck out at any time. Every ten feet I interrupted Katherine with a sloppy kiss.
And this already wild happiness was only multiplied when I won the next round, in a similar fashion, a week later. Not only had I won my first two Canadian tournament games, I’d actually won the whole tournament—or at least its beginner section, for players rated under 1800—because it was canceled after two rounds, for arcane scheduling reasons I didn’t care about.
Chess! Not that hard, as it turns out. Not for a guy like me.
6
ROUGH GUS
I woke suffused with excitement on the day of the next tournament on my Toronto schedule, the Hart House Open. As I prepared my morning coffee, I jangled around the kitchen delightedly, knowing I’d deliver a stunning performance that would scintillate the chess community, and maybe impress Katherine, slightly. I’d finally feel unambiguously good about myself—capable of love, capable of chess, a human being deserving of his allotted portion of white blood cells. The kids who bullied me when I was younger would hear about my tour de force, and they’d feel bad, as they should.
The tournament was named for the building it was held in, Hart House, an old faux-medieval building belonging to the University of Toronto, where zany activities happen. The morning of the tournament was clear, cool, and bright. I smiled at the world genteelly, with Katherine on my arm, as I entered the tournament hall, which was a gigantic dining room whose wood walls bore clusters of engraved Latin mottos. My Latin is rusty, so I was free to imagine that the mottos were all predictions of the wanton wrath I’d inflict upon the children before me.
There were a lot of children. Basically, my bracket of the Hart House Open was me, thirty Chinese kids, and a couple of other Caucasian-ish people of various ages. Essentially, I was attending a Chinese kid convention. This made me feel more than a little out of place. It slightly disturbed my pluckiness. I couldn’t help but recall my wasted youth, which had far too little chess in it, and far too many soggy sandwiches, occasionally seasoned by stray tears. Meanwhile, here were a hundred jubilant kids, many with charming bowl cuts, whose parents were always close at hand, helping them achieve chess greatness. They stared at me, parents and children, seemingly wondering why I’d been pulled from a sarcophagus and placed in their playground. It was a weird dynamic.
But, “Fuck it,” I thought. Somebody had to teach them that life wasn’t going to be all roses and hamburgers. They should be disabused of the notion that the world would immediately yield to their desires upon seeing their squishy young faces. I would deliver that news, borne on the thrusts of my bishops.
This is one of the embarrassing things about coming to chess in your twenties. When you’re in the lower ranks, your opponents are basically of two varieties: children with promise who haven’t yet developed their skills, and adults who are long past their peak, too old to calculate complicated tactics. Meanwhile, you float in the middle, in a state of static mediocrity.
Katherine got me coffee, then mimicked the facial expression of an interested person as my first game began.
GAME 4 SASHA CHAPIN VS. HARRY HUNCHES
My approach to this game was highly original. You might say it was bold and unpredictable. I played with an artistic and mercurial style. After making ten perfect moves, which made my opponent sulk like his mom just took away his Internet privileges, I started playing like an energetic moron. Diligently, I equalized a game in which I’d enjoyed a tremendous advantage, then mounted an attack that didn’t really attack anything. Following my completely silly offensive, my pieces were all over the place, making their capture quite literally child’s play. During this last stage of the game, Harry’s friends all sat next to the board, smiling and fidgeting.
“Good game,” I said, shaking Harry’s hand. Wordlessly, shyly, he returned my handshake, then left.
“Aw man, I’m sorry,” Katherine said.
“I can never play that badly again,” I said.
“Wanna go get a burrito?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’ll feel better after a burrito.”
“I feel nothing but rage, and I am its only object.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
“But the correct assessment of the situation is that I’m a fucking idiot who should never do anything again.”
“Look, the first ten moves were good, right?”
“Yeah, until I self-destructed, I was playing high-quality chess.”
“So that shows you that you’ve just got to pay attention and not let go.”
“What you’re saying isn’t literally impossible.”
“Dude, you’re gonna do great.”
“Jesus, I fuck
ing hope so.”
After our burrito, Katherine had work to do, so I went back alone, armed with her wonderful, cleansing love and my useless mind. Full of molten self-revulsion and beans, I sat alone in a lounge abutting the playing hall—it was an hour until the next round, and the kids were frolicking all around me, having a great time. Among them was little Harry Hunches, zapping his friends with an imaginary ray-gun, zap zap.
My mind grew blacker with every breath I took, so I tried to breathe infrequently. Momentarily, the pairings for the next round were posted. With as neutral a facial expression as possible, I greeted my opponent, Rough Gus.
GAME 5 ROUGH GUS VS. SASHA CHAPIN
The thing about being beaten by a little kid is, like, I’m better than a little kid, right? Any impartial observer would have to agree that I am superior to nearly any ten-year-old. While I’m maybe not as cherubic or delicate, I am more tough, useful, steadfast, reasonable, caring, intelligent, precise, and voluminous. Most children can’t lift three hundred pounds, as I can. Painful years have abraded the superfluities of my personality. Come over sometime and I’ll cook a fantastic meal as long as you bring the wine I suggest. Only an idiot or a pervert would want to hang out with Rough Gus, my opponent, instead of me.
And yet, Rough Gus bested me. Admittedly, I helped him out quite a bit by playing terribly. Concentration, the most important mental resource in chess, was something I simply couldn’t summon at that moment—only rage—rage at the previous game, and rage at Rough Gus’s behavior.
Rough Gus was a weird, weird kid. For most of the game he stared at a bottle of ice tea, which he swirled around until it frothed. Occasionally he took breaks from that, during which he tore strips out of the bottle’s label and tied them in delicate knots. Twice, he got up, went over to the wall, and rubbed a small patch of it for thirty seconds or so. He never looked at me. And never did he betray any sign that he regarded our game as more important than any of his other fidgety little activities.
Defeat was swift and terrible.
Outside, a superlative sunset could be seen quivering in melted snow puddles all down the quiet street. Among this excellent weather I felt ghastly. Along the way home I ran into an old friend who had recently dealt with cancer. He was happy. Seeing that I was not, he provided encouraging words.
There is little point in discussing the next few games in detail. The grotesquerie continued. I lost my next game, against a young man who was terribly affected by eczema—some of his facial skin fell on my pieces as he took them from me one by one. I then lost another. During the last game, I was barely conscious, so I hardly noticed when I lost that one, too. My opponent was a mean old man. The kind I would become if my life continued like this.
That was it. The tournament was over. The flocks of children scattered homewards—full of joy, full of potential. Where I went, there was only white-hot agitation. I was a hive of putrid thoughts, each ultimately becoming an argument proving my own inadequacy, finding evidence from every corner of my memory. Everyone had seen this coming, the failure I now was. My grade school teachers—they all knew what was going on. There goes little Sasha. What will become of that unkempt boy? I don’t know, but thinking about it makes me sad.
I left my apartment after screaming incoherently in the shower and went over to Katherine’s and slept badly. When I woke at noon, she was stroking my hair.
“Good morning li’l pal, how are you feeling?” she said.
“I’ve never been so happy,” I said.
“Oh yeah?”
“I’m completely ecstatic.”
“It’s really not so bad—you’ll play better next time.”
“But will I?”
“You couldn’t play much worse.” “Honestly I don’t understand it—I thought I was getting better.”
“Maybe you just had a bad tournament.”
“Maybe.”
But I couldn’t accept that rationale. There had to be a reason why I’d played so badly, after playing so well. I couldn’t blame the mere fact of human frailty. Doing that would be giving up. I would be forsaking all hope of improvement, and surrendering to the possibility that I’d forever oscillate between being middling and pitiable.
What followed was a few solid months of trying to improve myself with self-authored techniques. My efforts were an unremitting deluge of inanity. The problem with trying to solve your own psychological problems is that you’re inside the delusion you’re trying to diagnose. Being a bad chess player, I came up with a series of bad solutions to my bad chess play. I wallowed in a mess of my own dubious pseudo-insights, developing a whole rotisserie of far-fetched and spurious strategies.
For example: at one point, I hit upon the idea that maybe the essential ingredient to good chess play was self-hatred. After all, I’d played well at the Annex Chess Club tournament, which I’d begun in a state of shameful terror, but I played badly at Hart House after entering the competition in good spirits. Therefore, I should try to feel unhappy before every match. This was bulletproof reasoning, I thought.
So, when I played a small weekend tournament in Ottawa a few weeks after Hart House, I made sure to be as sad and uncomfortable as possible. I wrote, “you have no talent” on my palm, drank jugs of ice-water until I shivered, and sat on my hands for the whole of every game. And I won my bracket. “Problem solved,” I thought. “Just feel bad, and you’ll checkmate everybody.” But then I applied the same strategy to a subsequent tournament in Manhattan, and I lost every game.
Clearly, I needed to stop relying on my own judgment. What I really needed was a teacher—someone who could actually figure out why I was so terrible. One name came to mind instantly: that of Grandmaster Ben Finegold.
7
THE SECRET OF CHESS
I first stumbled upon the lectures of my future teacher and spiritual guardian, Ben Finegold, during a despairing google for chess tips in Bangkok. He was different from all the other chess lecturers I’d seen before. Most lecturing grandmasters, even the most charming ones, approach the game with a hushed reverence, as if delivering news on a pediatric oncology ward, or trying to placate an errant tiger. Finegold is the complete opposite. He’s charismatic, frank, and viciously funny, matching a respect for the game’s elegance with flagrant mockery of everything else. When Finegold’s students raise their hands, he often points a meaty hand at them and says, “You, with the wrong answer” or “You, with some crazy comment.” Upon hearing one of their replies, he’ll often respond, “Ugh, that was painful” or “Hey, you’re the best player in your chair.” He’s given to claiming that the Panov-Botvinnik Attack was named after “Mr. Attack.” His lectures are littered with Tarantino references, imitations of other lecturers from his chess club, and fatuous advice like “never move pawns.”
I soon felt like he was someone I’d already known my entire life. He reminded me of my stereotypically Jewish relatives, who communicated their affection with scabrousness and sarcasm, just like they communicated everything else. I found his lectures so comforting that I often left them playing in my apartment on my laptop during cigarette breaks or other interregna—his voice came wafting out to the balcony and took on a strange gravity under the starlight.
He isn’t always the most informative lecturer. His lectures are as much about verbiage as they are about chess. Sometimes, if a game he’s showing a class bores him, he’ll say things like, “Enh, this seems like a chess position” or “We need some smelling salts for the audience.” But he communicates a powerful if occasionally clumsy affinity for the game that I enjoy much more than the highfalutin academicism displayed by other teachers.
Finegold has a unique place in the chess world. He has ardent fans, because of his aforementioned characteristics, and many detractors, also because of his aforementioned characteristics. Moreover, he lives on an odd plateau of chess skill—that of the low-level grandmaster. The fact that this is a coherent concept is another illustration of the vast distance between the amateu
r and the professional player. To any player like me, any grandmaster lives in an unreachable and starry grove of intellectual superiority. Someone like Finegold can calculate in drunken sleep better than I can while achieving satori on Adderall. But, to most grandmasters, Finegold isn’t that notable, except for his personality. Like in any professional sport, the best of the best chess players have to live with being forever inferior to the best of the best of the best. While Finegold occasionally scores an upset, like a win against Shakhriyar Mamedyarov, a player consistently in the world’s top ten, he mostly can’t compete with the top-flight professionals.
There are essentially two ways you could regard Finegold, given his position in the chess ecosystem. You could see him as a pitiable example of the game’s mercilessness, by focusing on the fact that Finegold never made it to the upper ranks. On the other hand, you could see him as someone who hurled himself directly into the howling void of chess and came out intact, with a fan following, two kids, a little house in Georgia, and the ability to eke out a modest living by teaching his favorite game to captivated pupils—occasionally including desperate adults who come all the way from Canada to absorb his teachings.
After I’d won the tournament in Ottawa, but also faced disaster in Manhattan, when I felt desperate and lost and in need of guidance, I shot him an email, to see if he’d give me some private lessons. He agreed, and told me to meet him a couple of months later in St. Louis, where he had a teaching residency over the summer.
Katherine’s reaction to the news that I was planning to spend a month in St. Louis was decidedly mixed. She knew how important Finegold was to me. And in a way, he was important to her, too, because a lot of my mannerisms that she found most charming were actually Finegoldisms that had crept their way into my vocabulary. He was, she knew, like a second father I’d never met, and she was delighted that I’d have the chance to finally sit across from him. Maybe he would even rouse me from the half-stupor I’d been in ever since Hart House. On the other hand, like, what the fuck, right? Her boyfriend was going to leave her for a month, during the pleasant first year of the relationship, to spend time in a hot, dangerous American city for, yet again, the sake of a nerdy, juvenile hobby.
