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Chess... limbo...
Jan. 8th, 2002 08:02 pmOver the next few years, I didn't think much about chess. I suppose that, somewhere along the way, I learned how the pieces moved, but little else.
In the summers, my parents would send me to camp. Nothing fancy, you understand, just a place out in the country, run by a reputable outfit. At one of these camps, during the summer between 8th and 9th grades, one of the senior members of the camp's staff - a truly senior fellow who had fought with Denikin's army in the Russian Civil War - undertook teaching chess to some of us youngsters.
I don't know how many of us were actually interested in chess. I do know that those of us who volunteered for the lessons were vitally interested in being close to where the Good Humor ice cream truck parked once the "rest hour" after lunch was up. That year, I recall, I was trounced rather convincingly in the tournament set up by the old man at the end of the summer.
In the school year that followed, it turned out my stepdad was a chessplayer, too. In fact, it turned out he played chess regularly with fellow employees during lunch hour (there were a lot of European immigrants in my dad's office). In the meantime, I'd saved my cents and bought a book by Fred Reinfeld at the local paperback shop, with some lurid title along the lines of How to Play Devastatingly Winning Chess.
I read the book and reread it. I got to the point where I understood what the various combinations were about (they were, in the final analysis, pretty obvious) and could understand the coordination that had to take place in order to checkmate the opponent's king. My dad started bringing home "adjourned" positions from games he was playing at the office, and we spent evenings together analyzing those positions.
(Someday, when I am in the mood to really reminisce, I shall relate what happened to me in algebra class the year I immersed myself in chess.)
The next summer, I went back to the same camp with the Reinfeld book and a sample issue of the United States Chess Federation's magazine, Chess Life. Over the chess board, I was unbeatable. Even the old man who had taught us the moves could not beat me. But it turned out that the man driving the Good Humor truck was an 1800-rated player, and about two-thirds of the way through the summer, he started to notice my play and nearly always made the time to sit down and play a game with me, and very nearly always beat me.
What's an 1800 player? Well, consider that the best players in the world are rated around 2800 or so, using a formula developed by chess-playing statisticians. Now consider that, in this rating system, a rating difference of 500 points confers about a 97% winning statistical edge to the higher-rated player (out of 100 games, the higher rated player would win 97).
That means that a World Champion like Garry Kasparov will pretty much always beat a 2300-rated player.
And a 2300-rated player will, in turn, pretty much always beat a 1800-rated player. That boggles my mind (mainly because I'm sometimes not sure what it means).
Of all the players in the world who take the game seriously, 1800-level players are about at the 90-th percentile (meaning that only 10% or so of rated players have higher ratings and 90% have lower ratings). That summer, I was well and truly in that bottom group, as the 1800-rated Good Humor man pretty much killed me every time I sat down to play against him.
(And I kept sitting down to play, which is the subject for a completely different essay.)
At the end of the summer, Tom (which was the Good Humor man's name) gave me a souvenir: a book of games played by the Russian champion Alexander Alekhine. He also proposed that we play a set of games by mail, using postcards (which was my first taste of correspondence play).
As an aside, you'd think it'd be hard to play poorly when you can think about what you're going to do, move the pieces around the board, refer to books on the game, etc., which is the case when playing chess by mail, but I did. Tom beat me about as regularly in our mail games as he had over the board. But I digress...
Despite the fact that Tom beat me consistently that summer, I took home the camp's trophy for the end-of-summer tournament, where I had weathered all comers without a defeat. It was a cheesy trophy, no doubt bought at a place that specialized in "World's Greatest Beer Drinker" awards, but hey! it's the thought that counts.
That summer was the last I spent away at camp (if we don't count that little deal when I was with the Marines, but again, I stray...). Dizzy with my success - and despite my defeats at the hands of Tom, the Ice Cream Man - I contemplated taking the next step by actually entering a Real Chess Tournament.
To be continued...
Cheers...
In the summers, my parents would send me to camp. Nothing fancy, you understand, just a place out in the country, run by a reputable outfit. At one of these camps, during the summer between 8th and 9th grades, one of the senior members of the camp's staff - a truly senior fellow who had fought with Denikin's army in the Russian Civil War - undertook teaching chess to some of us youngsters.
I don't know how many of us were actually interested in chess. I do know that those of us who volunteered for the lessons were vitally interested in being close to where the Good Humor ice cream truck parked once the "rest hour" after lunch was up. That year, I recall, I was trounced rather convincingly in the tournament set up by the old man at the end of the summer.
In the school year that followed, it turned out my stepdad was a chessplayer, too. In fact, it turned out he played chess regularly with fellow employees during lunch hour (there were a lot of European immigrants in my dad's office). In the meantime, I'd saved my cents and bought a book by Fred Reinfeld at the local paperback shop, with some lurid title along the lines of How to Play Devastatingly Winning Chess.
I read the book and reread it. I got to the point where I understood what the various combinations were about (they were, in the final analysis, pretty obvious) and could understand the coordination that had to take place in order to checkmate the opponent's king. My dad started bringing home "adjourned" positions from games he was playing at the office, and we spent evenings together analyzing those positions.
(Someday, when I am in the mood to really reminisce, I shall relate what happened to me in algebra class the year I immersed myself in chess.)
The next summer, I went back to the same camp with the Reinfeld book and a sample issue of the United States Chess Federation's magazine, Chess Life. Over the chess board, I was unbeatable. Even the old man who had taught us the moves could not beat me. But it turned out that the man driving the Good Humor truck was an 1800-rated player, and about two-thirds of the way through the summer, he started to notice my play and nearly always made the time to sit down and play a game with me, and very nearly always beat me.
What's an 1800 player? Well, consider that the best players in the world are rated around 2800 or so, using a formula developed by chess-playing statisticians. Now consider that, in this rating system, a rating difference of 500 points confers about a 97% winning statistical edge to the higher-rated player (out of 100 games, the higher rated player would win 97).
That means that a World Champion like Garry Kasparov will pretty much always beat a 2300-rated player.
And a 2300-rated player will, in turn, pretty much always beat a 1800-rated player. That boggles my mind (mainly because I'm sometimes not sure what it means).
Of all the players in the world who take the game seriously, 1800-level players are about at the 90-th percentile (meaning that only 10% or so of rated players have higher ratings and 90% have lower ratings). That summer, I was well and truly in that bottom group, as the 1800-rated Good Humor man pretty much killed me every time I sat down to play against him.
(And I kept sitting down to play, which is the subject for a completely different essay.)
At the end of the summer, Tom (which was the Good Humor man's name) gave me a souvenir: a book of games played by the Russian champion Alexander Alekhine. He also proposed that we play a set of games by mail, using postcards (which was my first taste of correspondence play).
As an aside, you'd think it'd be hard to play poorly when you can think about what you're going to do, move the pieces around the board, refer to books on the game, etc., which is the case when playing chess by mail, but I did. Tom beat me about as regularly in our mail games as he had over the board. But I digress...
Despite the fact that Tom beat me consistently that summer, I took home the camp's trophy for the end-of-summer tournament, where I had weathered all comers without a defeat. It was a cheesy trophy, no doubt bought at a place that specialized in "World's Greatest Beer Drinker" awards, but hey! it's the thought that counts.
That summer was the last I spent away at camp (if we don't count that little deal when I was with the Marines, but again, I stray...). Dizzy with my success - and despite my defeats at the hands of Tom, the Ice Cream Man - I contemplated taking the next step by actually entering a Real Chess Tournament.
To be continued...
Cheers...
