Playing hard

Is it just me, or has everyone caught a summer fever?

There are a number of speed chess players in and around the part of MS campus that houses the .NET Framework and related teams. I'm definitely not a strong player. In fact, I was playing in a coffeeshop called the "Last Exit" around 20 years ago (now gone, it was the place for chess, backgammon, and go) and Steve Brandywine (spelling?), who I recall was Fisher's "second" at Reykjavik (Steve helped him prepare: he had an encyclopedic memory in the days before computers) was sitting at our table Actually, the tables were marble slabs that used to separate the urinals in a local police station that had been demolished, but that's another story. Anyway, some non-chess player happened to ask if I was a "patzer" (which dictionary.com defines as a "poor or amateurish player") and Steve quipped that I'd have to pick up a couple of hundred rating points to hit that level. At that was when I was at my best! Ouch!

Another time some guy walked up to my table, watched a bit, and then went up to the espresso bar (I followed him to order a drink) and asked "doesn't anybody good come in here?". Ouch again! The barista responded "sure, lots of good players. Yasser comes in a lot". The guy then asked "who's Yasser?". The barista said "Yasser Seirawan: he's the US chess champ" and the guy then responded "yeah, right, like he'd come in here". At the time, Yasser was sitting on the furnace (actually, it was the most comfortable place to sit). So...I introduced Yasser to the guy at the espresso bar. Who, it turns out, was a Seattle Times reporter and ended up writing a feature story about the chess players at the Exit. Of course, I wasn't mentioned. <g> Anyway, if you're interested, here's a link to a recent Seattle PI story that talks about Yasser, the Last Exit, and chess.

Fast forward to last month. I'm playing speed chess in the Building 42 cafeteria at lunch, doing pretty well in my declining years against - let's admit it - a bunch of patzers. Of course, these guys work on .NET security and the 64-bit version of the .NET Framework, so they're not exactly dummies. And a real chess player - his personal web site boasts "Expert chess player (peak USCF 2065)" - swaggers over and says "let me know if you ever want to play a real chess player". Well, of course he's going to kill me (if I had a rating, it would be perhaps 1600: he should win something like 199 out of 200 games against me) so he offered "5-5 rook odds", which means we both had 5 minutes but he started down a rook. OK, sounds like fun. And I win the first game. So he says "that really shouldn't have happened, lets' play again". And I win the second game. And he says "OK, I have to save my ego here, let's play straight up" (meaning no rook odds). And I win the third game! So he says - and this line has marked the begining of many a long, tortured path - "one more!". And I win the fourth game! And, gee, imagine that, it's time to go (inventing a meeting I had to attend) and I fairly run out of there.

And now this afternoon...

There are a couple of foosball tables in building 42 (which houses the .NET Framework and related teams). Normally, these tables seem to be in constant use but I walked by one today where there was just a single guy playing by himself. He saw me looking over and said "how about a game?". Then he looked down and drilled a shot in from the back, dropped the ball, caught it, and drilled it again from the middle. Then I noticed he was wearing gloves. I said "gee, maybe I better pass on that" and moved on.

As Kenny Rogers said, you have to "know when to walk away...and when to run".