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.
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