Somewhere in the 80s I tried to learn the game of chess. This wasn’t really a success. Unless you have a natural talent, without getting the right information you just “do” something unaware of tactics like development of pieces. Basically, you move some pawns and after losing or swapping a few of them, you begin to place a knight or a bishop somewhere.
At the time
it was more or less a Russian sport due to the games between Karpov and
Kasparov.
Around a
decade later I met N., a young bloke who was in the first grade of the college
we both went to. I was in the third grade. He already knew my brothers who were
working with him at a supermarket in his village, which is situated
approximately 3 miles from my own little village.
Occasionally we would visit a pub or a disco. We spent a cool day in Friesland on a
farm, near the capital Leeuwarden but still in the middle of nowhere. In the
summer of 2000 we took an interrail voyage to North east France. That’s
territory which Germany stole in 1871 and France got it back in 1918. Nevertheless,
the area to this day still has a certain German ambiance.
On the 2nd of
July I asked the camping site manager of the whereabouts of a television set to
watch the Euro 2000 final. “Mais non Monsieur, desolé, il n’y a pas de television
ici”. I hitchhiked to the nearest city.
My friend had no business with football. He found a lovely blonde German
Madchen, A. and even though he had a crush on a “fille francaise” which affected our strange
trip from Strasbourg to Avignon, he began dating the German girl and soon
after, she moved to the Netherlands.
At the time,
I had only 2 routines for Friday night. The 1st: go to a pub with M., a friend
in Deventer. The pub in question is “de Elegast”. It was a joint with a typical
80s/90s ambiance where we’d drink quite a few bottles of Hertog Jan, beer from
the southern part of the Netherlands.
Those nights
normally ended around 3 or 4 AM, then I’d sleep on the couch and would return somewhere
in the afternoon to my own village.
The 2nd routine: visiting N. in Enschede.
The Enschede
Fridays were about playing chess via Yahoo accompanied by Grolsch beer and they
went on until early 2003 when I moved to Spain.
There are
plenty of stories I wrote about Spain. If you’ve read them, you already know
that my friends there weren’t into chess. Therefore we flash forward 2 decades
here.
I began a
chat with J., he is the father of my friend N. J. is a chess master and has
plenty of shelves filled to the brim with chess literature. He just said, well,
I’ll send you a few matches so you can replay them and practise the game.
At first, I
replayed those games in the 1988 Battlechess game by Interplay. Interplay made
the game attractive for people by putting cute animations in it. But the game
didn’t show any techical details.
J. spoke
about Chessbase, an application for your PC in which you can replay games or
write game files by yourself, know as PGN (Portable Game Notation).
A PGN can
contain one single game or over thousand matches from famous players. You can
find these files on www.pgnmentor.com
Instead of
simply writing the analysis of the games, I decided to add a science fiction
element: a time machine. Not just a simple device with an on/off button, no,
the machine reacts to music and displays on its screen the year a song was
released.
The device
is inspired by the 1972 Hawkwind song Silver Machine: “it flies, sideways
through time”
The machine
also features a map of the world in order to select the venue of the game. The
design of the map is completely outrageous. For instance, if you choose a
destination in an era where the USSR still existed, then you won’t see the map
of Russia, but the USSR map. Same goes with Yugoslavia, Germany, Hungary,
Austria and so on…
You’d
probably think, how do you power the time machine? We put solar panels on it.
This is more or less “stolen, or inspired” from the 1979 film Time after Time.
Now, who
is/was the best Dutch chess player? In 1935, Max Euwe played the championship
matches against Aleksander Alekhine and won. 2 years later, Alekhine regained
the title. But Max’ victory led to increased popularity of the chess game in
the Netherlands. Many clubs were founded in the mid 30s.
I “traveled”
to the 1930s and later on to the 50s, 60s, 70s etc.
When you open a game in Chessbase from a “database”PGN you’ll see the following
information:
Both
players, their ELO rating, a code (B90 for instance), the venue and the year of
the game, all moves and the name of the opening (Sicilian Najdorf for example).
After
reviewing several games you’ll know what a player ought to do if his King is
under attack.
As a kid you
think chess is just a complicated board game. But it’s a lot more than that,
There’s a whole culture behind it and I’m pretty sure the game has profited
from the modern online world. Chess has become more accessible than ever.
Many thanks
to my friend J. who still provides me with nice games from the past. Fetch yourself a Grolsch from the fridge, you deserve it!
