All the Wrong Moves

by Sasha Chapin

  GAME 34 SASHA CHAPIN VS. VICTOR REMUNERATION

  Victor was a kindly old man, who wanted to play some mean, merciless chess. But I denied him that opportunity. One of the reasons that chess is a brutal game is that a single bad move can decide the whole affair instantly. If you’re the World Champion, and you’re playing a sorry jackass like me, and I play twenty random moves, I’ll still win if you give up your queen on move twenty-one—there’s no going back. Every move, over a game that can last six hours, is an affair requiring absolute concentration.

  In this case, my opponent didn’t realize that, through a simple maneuver, thanks to some clumsiness on his part, I could ruin the position he was striving for in the opening. Ten moves in, my queen was sitting right up in the crotch of his kingside—the area of the board in which the king usually finds shelter—preventing the vulnerable monarch from getting comfortable. I had him pinned to the floor and he was squirming around.

  There was only one problem: the burping. In general, India is a place where, in comparison to Canada, there’s a more nonchalant attitude towards the public execution of bodily functions. So, when one player in the corner of the hall let out a profound burp, it didn’t occur to anyone that he had done anything wrong, and in fact, a few other players, wanting to join in on the fun, started burping as well. That prompted a couple of older players to emit long spells of terrible hacking coughs. And since I was raised in a sterile, squeamish society where extremely normal things like burping are discouraged, this disgusted me and robbed me of all my focus.

  In my confused state, I perpetrated a total fuck-up. It was the product of a weird cognitive phenomenon that all chess players know about—a particular type of mental blip that occasionally occurs during long tournament games. It happens when you’re looking at a position, and you’re sure you have the right move, and it’s held tightly in the palm of your mind, having retained its promise after being subjected to numerous rounds of mental cross-examination. You’re about to move your piece and hit the clock, but then you’re suddenly interrupted—some unbidden cerebral current brings another move to your consideration, and you find it strangely alluring. And despite knowing that your original move was correct, you make this new, dubious move anyway. It’s kind of like how, in an intimate moment with your loved ones, you think of something you absolutely shouldn’t say, and then you say it. As Ovid once wrote, “I see the right way and approve it; alas, I follow the wrong.”

  So: all around me fell a plurality of guttural riffs. My queen was perfectly placed, dominating my opponent’s army completely, preventing his king from finding safety. And then I did the obvious thing—I retreated my queen to a totally nonthreatening square, allowing my opponent to attain a completely comfortable position. Then, I lost slowly, over about fifty moves.

  Outside, rain fell through hot sunshine. One kid came up to me and asked me how the game went. Then, another kid did the same thing. Over the next half hour, I had to tell a hundred people how I did, because everyone was curious about whether the strange, lonely Canadian in their midst could actually play chess.

  “Why?” said one.

  “I failed,” I said.

  “What happened?” said another.

  “I’m stupid,” I said.

  “Why lose?” said another.

  “I’m just not a good player,” I said.

  Over on the back porch of the building, curried lentils with rice were served on little disposable plates. Everyone looked at me. “Hello,” I said to nobody in particular. A couple of people made inquisitive eye contact, to which I offered no meaningful response. The next game was scheduled for 1:30 p.m. It began at 3:30 p.m., after two hours in which I tolerated the weather and more socializing with juveniles.

  GAME 35 COLD CUTS VS. SASHA CHAPIN

  My opponent was rated about 1150. I was sure, therefore, that he’d offer his pieces to me, one after the other, and then give up. After the debacle that was my previous game, I was looking forward to a cakewalk.

  There was only one problem: my stomach. Over the previous half-hour, my slight thoracic discomfort had bloomed into a terrible bloat. I was carrying a toxic balloon in my midsection. My belly was full of indecent flora, having a party at the expense of my health. I wobbled around in my chair, pained and pale. My thoughts became fluttery and insubstantial, including my calculations—ridiculous moves that I would never otherwise consider became compelling.

  In this confused state, I decided to play the Slav Defense. It was a weird choice, because the Slav is really complicated and requires a lot of study, and I’d never played it before in my life, not even in an online blitz game. Why I made this decision, I don’t recall. Perhaps I wanted to be like Finegold, who’s a Slav specialist. Perhaps I wanted to represent my Slavic heritage, even though I’m only barely Slavic, and don’t care about representing my heritage.

  Whatever the justification my harried mind stapled together, it was an awful decision, and my unskilled opponent punished me soundly. After ten moves I had made ten mistakes. On move twenty, he shrugged sadly as he delivered his rook to my back rank, and said, “Checkmate.”

  Back at the hotel, my ill health had transmogrified. My bowels had worked out their inner conflict, but now I was feverish and my sinuses were filled with muck. I breathed unenthusiastically until I drifted off. When I woke, I ordered milky, murky coffee from room service, skipped breakfast, because the food was poison, and headed off to the tournament once again.

  GAME 36 SASHA CHAPIN VS. RAJIV STILTON

  Actually, my bowels had not worked out their inner conflict. In point of fact, as I made the first moves of the London System, a tedious but solid arrangement of the white pieces, I became increasingly nauseous. To be completely honest with you, my body was overtaken with spasms, and, as I attained a comfortable position on the board, I had to run to the bathroom to have an international incident, which took some time to elapse.

  Outside the bathroom, there was no soap, only a rusty tap emitting spurts of dirty water. Also, there’s not a lot of toilet paper in Hyderabad, and none at public schools—everything has to be done manually. What this meant for me personally, at that moment, is that I had to run across the road to a hospital and beg them for hand sanitizer, after doing some things I had to do.

  An hour later, I applied some disinfectant to my besmirched hands, and returned to find that there were ten minutes left on my clock. My opponent, who had a full hour and a half remaining, seemed happy about the situation. For the rest of the game, I didn’t have enough time to calculate, or even think about playing well. And besides, my cogitation abilities had evaporated in the toilet. Being in this position, I just played not to lose. The result was a boring draw.

  “How did you do?” asked Gopal, as we met each other at the chai stand.

  “Badly,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Stomach trouble,” I said.

  “How did you do?” said a child, approaching us.

  “Great,” I said. “I played great.”

  This creepy feeling started coming over me—this sense that there was maybe an outside chance that this had all been a mistake. But I was too bothered by bodily sensations to be all that exploratory about the bigger picture.

  GAME 37 LUCY STOCKTON VS. SASHA CHAPIN

  This game was another disappointment. To give you a sense of just how disappointing it was, let’s talk about Paul Morphy, the most melancholy figure in chess history.

  Born in 1837, Morphy singlehandedly altered, everywhere, the conception of how the game could be played. He was a cherubic boy, born of wealth, with a gently sarcastic manner, whose talent was such that nobody had to teach him the rules, or tell him anything about the established notions of strategy. He simply watched his uncle and father play, and then beat them both, easily, in round after round, when he was seven years old. By the age of nine, he was one of the best players in his hometown of New Orleans, and conducted blindfolded simuls for fun. At twelve, he trounced
professional player Johann Löwenthal, one of the strongest players of the day, in a three-game match.

  Bobby Fischer called Morphy “perhaps the most accurate player who ever lived.” This is a word that chess players use often, accurate. It implies that there’s a truth to the game, and that a player’s goal is to get as close to that truth as possible. Even as a mediocre player, I can attest that Morphy’s play feels truthful—simple, unexpected, perfect. Kasparov called him “the first swallow”—as in, the first player who really flew.

  What made his style different, if there was one thing, was a preternatural instinct about the relations between each piece. Whereas previous players, even the best players, had seemingly seen each piece as an individual weapon, Morphy regarded them all as voices in a complex harmony. With every move, his pieces became more tightly bound to each other, like a troupe of acrobats following a marvelous routine. And this symphonic understanding was animated by brute brainpower of the highest level: once all of the pieces were together, Morphy got them to collaborate with total suavity. He could calculate better than, evidently, anyone alive at that time—like Magnus, he didn’t try to see the variations, he just did. So, he beat everybody. Adolf Anderssen, the best player before Morphy came along, was asked, after one match with the “first swallow,” why he didn’t play as well as he usually did. “Morphy will not let me,” he said.

  “Too beautiful for this world” is a silly phrase. Beautiful things are usually popular and successful. Unfortunately, it applied to Morphy’s chess. He was too good. He had no serious competition on earth. Of the fifty-nine games he played against the very best players of his era, he lost eight. It’s also speculated that he didn’t take these games very seriously, based on the fact that he played very quickly and often appeared unamused. Many elite chess players refused to face him, out of fear. Bored of being able to achieve victory at will, he retired and began a law practice, which never became successful because people only came to his offices to try and engage him in a match. He always refused. His professional chess career lasted a total of two years. He died of a stroke at the age of forty-seven, lonely and idle. What brought on the stroke was a glass of water. It was hot and he got overheated after a long walk in the sunshine, and he drank a cold glass of water, and he fell over and died. “The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman,” he once said. “The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life.”

  If he truly believed that, he would’ve been dismayed to see how influential he eventually became. Even as geniuses after him continued to revise the character of the game, his victories remained the cornerstone of the chess canon. Every young player studies one brilliant casual game he played while watching an opera, against two dukes who insisted on harassing him as he tried to take in an aria or two. Morphy, versus their combined scheming, in the course of blitzing out moves distractedly, composed an attack of such inexorability and elegance that it feels like stars aligning. With every move, the dukes became more ensnared, putting up the kind of fight that a mouse does while being digested in a snake’s stomach.

  This is the ideal of chess that a lot of us possess when we begin playing. But often, when we start playing tournaments, we find that the chessboard is sometimes as full of dullness as it is filled with potential wonder. Unlike Morphy, we don’t see the tiny opportunities that might be leveraged into a violent coalescence, so our games don’t blossom the way his did. We sometimes just move our pieces around, shake hands with our opponent, go home, and despair that we’re incapable of living up to the possible gorgeousness of the chessboard.

  Speaking of which, there wasn’t much left of me, four hours later, when the next game started, three hours behind schedule. Everything had been sucked out of my brain and intestines. I barely saw the girl of maybe twelve with a broad toothy smile who sat down across from me. Our game was unremarkable and protracted. The game ended in a draw, and by the time it was over, it was dark. A few more mosquitos had bitten my face, and I felt my muscles shifting under the new swellings positioned around my grimace. She yawned as she put away the pieces.

  “I’m sorry I kept you up past your bedtime,” I said.

  “Do not worry, sir,” she said, again with an ear-to-ear smile, “that is how long the game takes.”

  “I guess so.”

  “You are not well,” she said, “do you need my help?”

  “I’ll be okay.”

  “I hope so. Rest well.”

  She got up and patted me gently on the head, and walked away. And as I sat there, after my forehead had made its way to the tabletop, I remembered something my friend Naomi once told me: “You put behavior into the world, you get behavior out.” It’s true. That’s all you can do, and there are no guarantees of receiving any specific behavior in exchange for yours. Your love and fury doesn’t mean you are owed a particular response from the indifferent cosmos. You can, in the name of chess, fly as far as possible from your home and get diseases along the way, and still be a mediocre player. You might take a pilgrimage and learn nothing.

  Or you might learn something other than what you’d intended to. I might have come all the way to India to learn that I’m still the same mostly average person, even when titillating words like India are tacked onto my existence. That there’s no other life for me that I can simply burst into by becoming excitable, at least as far as chess goes. That, like the vast majority of all players, I was probably going to remain part of the necessary lowest levels of the chess food chain. I was the canvas upon which more gifted painters could produce their violent work, like Paul Morphy’s opponents. And maybe—maybe—I could improve slightly. But not by becoming ill in a distant country. There were no shortcuts, least of all this one.

  Really, by coming to Hyderabad, I had broken another one of Finegold’s rules, right after I learned it: Chess is not some crazy story you read about in a magazine. It’s the same everywhere, just like me. This was a normal tournament, and I was performing normally, which is to say, badly. All I could do was keep on playing.

  GAME 38 SASHA CHAPIN VS. ???

  I don’t remember what happened in this game, which occurred the next day. I do remember that I lost. Afterwards, I sat down in the shade and the boys all thronged me at once. As they said words to me, I took a tube of mosquito repellant from my bag and applied some to my arm.

  But it wasn’t mosquito repellant. It was actually toothpaste. The boys laughed and started calling me Colgate. In a childish huff, I stalked upstairs and sat down in a plastic chair, which shattered instantly. As I got up, one of the boys approached me.

  “You fell down,” he said. “I will tell your entire family.”

  GAME 39 RON DIESEL VS. SASHA CHAPIN

  As I sat down to play, later in the afternoon, as the intense sunlight really began eroding me, I said, almost aloud, “Fuck you, I’m gonna win now” to the perfectly acceptable-seeming young man before me. And I played the Chigorin Defense, my favorite secret weapon, also a favorite of Finegold’s. I don’t know why we both like it. It’s really bad, actually. But sometimes you just like bad things. Soggy fries. Hangover sex. The Chigorin. It’s chaotic, risky, and clumsy. The only good part, I guess, is that your opponent can be confused by why you’re playing so strangely. I ripped him apart, and he cried. And then I stalked off, thinking, “You’re goddamn right.” And I took an Uber back to the hotel and chilled out with the toilet for a couple of hours, waiting for vomit that never came.

  GAME 40 SASHA CHAPIN VS. THE HOSPITAL

  When I woke up the next day, one of my mosquito bites had a blister on it that looked exactly like cellulitis, which had nearly killed me in college. So this is how I would die—not in a sudden collision in traffic, but of mosquito-borne illness. I thought I was probably doomed, but I decided to skip the morning game and go to the hospital, just in case I could eke out a few more minutes of pained, perspiring existence.

  I went down to the hotel concierge and asked him if there were any good hospitals
around.

  “There are very few good hospitals,” he said.

  “But is there, like, one good one?”

  He shrugged. I googled the local facilities and went to the best-reviewed, which was just down the road, beyond a bunch of cows and traffic. It was a squat building, whose placards promised urological services I hoped I wouldn’t need. I entered. The people at reception didn’t speak English, so they offered me gestural directions that I was too stupefied to figure out. As I reconnoitered, looking for someone who could help, orderlies followed and took selfies with me.

  Half an hour later, I was in a little examination room, being scrutinized by the first doctor I found who spoke English. Some of the orderlies who had followed me through the hospital—five in total—were smiling as they relaxed along the far wall, observing my ongoing demise, drinking thimblefuls of chai. The doctor concluded that I probably didn’t need drugs, so she prescribed me four kinds of drugs. This was an approach to medicine that I appreciated. The pharmacist’s assistant added me on Facebook after filling my prescription.

  By the time I got back to the hotel room, my consciousness, such as it was, had mostly been scooped up by a swell of fever. It was much the same way after I woke up from a deep sleep. My unknown illness having reached its zenith, I skipped that day of the tournament and spent most of those waking hours lying on the cool floor of my room, thinking that I used to play frisbee when I was a kid, and now I was about to expire.

  GAME 41 SASHA CHAPIN VS. NO ONE

  I did not expire. Also, the organizers had not received the voicemail I left them that declared I was missing a day and a half. Based on my non-appearance, they had forfeited all three of my games and withdrawn me from the tournament.