Author: Jorge Pichard
Date: 15:16:36 12/27/02
The Pariah Chess Club
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, December 27, 2002; Page A25
I once met a physicist who as a child had been something of a chess prodigy. He
loved the game and loved the role. He took particular delight in the
mortification older players felt upon losing to a kid in short pants.
"Still play?" I asked.
"Nope."
"What happened?"
"Quit when I was 21."
"Why?"
"Lost to a kid in short pants."
The Pariah Chess Club, where I play every Monday night, admits no one in short
pants. Even our youngest member, in his twenties, wears trousers. The rest of us
are more grizzled veterans numbering about a dozen, mostly journalists and
writers, with three lawyers, an academic and a diplomat for ballast. We've been
meeting at my house for almost a decade for our weekly fix.
Oh, yes, the club's name. Of the four founding members, two were social
scientists who, at the time we started playing, had just written books that had
made their college lecture tours rather physically hazardous. I too sported a
respectable enemies list (it was the heady Clinton years). And we figured that
the fourth member, a music critic and perfectly well-liked, could be
grandfathered in as a pariah because of his association with the three of us.
Pariah status has not been required of subsequent members, though it is
encouraged. Being a chess player already makes you suspect enough in polite
society, and not without reason. Any endeavor that has given the world Paul
Morphy, the first American champion, who spent the last 17-odd years of his life
wandering the streets of New Orleans, and Bobby Fischer, the last American
champion, now descended John Nash-like into raving paranoia, cannot be expected
to be a boon to one's social status.
Our friends think us odd. They can understand poker night or bridge night.
They're not sure about chess. When I tell friends that three of us once drove
from Washington to New York to see Garry Kasparov play a game, it elicits a look
as uncomprehending as if we had driven 200 miles for an egg-eating contest.
True, we chess players can claim Benjamin Franklin as one of our own. He spent
much of his time as ambassador to France playing chess at the Cafe de la
Regence, where he fended off complaints that he was not being seen enough at the
opera by explaining, "I call this my opera." But for every Franklin, there is an
Alexander Alekhine, who in 1935 was stopped trying to cross the Polish-German
frontier without any papers. He offered this declaration instead: "I am
Alekhine, chess champion of the world. This is my cat. Her name is Chess. I need
no passport." He was arrested.
Or Aron Nimzovich, author of perhaps the greatest book on chess theory ever
written, who, upon being defeated in a game, threw the pieces to the floor and
jumped on the table screaming, "Why must I lose to this idiot?"
I know the feeling, but at our club, when you lose with a blunder that instantly
illuminates the virtues of assisted suicide, we have a cure. Rack 'em up again.
Like pool. A new game, right away. We play fast, very fast, so that memories can
be erased and defeats immediately avenged.
I try to explain to friends that we do not sit in overstuffed chairs smoking
pipes in five-hour games. We play like the vagrants in the park -- at high speed
with clocks ticking so that thinking more than 10 or 20 seconds can be a fatal
extravagance. In speed ("blitz'') chess, you've got five or 10 minutes to play
your entire game. Some Mondays we get in a dozen games each. No time to
recriminate, let alone ruminate.
And we have amenities. It's a wood-paneled library, chess books only. The
bulletin board has the latest news from around the world, this month a London
newspaper article with a picture of a doe-eyed brunette languishing over a
board, under the headline "Kournikova of Chess Makes Her Move." The mini-jukebox
plays k.d. lang and Mahler. (We like lush. We had Roy Orbison one night, till
our lone Iowan begged for mercy.) "Monday Night Football" in the background, no
sound. Barbecue chips. Sourdough pretzels. Sushi when we're feeling extravagant.
And in a unique concession to good health, Nantucket Nectar. I'm partial to
orange mango.
No alcohol, though. Not even a beer. It's not a prohibition. You can have a swig
if you want, but no one ever does. The reason is not ascetic but aesthetic.
Chess is a beautiful game, and though amateurs playing fast can occasionally
make it sing, we know there are riffs -- magical symphonic combinations -- that
we either entirely miss or muck up halfway through. Fruit juice keeps the
ugliness to a minimum
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.