The Unemployable Chess Player

  I sat across from the Job Fair lady at one of those long auditorium tables. Army recruitment was at the next booth and on my other side some creepy guy in a blazer was selling training in Real Estate. There were hundreds of booths and most were offering training rather than jobs.

   “So, what have you been doing since High School?” The Job Fair Lady continued. She didn’t like what I said about school, but she had one of those nodding smiles people put on when they think they’re being nice.

   “Chess.”

   “Chess?”

   “Yea, my uncle’s got a second-hand shop. It’s full of crap. Like electronics no one wants anymore. Oh, but he gets these computer chairs. Like, from offices that have gone out of business. These are good chairs. Cost you hundreds. And he’ll, like, sell them for fifty bucks each. It’s better than these things.” I shifted my bum on what seemed to be a cheap, unpadded, cafeteria chair.

   “Chess?”

   “Yea, I was at my uncle’s store and I found a chess set and it was in a tube. A tube. My uncle pulls it out and it’s got a fabric board. It’s vinyl. He flattens it out on his cash counter and then he’s got an old dusty chess clock. It’s made of wood. It’s two clocks in the same box. You wind it up the clocks and then you press the top button on your side and the other guy’s clock starts. He makes his move, hits his button, and then you’re your clock starts. You only got so much time to make your moves and if your time runs out, you lose.”

   “Did you do this professionally?” The Job Fair lady interrupted.

   “I got pretty far. I started playing with my uncle. I went to his shop everyday, because I wasn’t doing anything else with my life since High School. And my uncle says one day, ‘You got a real mind for tactical chess. You’re a real tactician, but you have to learn positional chess. Go to the Library and get a book on chess openings. Look at Ruy Lopez and Queen’s Gambit openings. The first five or six moves, so you’re not getting beat in the openings.’”

   “Did your uncle play professionally?”

   “Oh, he knew what he was doing. Like, I’d lose a game to him and he’d show me how I lost. He’d say, like, ‘Look, you didn’t develop your centre. The pieces on your Queen’s side couldn’t get out. See this? This is a Monk Bishop. You know why it’s a Monk? Because it can’t… it doesn’t…it can’t interact with the other pieces because it’s buried behind your pawns. It can’t come out and play. You see it's a Monk because it doesn’t…”  

   The Job Fair lady held up a hand to stop me from explaining any further. “What skills does chess give you that you feel would benefit an employer?”

   “Alright, you’re ahead of me. So, my uncle he teaches me about positional chess, touch move, openings, gambit’s, playing the man, en passant, oh, and he’d say, ‘Remember to make loud slurping noises when you take your opponent’s pieces.’ That was his joke. He didn’t mean it for real.”

   “Did you play anyone beside your uncle?”

   “Oh, yeah. I joined Hamilton Chess Club. They’re part of the Chess Federation. And they matter because when I started, I was an unrated player. And if you’re going to get anywhere you want to become a rated player. I played all these other guys at the Club for a while, and they said I was a fifteen hundred player. A new guy usually comes in at thirteen-fifty, but I was already at fifteen hundred player. An Expert is a two thousand rating, a Master is Twenty-Two Hundred, and a Grandmaster is twenty-five hundred. I entered my first Chess Tournament to get my rating.

   “Only the problem was the guys I had to play were from out of town. It was weekend tournament. Five rounds. One Friday night, two each Saturday and Sunday. Most of us still had wooden clocks. They’re moving to these quiet plastic ones. But we had wood.”

   The Job Fair lady made of face of what’s the difference.

   “If you slap your button on a wooden clock you can hear it across the church auditorium. I played this guy Friday night and my nose started running. I’m going to the bathroom for toilet paper to wipe my face because my snot’s about to drip, drip over the board. I beat the guy but he was unrated like me.

   “Saturday it rained. All day. My nose isn’t running anymore so much but my head is totally clogged. It’s just pounding. The guy I was playing was a fifteen hundred player and I slaughtered him. I can’t even remember the game. The evening guy had a seventeen-fifty rating. The day was going on forever and I couldn’t sit still waiting all the time.

   “These guys took forever to make their moves. You had the clocks, but it was like you make forty moves in ninety minutes, and then a half hour to finish the game after the ninety minutes. If you both used most of your time the first forty moves could take almost three hours. That’s almost four hours to finish the game if you’re both taking eternity to checkmate the other guy. The games were taking forever and I was sick as a dog.

  “The girl I was playing that night was taking twenty minutes for each of her opening moves. Like, if you know your openings there are only so many moves. Most players can do their first four or fives moves in two minutes because they know the openings. I don’t know what this girl was thinking in her moves. I kept running to the bathroom because I thought I was going to throw up all the time. I even went out for a cigarette in the rain. I know smoking makes most people sick, but I was smoking to stop from being sick.

   “I beat the girl. Then as I was packing up, she wants to go over the game. Compare our moves. She gets real upset with me that I don’t want to relive all that crap again.

   “Sunday morning, I wasn’t sick anymore but still felt awful. I brought a newspaper to the tournament. I was playing an Expert. A two thousand player, or close to. I didn’t expect to win. I tried not to trade any pieces with the guy. I tried to keep all the pieces in play and not make it easy for him. Mostly, I read my newspaper. He was another guy who took forever. There’s a strategy where you use your opponent’s time to think of your next move and save on your clock time. But I’m not that bright. I waited for him to press my clock and then I’d think about my move.

   “Then something I wasn’t even thinking about happened. He got up and stood looking at the chess board like he was afraid to leave it. He was shifting on his feet back and forth. He had to go to the bathroom. It was like he was afraid to leave the game. He kept studying the board. Then I saw his clock time. Fifteen minutes left in his first two hours. He had made twenty-seven moves so far. My clock only said twenty minutes. I had only used twenty-two minutes to make the same number of moves. This Expert had only had fifteen minutes to make thirteen moves, or he would lose the game.

   “He really had to go to the bathroom. I figured at this point if he was this wound up about leaving the board it wasn’t because he had to pee, it was because he had to have a sit down in the bathroom. His hand hovered over his queen but he knew not to touch it. Touch move. If he moved his queen, he was dead. He looked like he was going to burst. He moved his knight. It was the safe move. He rushed to get to the bathroom.  

   “Okay, so, this next part, I couldn’t help myself. I had used his time to think of my next move and I made that move and I slammed the wooden clock button. You could hear it through the church auditorium. He stopped next the restroom like a cartoon character and turned around and ran back to the board. He tilted the cock to read his time and hovered his hand over different pieces on the board to try to make a quick move. Finally, he didn’t make any move. He walked away from the board.

   “When my opponent returned from the restroom he looked like he had definitely relived himself, but he had only eight minutes left to make twelve moves. I folded my newspaper and got down to business. He slapped his moves quick now and got in under the limit. Now it was thirty minutes for the rest of the game. He beat me.

   “When it was over, he wanted to show me all the ways I almost had him in trouble. Whatever. Then he shook my hand and said for no one else to hear, ‘That was very rude of you.’ He was right. I didn’t know what to say to the guy. Then you know what he says? ‘It’s rude to bring a newspaper to a chess tournament.’

  “Last guy I played had a lower rating and we played to a stalemate, and after the tournament they calculated my rating as eighteen-fifty. I was near being an Expert, my first tournament. I mean, they didn’t agree, but I saw it that way.”

   The Job Fair lady looked at me. “Do you play now? Are you professional?”

   “Oh, no, nothing like that. You know at this tournament there were guys and girls who carried encyclopaedias of chess moves with them. Thousand of pages. It’s like they’re walking around with Bibles. I can’t do that. My brain can’t stretch that far.”

   “So, this was a hobby? Nobody paid you? You couldn’t make a living at this?”

   “Well, I wouldn’t know how. I wouldn’t want to.”

   The Job fair lady nodded. “That’s interesting.” She said and smiled in that way that she thought she was still being nice. “Now, what have you been doing since High School?”