On Being No Kind of Strategist.

I could never quite fathom why I was so hopeless at chess. After losing to my daughter when she was aged twelve, I decided that I just wasn’t blessed with a chess mind and so didn’t bother playing again. I came to the conclusion that being informed by MENSA that I had a brain the size of a planet was no guarantee of being any better than grade one at the game of kings, and thanked my lucky stars that I’d never tried to become a general in the army because I would probably have been court martialled, convicted of gross incompetence, and sentenced to some unspeakable fate. But still I wondered why…

So, all these years down the line, and being afflicted with a state of extreme tedium, I decided to see whether my trusty Windows 7 had a chess facility in its cyber store so I could try again. It did and so off I went. I lost the first game, and the second, and the third, and the fourth. I asked myself whether it would be a good idea to continue, since the surface of the dark swamp in which I’ve been standing lately was starting to rise and suffocation seemed imminent. I’d already come to the conclusion that the game of chess is not so much about the kind of intelligence I possess, but more about the ability to see an overall, complex picture of trap and counter-trap. That’s not me; I’m much too straight a person. I don’t deal in things like deviousness, subterfuge and trap-setting. I deal in openness, honesty, high principles and straight lines. Call me a wimp, but there you are.

Nevertheless, I asked myself, should I give in or should I persevere and see whether I might get the hang of it and improve? I searched the settings and discovered I was currently on level 2 out of 10. OK, let’s go down to level 1. If you’re going to be a novice hoping to improve, there’s no shame in starting at the bottom. It worked. The computer began making the same stupid mistakes I’d been making and I won the game. I think it’s the first game of chess I’ve ever won.

So did this make me feel good, you might ask? Not really because now I have another issue to deal with, namely whether I should continue. Suppose I should lose to this imbecile of a computer program. What on earth would that do to my self-esteem? I swear that when I chose to come here, nobody told me just how difficult life can be.