The Queen's Gambit

 A true story about me that made watching The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix a mix of nostalgia, stress, and regret. 

When I moved to Fort Lewis, Washington--after a dismal year in Shelton, a tiny logging town on the Puget sound Peninsula that I absolutely loathed--I spent the first few weeks of my sophomore year of high school avoiding other people by taking lunch in the library. The main perk of the library was that it offered a lot of single-seat tables. These allowed me to avoid the embarrassing task of searching the lunchroom for the communal table least populated with people, none of whom did I know, nor did I look forward to putting in the required work to know them. Plus, I assumed, there would be very few people in the library to potentially see me hiding behind the three-sided privacy desks other students generally used for studying or goofing off. But I did neither of those things. Instead, I ate and read a Dungeons and Dragons book in a perfect little introvert haven. However, much to my surprise, the library was full of activity, and there was always the faint clicking of plastic against plastic during the lunch hour. Eventually my curiosity was piqued enough that I peeked over the wall of my security desk to investigate the source of the daily commotion.

With my eyes hovering just over the edge of the desk’s front privacy wall, I saw four long tables situated near the front of the library where on any given day eight to sixteen kids sat with chess boards and clocks between them. They had gone unnoticed by me prior to that moment because on my way into the library I usually unconsciously filtered these tables out of existence owing to the fact that they suffered from the same curse as those outside of the library: multiple people sat at them. It took a few days for me to gather up the gumption to stand next to a game and watch as a silent spectator after having finished my lunch. I understood the basics: how the pieces moved, that white goes first, the relative value of pieces, and what check and checkmate were. But this was when I first became acquainted with the clock, speed chess, and the almost hypnotic sounds made by a player using one piece to take another and then firmly pressing the clock before placing the freshly taken piece on the wooden table: click-tap-clack. That last clack a subtle assertion of power--I’ve taken your piece, and with it, a part of your dignity.

There were still other things I would learn later, after hundreds of games. I had no sense of strategy, or even tactics, I couldn’t tell you if a move was good or bad unless it was a lesser valued piece taking a greater valued piece (which isn’t always a good metric, but I couldn’t have told you that either) or resulted in mate. I had no idea what tempo was, or that there were openings and end-games or forks, skewers, and pins. And I certainly didn’t know I would obsess over the game for the next three years. I didn’t know that I would spend my time alone thinking about moves and games I had played. I didn’t know I would learn to love the tactile feel of the chipped plastic pieces in my hand. Nor did I know about the joy of mindlessly spinning a pawn between my fingers while contemplating my next move or two. But I get ahead of myself here, pushing all my pawns before I’ve moved any major pieces out.

After a few days watching games, the losing player at the table I was hovering over stood up and left. No one else was around so the winner asked if I wanted to play. I said, “Sure.” I put my backpack on the floor and sat down and expertly arranged the chess pieces. I played black and thought I was smart enough to have a good go at the game. At the time I didn’t know the chess club/team at Lakes High School was a fairly close knit set of people. The boy sitting across from me was a senior and played second board on the team (which made him the second best player at the school). He knew I was not on the team and he probably knew I’d never played a game in the library; his intuition likely told him I was easy pickings. Four moves later he proved the proposition with what we learned from The Queen's Gambit is the scholar’s mate. I felt simultaneously like an idiot--all of the other games I’d watched had taken twenty plus moves to complete--and amazed that such a thing could be achieved. But I didn’t understand at all how it was achieved. Or that it could be replicated. And avoided. A point proven by our second game in which we played out the exact same set of moves, like I was a ghost whose first task is reenacting its own death. After that he walked me through the sequence of moves and explained how to avoid the end result and how you would probably never see the white queen come out like that in a tournament game. I never played another game against him. Such games would not have been fun for either of us. 

I went home with two choices before me: I could either take the day’s whippings as a sign that I wasn’t cut out for the game of chess or I could practice and maybe get a little better. I opted for the latter and asked my dad to play with me that night. He beat me, too, but at least it was a more traditionally lengthed game. After the game I showed him the scholar’s mate; he thought it was pretty cool. Then I went to my bedroom and sat down at my desk and started up a circa 1994 Windows machine. I examined its games to see if it came pre-installed with chess; it did not. I bought one the first opportunity I had. I started with Battle Chess, where the pieces fight whenever any piece is captured. But those games ended up taking too long because of the animation, so I then acquired a more basic chess game without any fancy graphics. At the same time I started playing diligently during school lunch. I ended up playing a lot of chess, multiple hours a day between lunch and the program I had at home. I slowly worked my way up the challenge levels on the computer, and apparently at the lunch tables as well. One day the librarian came over to one of the games I was playing and he asked, “Would you like to join the chess team?” 

Just before chess season started the librarian--who was ostensibly the chess coach as well, but who taught us nothing about chess; he was basically just a chaperone at our tournaments--put together an in-school chess tournament for anyone who wanted to be on the team. The results of the tournament would determine who would sit where on the team. In Washington state high school chess, a team consists of five players and generally the first board is your best player and the fifth board is your fifth best player. Strategy might dictate otherwise but that was how our team was always run. The good news, if you liked playing chess, was that even if you didn’t make it in the top five, you could still participate in the solo tournaments where you faced other players one-on-one. 

I learned a handful of new things during this tournament. I learned that every player has a rating that indicates the relative strength of a player; it goes up as you win and down as you lose during tournament play. People record their games on paper using notations. Lakes High School at the time was home to the number one ranked high school player in Washington state. And, I wasn’t good enough to play board one through five. This last point was not terribly shocking. I had a good sense that the kids older than me had played a lot, and I had been beat by most of them during some lunch or another. But luckily the coach thought a sufficient number of us played well enough that we could field two teams. He selected me to play board three on the Junior Varsity chess team. He assured me it was a good spot for an unrated player and that I should be proud of my progress. 

From there once a month our team would play a single set of games against another team in our district. For these games each player received one and half hours on the clock. Intermixed with these were proper solo tournaments where we played five 60 minute solo games where whomever finished with one of the best three records would win a trophy. Unrated players, and players with less than 1200 rating, were plugged into a reserved section; all others were put into the unreserved section. I started in the lower tier, but worked my way out of it after two tournaments.

The highlights from that year were that in my first reserved tournament I went undefeated, but so did the kid who played board two on my team. Normally three games of speed chess were used to break such ties, however our coach didn’t like that idea of two of his players competing so directly; instead, the first place trophy was offered to my teammate because he had the higher rating. I don’t recall being bummed about that; maybe because based on games we had played at lunch, I was certain I was the better player.

The next tournament I placed first and then I graduated out of the reserved section and had to get used to not even sniffing the top 20 for the remainder of the year. But my game was improving at a respectable pace--I was moved to the first board of our JV team by the time the school year ended. Our varsity team took first in state and three of those players were graduating seniors. Odds were good that I could play on the varsity team my Junior year.

We had a similar in-school tournament for placing again the next year. I played enough with the other kids at that point that I knew I would be board three of the varsity team, the two seniors on the team were boards one and two, though they were unequivocally worse at the game than the prior year’s top two players. Our team did not even place in the top 10 that year; though again at the end of the year I was regularly beating the two players above me during our practice games at lunch and placing higher than them at solo tournaments where I consistently finished in the top 10 to 20.

But the best and, in ways, worst year of my chess life was my senior year. I started the year at board one of our varsity team--making me captain of our chess team--and stayed there for the year. It felt good. We performed well in our monthly team matches. I consistently finished in the top five at solo tournaments; even picking up a few more trophies. Let me regale you with the highlights of the year.

I learned a new opening--The Queen’s Gambit. I made it my opening of choice when I played white. I wasn’t the type of player to read books about the game. It pains me to think about how good I could have been with some book learning or a chess tutor. I picked up the opening playing against the computer and I memorized a sufficient number of moves for the opening that I could play it well enough to win against the computer as frequently as I did when I played the more traditional king's-pawn openings. But it had a distinct advantage in high school tournaments: the players didn’t have a database of moves behind them. Which to say, 98% of the humans I played against were encountering Queen's Gambit for the first time when they sat across the table from me and thus didn’t know how to play against it. I couldn’t analyze the opening and tell you what its strengths and weaknesses actually were, but I knew I won games when I played it. It flummoxed anyone who wasn’t a top ten player. I played hundreds of practice games with Queen’s Gambit so that I could gain a quick positional advantage in most games in which I played white and watch my opponent squirm after my first two moves.

Not all students in the state showed up to all of the solo tournaments. This meant that sometimes I was the top rated player at a tournament, and by the end of the year I was always near the top, and so rarely did my opponents have any experience playing against the Queen’s Gambit. That year I only played in one solo tournament with one of the top three kids in the state. In round four of five we had the same 3-0 record and I sat across from him. I was kind of star struck. He came in with purple hair and a leather jacket; he didn’t say a word to me before we shook hands and started playing. He oozed cool in a way I prior would have thought impossible for a high school kid playing chess to pull off. I was a little unnerved, his rating was 200 points higher than mine, but I played a respectable game; at one point late in the game I probably could have requested a draw and he might have given it to me. But I blundered in the end game and he beat me before going on to take the top prize for the day. Still, I walked away feeling confident in my game and ability. Playing against the Queen’s Gambit was dicey for even a player of his caliber, but my early advantage only lasted so long before his overall skill overcame it.

However, I did get a little taste of what it felt like to sit on his side of the board because I was the highest rated player in my school district; which meant in our monthly team play I was feared by opponents. I had a reputation in that little corner of the world! It’s the closest I’ve ever come to being famous. There were few enough teams that we eventually played every team in the district twice before the top two teams were sent to the state tournament. I recall playing one young lad the first time and beating him in about 12 moves. It was a very quick and decisive game for tournament play. I assume his team was their JV team given the low quality of his play at first board. The quick win felt good, but what felt better was later that year when our teams matched up again he came up to the table where I was already seated, and when he saw me he sighed and said, “Oh man, not you again.” This was a major highlight of my short lived chess career. I only lost one game in team play that year. It was late in the year when my game play was dipping in quality. I was playing considerably worse at the three hour team games than I was at the hour long games at the solo tournaments. I was having a hard time focusing on games that lasted that long.   

The second high point of my chess career came at the state tournament that year. Playing board one I went two and three against the best players in the state, including a game against the number one ranked player, Andy Van Dyke. His rating was a full 300 points higher than mine. The other members of my team all did better than I did and we took second in state, Andy’s team didn’t finish in the top five. The team accomplishment was nice, but my game against Andy was what I remember most about that day, and year; it was an emotional roller coaster.

When the round was posted and I saw I would be playing him I knew there was no chance of me winning. It had already been a rough day eeking out a couple wins and losing to some of the best players in the state. Everyone on the team knew I wouldn’t have a great record at the end of the day; it’s the fate of a board one player who isn’t a top five player. But it was still kind of a gut punch. And then to sit across from Andy, where you know people will be coming by to see how the game’s progress--I just couldn’t imagine it going well. But it did. It went surprisingly well. I went up a piece for a pawn in the mid-game and had an aggressive line on his king with my two rooks. The tournament hall was buzzing with whispers that someone was beating Andy Van Dyke--no one ever beat Andy Van Dyke. I could see in his body language that my assessment of the game matched his: he was losing on pieces and position. But here is where experience reigned supreme. He stayed calm. My nerves and adrenaline worked against me, and I blundered, dropping one of my rooks only a few moves later. The hall went back to quiet, the crowd around our board dissipated. And before long I resigned. I congratulated him on the win and he said I should have won, that I played too defensive after going up. I almost beat Andy Van Dyke and he fucking knew it. 

I was certain on that day that had I not intuited my way through chess the past three years, but rather spent the time in a more formal study of the game, like Andy likely did, I could have beat him on that fateful day, and that in another timeline I was easily the top one or two players in the state my senior year. This point was later further confirmed to me in college.

I played a little in college, very informal with other students in the dining hall, no tournaments. Then I met this Russian guy named Mike who was also a computer science major like myself. Mike was diligent and hard working, but the topic didn’t come to him as easily as it did to me. I loved working with him; his hard work was inspirational and humbling. One day we were talking about chess and how I played and he said, “I would definitely beat you.” He too had played in high school. But not thousands of games like I did, but with a tutor and study, going at it like he did his school work. And, as promised, he wrecked me even though he said he hadn’t played in four years. He walked the game back and showed me all the things I did wrong and explained how he controlled the board with his pieces and how my pieces were doing absolutely no good for me where I put them. He came at it like a science rather than an art, which was the opposite of how I felt I played.

Watching The Queen’s Gambit reminded me much of my failure at chess. Not that I was ever destined to be a grand master or even a master. But I could have been really good at it, but I let it slip away because sitting down with a book seemed boring, and frankly, hard (though at the time I probably didn’t recognize that latter hurdle). Unfortunately this is not a singular occurrence. I feel I’ve based much of my life around doing what is easy and avoiding what is challenging, this to my own detriment. Math has always been easy for me, and so every educational and professional choice I’ve made has hinged on that fact. Math is easy -> computer science is easy -> getting a job is easier than grad school -> staying where I am is easier than changing jobs or moving -> computer science is easier than writing -> writing is hard -> avoid writing -> write so little that it all ends up being trash. The corollary is also true around my fear of public speaking. Public speaking is hard for me -> avoid anything in school that would require it -> avoid applying for any job that would require it -> avoid promotions or job changes that would require more of it. 

These are things I thought about while watching the ups and downs of The Queen’s Gambit (in addition to re-experiencing some of the mental exhaustion of playing a long set of games). I feel like I never made that second move in life; I never put anything at risk; I’ve stayed safe. At forty-two I’m doing the type of engineering work that most leave behind in their thirties to move into management roles in order to make the big bucks. I could have been better at a lot of things. I could have shined. Which isn’t to say I haven’t accomplished anything in my life. But I wrestle with a lot of what-could-have-beens when it comes to career choices I’ve made because of either fear or to avoid doing hard things. Sometimes I feel like I keep letting life scholar’s mate me over and over. Or that I never pushed that second pawn and gave life the opportunity to accept my gambit. Thanks Netflix. I loved the series.