Check Mates

By Zach Hively

There's always time for friendship, right?
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Let’s make this quick: I don’t have any time.

My life is full and demanding as it is. Every moment I claim for myself gets snatched right back up by my two dogs or, more aggressively, by the Duolingo owl. I cannot possibly take up another pursuit, or chance unlocking another lifelong passion. Who can afford to be a Renaissance man these days? More like run-out-of-sauce man, am I right?

Which is why, when one of the coolest of my very few friends asked if I wanted to play chess, I risked our friendship and said no.
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Then he told me about all the chess-related Instagram reels he would send me if I played. So I said yes.

​Chess players on Market Street in San Francisco, California. [Free to Use and Reuse — credit: The Jon B. Lovelace Collection of California Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith's America Project, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.]

It feels like my duty to contribute to the national averages. Traditional TV time is down in the ol’ US of A, probably because I haven’t chipped in my share of video watching in years. Maybe ever. It’s dipped all the way to two hours and 55 minutes—not a month, not a week, but a day.

I frankly don’t see how it is possible for any average person to have this much time, not with their average digital video consumption averaging four hours a day. To reiterate: These numbers include me over here, who still has yet to watch Game of Thrones.

But I have now watched several whole minutes of chess-related reels. These videos make me feel like an insider—like one of those people who of course see the inevitability of checkmate in four moves. Who find glee in the elegance of some guy with a made-up name like Magnus Carlsen. Who don’t quietly look up what “castling” is because here we thought you should never call the castle-looking pieces “castles.”

Chess has changed, y’all. It’s changed a LOT since that one weekend morning my dad spent teaching me one slick opening move, sure to defeat anyone with even less chess experience than me.

For instance, our chess board was made of wood or some other similarly corporeal material. You could contemplate a move by shifting your pawn forward—but not ever taking your finger off its head—until your dad told you to hurry up, dude, at which point you’d return the pawn to its starting point to give your finger a rest and your dad could go make a lunch meat sandwich and maybe that was the last time you played in thirty years.

Now, chess is all played on apps. These, I must note, do not count toward my four hours of digital video time. I can’t leave a finger on a piece’s head, because there are no physical pieces to touch. But I can take three whole days to make a move, at least the way my friend and I set it up. And the synthesized pieces make satisfying wood-like synthesized sounds, which so far is my favorite part.

Poor Yannick—that is my friend’s name. I came in knowing only how the chess pieces move, more or less, plus the Dad’s Gambit that Yannick foiled after my first turn. But I am a scrappy player. By which I mean I’m sometimes pesky to eliminate.

I play chess, it turns out, like I played Halo in college: zero kills, but also seldom killed, because I defy all sense of tactic or plausible movement.

Yannick should have known this. We played Fortnight together exactly once, which is when I learned what Fortnight is. He started by presuming a baseline level of competence. He ended with a look that I can only summarize as “I should not have let him use my account.”

My secret weapon in chess is this:
​It requires no skills with a controller. Also this: my bathroom floor is tiled in black and white. The tiles are hexagons, not squares, but when I am hiding in there where the Duo owl can’t find me, I will let my tired eyes make patterns with the tiles. I have to think this translates to the virtual chess board.

We’ve played three games so far. I won the first one in a slog, to which Yannick said, “This is gonna destroy my rating hahahaha.”

He silenced me handily in the second.

The third is ongoing; we have five pieces total left in play, and Yannick appears to have upgraded his account, enabling him to delay his next move indefinitely.

Fine by me—all I’ve got is time.