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Online Chess
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Downside Mate in 47, the computer read out. I wiped my forehead with a damp handkerchief, loosened my tie further, and looked at the position again. My plan had been to take us out of a sharp, tactical middlegame, where modern thinking machines roamed unchecked, like hungry carnivores, and into a murky, overgrown swamp of an endgame, where my lifetime of following in Capablanca’s footsteps might show me the way through a dense thicket of variations. I pushed my king forward. This was the way out. I was sure of it. Mate in 15, the computer responded. I smiled, signed my scorecard, and walked away. There was barely a murmur of reaction in the Club. We were far past the excitement of “Man Bites Dog,” or “Computer Bytes Man,” if you will. These days, for a hundred dollars or so, just about anyone can buy an electronic chess brain which will regularly beat him (or her) mercilessly. As a result, in many of the clubs around the land, the top chessplayer shares living quarters with pals named Word and Excel. It’s a good thing, too, and all the better for it, I mused, as I paused to thumb through the latest copy of the Club’s bi-weekly newsletter. All the best new games were there, along with recent tournament results, a handful of theoretical articles, and the regular old columns. Good, readable type, and sharp, crisp diagrams: thanks again to the computer revolution. The editor, a hard-working guy with more energy than experience, and, truth be told, more stamina than skill – but yoked to a monster of a computer system – regularly turned out an above-average product. With the help of his analysis software, he dared to annotate games of the top players, and his comments, if second hand, were often revealing, and rarely trivial. He might be at a loss in a strategic fog, but he saw the tactical slip-ups with x-ray eyes. To top it off, with a couple million games stored away for reference on his hard drive, he could always suggest how a master might play – indeed, already had played – any given position. There is a downside to everything, and I noticed one tagging along next to the newsletter, lurking in its shadow. It was a small, folded and stapled booklet, clearly self-published. Its title startled me: The Penultimate Perry: 400 Games. Unbelieving, I turned to the “Introduction,” and read about the Club’s most notorious pawnpusher. My first book was Chess the Easy Way. It had a lot of helpful information, and it had a list of rules to guide your play. I liked the rules best. Morphy’s Games of Chess was the first game collection I bought. It promised to “put boldness into your chess game.” It convinced me my future was probably as a positional player. The first treatise I studied was My System. My game soon became so convoluted that my buddies nicknamed me the “stormy pretzel of chess.” Travesty! I was reminded of Nimzovich’s lament, “Why must I lose to this idiot?” More questions followed: Why can’t I ever get loose of this idiot? Why would I ever lose $10 – the booklet’s price – to this idiot? But, morbid fascination drove me onwards. I flipped to the “Annotated Games” section, and scanned the first example. It started 1.e4, and there was a note, “Fischer’s favorite,” followed by a dozen of Bobby’s games. Then, threw was Black’s reply, 1…c5, with another note “Kasparov plays this,” followed by a dozen of so of Garry’s games! The whole monstrosity was similarly padded with other players’ games, move upon move, until its abrupt, inglorious end. Shaking and a bit dizzy, I turned page after page. It appeared, upon complete inspection, that, of the “400 games” promised, perhaps 10 (at the most) were actually played by Perry. And he had lost all of them! “Autograph it for you?” came a gravelly voice, trying for detachment, but awkwardly climbing up the scale with each syllable, in nervous expectation. I whirled and faced the man. Good old Perry the PawnPusher. “You can’t possibly be serious,” I challenged. “This thing is full of dreck.” He smiled indulgently. “Should have included more of your games, eh?” And then he murmured, “Jealous, jealous, jealous.” “My own games are beside the point,” I continued, and he nodded too quickly in agreement. “But, hardly any of this is your own play!” Perry crossed his arms, and let his wire rims slide down his nose, as he scratched each elbow through his ratty sweater. “First, my games aren’t good enough to include. Then, you go on and complain that I left too many out. Can’t you be consistent?” “And your notes,” I stammered, losing steam. “They’re clearly all computer-generated.” “Of course,” another smile. “Should I have done them on my own, and listened to you complain about how weak you thought they were? Be realistic.” I was getting nowhere. “And you lost every game you did include,” I protested weakly. “Ah,” he said with finality, “but I won
the annotations!”
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