I’ve played so much chess that I can’t even look at a chessboard and pieces without feeling a wave of disgust. I have, no doubt, played too much over the last six months. The traditional games that we played while you were here (i.e. games where I can look at the face of my opponent) were a nice respite from the digital war games I normally force upon myself each day. I read about chess addiction in a magazine recently, and I think I show many of the signs. It does not surprise me since my life can be described as a spectrum of obsessions with varying severity. It’s truly amazing how losing ten matches, one after another, stokes a great fiery desire in my gut for more punishment. I get lost in losing. I don’t remember my victories, only the defeats. I believe that is a quote from some famous Russian or Jew, or both.

The pieces mean more to me these days. I understand their worth. I understand the general position they should attempt to maintain throughout a match. But, I don’t see them outside of the generalized systems that every novice meets when attempting to ‘dig deeper’ into the mysteries of the game. And it is a game; a silly, foolish game. Often I make the first dozen or so moves from memory, relying on an equally knowledgeable opponent who is also trudging through some system he read about in the basic manuals. It’s quite funny because once we’re through making the ‘best’ moves against each other in the opening, the game completely falls apart because neither of us understands the theory that led us to our positions. We blunder our way through to the end game where yet another system rears its ugly head. I found that the secret of chess is mastering the half-dozen or so moves in the middle-game. The rest is just memorization; a true testament to the limits of this seemingly limitless game.

The bane of my current existence is this blitz chess on the internet. What a fool I was to begin this little obsession. Not only do I lose continually, but I do so at ten times the normal rate. It is possible for me to lose seventy games in one day. Why do I do it? Why do I submit myself to such torture willingly? My whole desire was to learn the basics and then expand those ideas into some individual system of play that I could call my own. But here I am playing sixty second matches that force me to move my pieces blindly, as though learning about the proper moves in a book was some sort of handicap. No, I must learn how to play the game by narrowing down the eight-hundred-sixty-four million possible mistakes – one at a time. And many of them I make two, and even three times. I’ve skewered my King so many times I should be able to see it well in advance, but sadly I cannot.

For the first few months it was as though chess moves were something that happened to me. I merely reacted to one attacking piece at a time. I would find myself in such horrible positions that I would have to go back after the match and retrace my steps to determine how I could start with an equal number of pieces and end up in such a compromising position. It never is very clear. I keep looking for that one tiny iceberg that set the ship adrift, failing to realize that what I really should be studying are the conditions of the vast illogical sea that produced it. And that is where the madness begins. There is no hope for anyone who after peering out into this sea believes that they can see a system, a pattern of sorts, in the rippling ever-changing current. - BMS