Mismatch
Submitted by
Dozy on Tue, 04/22/2008 at 10:19pm.
Sometimes chess games are hard-fought battles right down to the last pawn; sometimes they are one-sided. It happens in the first round of Swiss Tournaments when the top half of the field plays the bottom, and even in chess.com tournaments where the ratings are open, or when a multi-stage tournament works much like a conventional Swiss.
But my favourite mismatch, and one I recall with pleasure, took place in 1971 between two of my work-mates.
In the build-up to Reykjavik chess fever was rampant and anybody who knew anything about the game was pushing pieces around a board. So it was at Sydney's Chief Telegraph Office where I worked, and where we had around 400 employees.
I didn't play chess then—I didn't even know the moves—and one guy, appropriately named Dick, offered to teach me. He was the office champion and almost never lost a game; he taught me just enough so that he could beat me easily. In our first 200 games I managed only one win and a draw. I realised he was only a chess bully, hustling and bustling in best coffee-house style, but I was keen to learn so I persevered.
After a month or two we heard that one guy in this office, a very quiet Hungarian named Steve Kaiser (everybody called him The Chief), had won his grade of the City of Sydney Championship. We used a different rating system in those days but it was equivalent to today's FIDE U1600. Dick couldn't wait to challenge him.
This was to be Dick's big triumph. It would establish him as king of the office chess scene. He said before the game, “If I don't make a mistake he can't beat me.”
A truism. The trouble was that Dick thought that a mistake was leaving a piece on prise while Steve would have been disappointed with his play if he put a pawn on the wrong square.
The result was a humiliating defeat for our self-styled champion and, to make it worse for him, the game was watched by a crowd of his victims.
Definitely one of my most satisfying moments in chess, and I didn't even have to lift a piece in anger.