Chess
I don't remember learning to play chess.
I remember a black and white plastic set encased in foam that my cousin brought with him one Thursday night in the early 1980s (he always visited on Thursday nights). I also remember playing against my Grandfathermy Dad's Dadat his house, with a wooden set. I remember him taking ages to choose his moves, and beating me.I remember playing against friends during wet breaktimes at school, and always losing.
The turning point came when I was off work with a virus for several days in the early 1990s. I sat in my room with my Grandfather's wooden chess set (he had given it to me), and an early computer chess game. Over the course of those few days I sat for the first time and really thought about how the game worked.
In the same way that I had stumbled upon Sine and Cosine while writing a video game to drive a car around the screen years before doing trigonometry in math at school, I discovered I had worked out the first 10 or so moves of the Ruy Lopez, or “Spanish” chess opening while playing against the computer.
A few months later I played my Dadfor the first time since I was littleand wiped him off the board. As he tipped his King over, he said “go and pick on somebody your own size”.
It's funnyin the succeeding years, I have hardly played at all, but I have somehow found myself coerced into teaching several childrenfriends children, and my own. Of course you never really stretch yourself against children; you're trying to balance the game, and setup chances for themtesting them the entire time.
Ihaveplayed a few half serious games over the years thoughperhaps the most entertaining while ever so slightly drunk at a friend's house. He knew I had played years before, and somehow knew I would be good. After the second or third bottle of wine vanished, he got the chess set out, and we began playing. I threw a piece away almost immediately, and apparently changed entirely. I stopped talking to anybody, and focussed on the board like some kind of terminator robot. The game didn't last very long, and wasn't prettyand I was relieved in a way to have destroyed him so convincingly.
I guess my problem with chessand no doubt the reason I so rarely play any moreis because I know I reached my limit. I read countless books about the history of the game, strategy, tactics, theory, and so on. I often wondered how much effect the knowledge really had, until I played my Dad a couple of years agohelping one of our girls get her own back on him. Watching what he was doing, and purely “doing the right sort of thing in this kind of position” quickly tipped two games in a row in our favoureven though I was openly discussing the ideas while we played.
Knowledge of ideas and concepts only gets you so far thoughat some point against serious competition you need to start calculatingworking out entire strings of best moves far into the futureand that's where I fall down. Such “sight” of the board requires hours of practice each weekplain old fashioned hard work.
I'm quite happy being the guy that nobody expects to do very wellthat turns up in front of a chess board every few years at a party, and scares the life out of everybody.