checkmate

An urge overcame me the other day to play chess again. It came out of nowhere, surprised me a bit. I play on and off on Yahoo! but don't get much pleasure out of it. Nothing compared to the times when I was a kid and played every weekend.

I was never a very good player, and my buddies weren't very good either. I never won an individual title of any sort, nor did my friends – except on the county level where someone had to win, and we traded honors. But we were all decent players and we congealed into a powerful team over the years.

You might not think of chess of a team sport – if you think of chess as a sport at all – but it is. Both. Even though every player plays his or her own game in a team event, it's a team sport because the presence of the other player spurs you on. The knowledge that your game matters for the team is a powerful driving force.

We always knew we were in it together. It was never about individual glory. This is probably why we, as a team, played much better than our individual ratings would have predicted. We exhausted ourselves to many narrow wins that let us forget the few big losses against teams that were clearly better. For four years ours was among the six best kids' teams in the country, without title hopes but consistently up there with the best.

The golden days ended when I turned fifteen. There were are other things on my mind, on all of our minds. Also, some friends moved and some found their passion elsewhere. We tried to keep the spirit on weekends during games but the fire was gone. It was a halfhearted effort. Yet it took until I left for college that I dropped the game entirely.

I had initially scheduled my weekend trips home to coincide with the men's team games. It was tradition, and it was good fun – being with the guys that I had known for a decade. But classical chess games can take up to six hours, and when the team plays you don't leave before the last game is over. There wasn't much more to Sundays than chess and the trip back to college. It was too much.

And so I haven't played in fifteen years, except online every rare now and then.

Yesterday, I played in the Golders Green rapidplay tournament, a North London institution, six games of half an hour per player. For an event with such tradition and popularity – running for over twenty years, the monthly tournament attracts up to 100 players – the event is extremely low-key and familial. It is held in a simple church hall filled with two dozen benches with boards and clocks. Volunteers sell refreshments, much of it homemade. Games are paired according to the organizer's famous hand shuffle algorithm as soon as a round's results trickle in. There's no computer. The only bit of technology is an online entry form. But it exists only to make it easy for the organizer to set up the first game of the day. You don't have to pay when you register, or even before you play your first game. Pay when it's convenient – but before you leave!

There were four subgroups: cracks, muppets, and two intermediate groups. I wasn't quite sure where to put myself but excluded the first two. At the risk of sandbagging, I chose the lower intermediate group. It was a good match. I played six good games, without being overpowered or overpowering, with some spirited attacks and some good strategies, and without serious blunders except the one to end the last game. I hardly remember opening moves but got out well in each game. In the end, I won some and I lost some, and I enjoyed the day a lot.

It wasn't so much the joy of playing, though that was real enough. The most amazing thing was the focus that a serious game of chess forces on the mind. I had forgotten about this, completely lost it. Throughout the six games, for a total of more than five hours, I didn't have a stray thought. It was amazing. There were only knights, pawns and queens, weak points, open files, and the ticking of the clock. I was in the game, calculating variations, conceiving strategies, balancing attack and defense, totally zoning.

I also completely exhausted myself mentally. On the tube on the way home, too wasted and worked up to read, I imagined how it would be to have that kind of steel determination at work. An ambitious thought – imagine what you could achieve – but I couldn't survive it for more than two days. Better play chess once a month and be dizzy for an hour afterwards.