Online Chess Heroes

Mthr fkr, a55hle, dum fkin american. I’ve been called many creatively-spelled names on Chess.com. One person told me they had fun with my mother the other night, and to tell her thanks. I highly doubt they’ve ever even met my mother. You’d think the idiotic trash talk that plagues the world of Xbox Live wouldn’t have infected the online chess community, but it certainly has. As anyone with an internet connection is well aware, anonymity seems to bring out the worst in people. I guess when you’re not sitting across from the person you’re playing, not looking at their face, when all you know about them is their screen name, it’s much easier to act like a complete asshat.

Now, I love online chess. Maybe love isn’t a strong enough word. I’m a bit obsessed with online chess. Chess.com is the first site I visit when I wake up, and the last site I’m on before I go to sleep. But I don’t really like the people on the site too much. I’ve come to find that most of them fit into one of a few categories. First, there are the outright hostile folks. The ones that make sure to tell you before the game what a terrible player you are. The ones that remind you during the game what an absolute idiot you are, and express their disbelief at your ability to even play the game. The ones that type out endless laughter and insults at the end of the game, despite the result, and tell you to have a good night, mthr fkr. These are the true scum of the online chess world.

Then there are the inconsiderate players. These folks usually don’t type anything during the game at all. They don’t respond to anything you say, they just play the game. Until they don’t. Drop a piece, stumble into a forced mate sequence, or just plain don’t like the way the game is going, and they’re off. Disappeared into the abyss of the internet. But not without leaving the game open in another tab so that you have to sit and wait, watching their time tick down. This isn’t too bad, I guess, but it does get on your nerves when you run into a string of these players. Suddenly you’ve been online for an hour but you’ve only really gotten to play for twenty minutes.

But there are those few, those select few, that actively go out of their way to make the online chess community a better place. When you’re playing one of these heroes, you usually realize it early on. They start the game with a simple “Hi :)” or a “Gl!” (Good luck!) and invariably end it with a “GG!”, regardless of their personal satisfaction with the game. With these players, online chess is no longer an anonymous, impersonal experience. You start to realize that you’re playing a game with another human. You’re both sitting down, often thousands of miles apart, and playing chess together. Testing each other’s ideas and plans. Helping each other get just a little bit better at the game you both love. It’s a strangely intimate experience.

I ran into one of these players recently while playing blitz chess on Chess.com. In these racing, often messy, 10 minute games, you can’t expect much forgiveness from your opponent. I’ve lost many games on nothing more than a mouse slip, accidentally clicking the square next to the one I meant to click. This match seemed like just another one of those games. I had tried to trade queens with my opponent, but ended up clicking the square directly in front of his queen. So rather than capturing his queen, my queen just sat there stupidly in the middle of the board, just waiting to be picked off. As far as I was concerned, the game was over. I had lost my queen with no compensation and my king would likely be lost, too. But then I noticed the chat box next to the game. My opponent asked me if I had misclicked. This was unprecedented. I’ve misclicked literally hundreds of times in my online chess career, often to my immediate demise, and this was the only time that someone had questioned it. I quickly explained that I had indeed misclicked, and that my intention was to trade queens. He then harmlessly moved his knight, allowing me to follow through with my plan on the next move. Clearly, I was playing a hero of the online chess community.

Chess: A Gentleman's Game?

In the golden age, Chess was widely accepted as a gentleman’s game. A game of honor and dignity for the noblemen of society. But for a gentleman’s game, chess competition can sure get ugly. In LA recently, two tournament players got into an argument over their game. Rather than doing the gentlemanly game and asking the tournament director to mediate their dispute, they took a different approach. They started jabbing each other with pens. Not a very respectable way of resolving their differences, but satisfying nonetheless. Ungentlemanly behavior is not a recent development, either. Sixteenth-century Ruy Lopez (of the famous Ruy Lopez opening) took a decidedly ungentlemanly approach to give himself the advantage in his games. As much as possible, he’d insist on playing outside with his opponents, where he’d position the board so that the sun was to his back, and directly in his opponent’s eyes. Gentlemanlike? No. Effective? Certainly.

The chess giants of the late 19th and early 20th century, too, had their fair share of erratic behavior. Alekhine (of the famous Alekhine’s gun setup, in which the queen is positioned behind two rooks so as to form a “gun” and shatter the enemy's defenses) once found himself in a losing position. After accepting his defeat, the noble Alekhine chose not to resign. Instead, he simply hurled his king across the room and walked out of the tournament hall. Nimzovich, the prodigious author of My System, too, found himself losing his tournament game. Nimzovich at least had the honor to resign his game like a true gentleman. But then he got up on the table, dropped to his knees and shouted “Must I lose against these idiots!”.

Modern day International Master Jeremy Silman has found himself playing against quite the gentlemen in his years playing chess. One of his opponents brought a coke bottle full of tequila to the board with him. When the game went south, he simply drank the bottle and moved his pieces around like a blubbering fool until he was checkmated. In a London tournament, Silman’s opponent found himself on the precipice of defeat. Did he resign? Well, sort of. He slowly pushed all the pieces off of the board and onto Silman’s lap and then, without saying a word, sauntered out of the tournament hall.

So, is chess a gentleman’s game? Well, it may have been played by noblemen and gentlemen for much of its history, but their behavior while playing was often anything but. Chess is a fierce, stressful fight, and often your opponent will snap after losing such a battle. I’ve never experienced such extreme ungentlemanly behavior first hand before, but I’m terribly excited for my first run in with it.