Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended,
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.Robert Frost, Relutance Verse 1
Chess in the 90s vis-à-vis other board games
A decade is ten years long and may contain a discernible sequence of events longer than a country lane winding through the chiltern hills of Bedfordshire into Buckinghamshire. Or it may contain no more than the unwitting inauguration and termination of social and cultural processes & events subject to happenstance and left unchronicled. Either/or 1 context is always essential. My experience of chess in the 90s can placed in the cornucopia of board games back then.
Verse 2
The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.
It was commonplace to play board games for those who grew up in England in the 70s & 80s before the advent of the internet, social media, online games and all that jazz. Oftentimes they were presents at christmas or birthdays or that which you spent pocket money on yourself sometimes. The first which I liked and loved was Frustration (a fun version of Ludo) and would play with my grandfather the most.
The many others that followed cannot be counted, but one stood out above all others, and that was Monopoly. Even though I could already play chess before I got it for christmas, what I liked was it was fun for kids and anyone could play it. Like those around my age on my street, I grew up playing all kinds of board games with them, mates at school, and cousins in that large family of mine -all quite normal.
Verse 3
And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch-hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question ‘Whither?’
By the time the 90s and its unfoldings arrived, I was already an avid reader already courtesy of chess, but it soon became not the only board game I would read up on, and read repeatedly, by borrowing a certain books out of Luton central library town. In the first winter, whilst wearing that yellow jumper handed down to me by an uncle, I borrowed Gyles Brandreth’s book on Monopoly and read it many times over2. In the summer of 92 my milieu and social patterns changed much. I began playing Monopoly with a new found group of friends I hung out with for years to come with great regularity and was almost impossible to beat, if not impossible!
We had card game evenings into the wee hours and many of them also with gin rummy, blackjack and whilst played usually. We played other board games too, Cluedo sometimes but Risk usually:
Such games are, however, mostly played for entertainment value, and with dice involved, are not considered strategic as such like chess is. But more importantly, when former Bedfordshire junior chess champion Nick McBride and I became close friends in 92 also, my love of board games branched out even further and pushed me towards achievements that surpassed all those acquired under strain in chess. Nick used to pick me up and take me back to his pad in Dunstable and there we played all manner of games. Mostly chess but also Backgammon, Scrabble, Draughts (Checkers) and Othello (Reversi), the last of which Nick had Ted Landau's book on and lent to me. He was more talented than I at all of them and helped me raise my game across the board. Nick also invited me to a match he played against Irish draughts champion Pat McCarthy on July 17th 1992 3, held in The Travelodge on Lutons edge, where I spent the entire day watching and playing both draughts and some chess too. I read up on draughts some and continued playing it whenever I could. Three years later, Nick and I went down to Weymouth, Dorset before it was light one Summer morning to play for England in a match against Ireland. I only played two games, drew the first and had a technical draw in the second but made a mistake in time pressure and lost that. I fell asleep on the way there and on the way back too, finding the bright sunshine and sunbathers on beach blinding, when more awake as we stepped out of his Renault and walked towards the playing venue across an empty car park on that hot sunny day.
I started university that Autumn, moved out of Bedfordshire and at the end of the following season, removed myself from its chess scene. However, upon return from America in 99, I spent the Summer working in London and bumped into Nick at the Mind Sports Olympiad in Kensington by chance. Chess had already become rather humdrum and pushed into the past, so I did not play it, although I did watch a few games played here and there as I recognised many playing. Instead, I entered the tournament for Othello (Reversi) and did rather well at first. So well in fact that I played alongside the then world Japanese world champion, who took interest in one of my games. Whilst not participating, Nick pointed out the big names of the draughts world such as Ron King, and together we would watch him play. I also saw Dave and Andy Ledger of the Bedfordshire chess scene play Cribbage (Doubles), my favourite card game, one which I would go on to play the American Number 2 at the time, Michael Schell, on-line four years later. I watched Abalone being played and almost entered a tournament for that also. It was generally pleasant to watch the hundreds or so enjoying their own thing together. Alphazero and Nobel prize winner Dennis Hassabis was also playing Othello but I cannot recall whether I played him (he was unknown then) or whether I finished above him (unlikely as I only scored 50% in the end despite a good start). I did, however, manage to befriend Aubrey de Grey from Cambridgeshire, a member of the British Othello Society and became a member, for which I received monthly e-mails for years to come. Nick and I had a great time and were there every day almost. I managed to juggle that and work commitments easily as they were mostly in the evening.
That was a very fitting finish to the decade. Both Nick and I were based in London that Summer and met many times over August and September after the Mind Sports Olympiad was over. Sometimes that was on Baker Street as he had a flat just off it, sometimes Soho. We used to walk around and never really talked about chess much but draughts we did as Nick had already trained in publishing and was producing literature on it, some of which I read. Although most of the decade was spent playing chess, it never really went anywhere and my interest gradually petered out as the decade passed and priorities changed; other than represent Anglia at junior level in a Jamboree in Bury St. Edmunds in March 19904, my achievements never were worth writing home about, I am not reluctant to tell. I certainly never played for England nor did I play on the board next to the world champion either! I never did apply what memorization ability I had much with chess either as it often played second fiddle to learning the lyrics to all the songs I liked and always listened to; the following decade I most certainly did with Cribbage (learning all the stats regarding both discard tables), Texas Hold ’em Poker (learning percentage play, and lesser so, how to calculate outs effectively also), and Scrabble (learning to memorize all the 2 and 3 letter words, 4 letter words I did not attempt but all the words that began with high scoring tiles, especially the letter Q I printed out and carried around my office as late as 2008). What does this all mean? Nothing much really except chess was just one of many board games I played that decade, as was the case in the preceding decade, and the one before that. The principle difference being it was the first I began reading about and the only one I became school champion of. As a promising junior it became more of an obsession than something I was relaxed about, as I invested a disproportionate amount of effort in it. All this helps me understand why I no longer play competitive chess, have no interest in improving myself, and play only for pleasure as that is how all board games should be played: that is how it began, and that is how it should end in my humble opinion.
Verse 4
Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?Robert Frost -Relutance
M J M
- This is the only publication of Kierkegaard that I can recommend. I used to read it on the beach in California in 98, having completed a course on him one year prior to that. ↩︎
- This has been out of print for decades now and the information online regarding the author isn’t correct either. That book was sold by presenting him as the British and not European champion and signed accordingly. I’ve always said it is by far the best book written on that game and the only one you need to read. the content is uncontestable. ↩︎
- In this post Nick recounts his conversations with Dr. Marion Tinsley, the all time draughts great, and details our interest in that game much further than I do here. I do need to issue a caveat, however, the previous month I had suffered a major accident and was far from myself, this can be seen quite easily in the swriting as it is highly impulsive and without forethought, that accident is referred to in it accurately. A nicer way to put it all is that aside, generally, the post is very tongue in cheek, as the title suggests. https://mccreadyandchess.com/2016/11/09/breaking-news-village-reputation-tarnished-by-two-chess-snobs-dressed-up-as-nazis-chatting-away-in-a-chip-shop-for-more-than-half-an-hour-tsk/ ↩︎
- I was the first from Bedfordshire to win that morning, team captain Paul Habershon shook my hand with a smile on his face for doing so. My opponent was not terribly strong and rated 130J only, he dropped a piece in the opening. I was white, it was a Sicilian Defence and he left a bishop hanging on b4, which I collected after a check with my queen on a4. It was a very easy win, achieved in that same yellow jumper I always wore down the library that year! ↩︎
Regarding the book Nick leant to me on Othello by Ted Landau, some pics I found on my facbook wall recently from it.
McCreadyandChess 