Chessplayer

When I was in the navy I did my time on a submarine. Men, in the prime years of hormone madness, trapped in a very confined space under high stress with no women. How to not kill each other was a daily question. We played a lot of chess. Being able to sit down, armed with exactly the same pieces as an enemy, with no opportunity for wayward luck to intervene, provided something vital.

I'm not quite as intense about it now, though when I'm having a bad day I go to Yahoo Chess with the stated intention to 'take some scalps'. On those days my rating tends to rise pretty fast. Testosterone still works I guess.

When people ask how I got to be a good chessplayer I tell them it's pretty simple. I've lost more games than they have. I've lost more games than they likely ever will. My brother taught me to play when I was six, and beat me like a drum until I was seventeen. I lived with his family for a while when I was seventeen and we both had off-shore oil jobs...so when we were on shore we could just hang out and play forty or fifty games a day...and often did. I learned a lot about life across that board...and I lost games beyond counting.

My life since then has given me lots of opportunities to lose chess games, and as Darth Vader says 'then I was but the learner, now I am the master'. I play chess on line with my brother, and I don't go soft since it is chess, but every time I beat him I think about how much I owe him for those early lessons. Thanks my brother.