When it comes to chess, I’m the worst kind of one-trick pony: I know a single strategy, and I employ it every time I play anyone. If my opponent knows how to play chess, my strategy’s all-but-guaranteed to fail. If, however, I’m up against someone entirely clueless (read: even more clueless than me), then yeah, I can pull off a checkmate.
According to Wikipedia, what I do has a name: it’s the “scholar’s mate.” I never knew that. In my head I always referred to the strategy as “that thing I do.” But I’m not a smart enough dude to have independently discovered the scholar’s mate; I read about it somewhere. It was in 1994: that was when I was six years old and really wanted to get into chess.
My precise motives in learning the game have been lost to time, but I remember enough details that I can construct a narrative of sorts.
I think what happened was this: I wanted to one-up a nerdy guy in my first-grade class named Ben. I wanted to one-up the guy because he was nerdy. No one, I felt, deserved to be nerdy but me. I wanted a monopoly on nerdiness.
So when I discovered that one of the nerdiest things Ben did was attend the Kipps Elementary after-school “chess club,” I did the natural thing and joined as well.
The group’s leader was a “Mr. Gary.” When I signed up, he asked if I knew how to play chess. I told him yes; this was a blatant lie. That first day, I slouched in the back of the classroom where the club’s meetings were held and watched everyone play.
“Don’t be shy!” said Mr. Gary. “Play with someone!”
“Don’t feel like it right now,” I said.
Before the next meeting, I got my mother to take me to the public libray. I checked out several chess books. Most were thick, boring and daunting. With a heavy heart, I realized the horrible truth: even if I managed to learn the basic rules, chess was way too nuanced to master overnight.
But that was when I discovered the scholar’s mate. It was a simplistic, boneheaded strategy, and that was exactly why it appealed to me.
If you were playing white, all you had to do was push the pawn in front of the king up two spaces, freeing up your queen and one of your bishops. Then, on your next two turns, you’d send them out on diagonal vectors that left them perched on the board’s corners. Then you’d move in on the king with one of them. Instant checkmate, though again: that would happen if and only if your opponent seriously sucked. Did Ben seriously suck? As it turned out, yes.
Not only did Ben suck, but so did nearly all the other younger players in the club. Yeah, the fifth-graders and fourth-graders could see through my plans and destroy me, but I just avoided playing them.
I quickly gained a (completely undeserved) reputation as a chess master, and thereby took from Ben the nerd-crown that was rightfully mine. A few months later, I won first place in my age bracket at an interschool chess tournament. I still have my medal. It’s one of the few awards I’ve won in my life, and it’s not even a legitimate award: I didn’t win it because of skill.
I spent the next several years of my life under the insane delusion that I was good at chess. It wasn’t until I became a teenager that I gained the wisdom necessary to understand what my real skill was. I wasn’t good at chess. I was only good at faking being good at chess, if I played the right people.
It doesn’t just stop at chess. This is the way I live. If it looks like I’m actually proficient at something, you are not looking hard enough.
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