Kids crushed me at chess
Yes. I play chess. Terribly. I've been playing chess for the past 2 years. Improved a lot, learned some openings and tactics. At this time of writing I passed 1300 in chess.com but still not a competitive player over the board. When it comes to OTB, I’m a 900 player. But trying to improve.
I recently joined this chess community “Chennai chess club”. It’s not a serious chess club, we play chess for fun every Sunday at restaurants and IT Park. So I started playing with random people over the board.
A month back, the club conducted a team based tournament. Yes, I procrastinated a lot to write this one. Whatever, the idea of the tournament is to form a team of 4 within our chess community and compete against other teams. My team’s motto was “Play for fun, don’t care about losing”. Yes, we took it really easy and didn’t care about winning either. It was one of those rounds where we are paired with a group of little kids.
I know, I can’t underestimate kids. Kids these days are very smart. My opponent (I forgot her name) seemed cute and silent. Her hands are not big enough to move pieces while sitting. So she knelt down on the couch and played the whole game. We started playing, after like 10 moves, I already started feeling pressure. I’m taking a full 1 to 2 minutes per move, where she takes merely 5 to 10 seconds. I was doing all these weird calculations and seemed stressed. My king started running in the middle of the board, I’m trying my best to defend.
Usually I know if I’m going to get checkmated before one or two moves. But I didn’t notice a bishop sitting in the Andromeda galaxy. I moved my knight and thought that I’m defending well. All of a sudden that bishop came out of nowhere. She didn’t say anything, silently stopped the clock and asked me for a handshake. It took me 3 full seconds to realise that it’s a checkmate. Whoa!
I usually don’t feel bad about losing, so I smiled and started thinking where I made the mistake. Then she asked me “Are you FIDE rated?”. I said “Nope”. She looked at my team and asked “Who is FIDE rated in your team”. I said “None”. And she gave a sarcastic and pitiful look and moved on. I felt terrible! Really.
Then I took a break and waited for the next round to begin. This time we got paired with a team of 2 adults and 2 kids. Unfortunately, I had to play with the youngest kid on that team. You guessed it right, I lost! But you will not guess how terribly I lost the game.
He is also so short that he had to stand on the chair and play. He is faster than the girl who beat me in the previous round. It was a 10 + 2 match (means 10 minutes for each player with 2 seconds increment on each move). Same after 10 or so moves I started feeling the pressure and didn’t know what to move. I did my best. Suddenly I took a look at the clock. I got 12 seconds and he got 9 minutes and some 20 seconds. Yes, he is that fast. As my time was low, the pressure grew exponentially, I had to play fast.
The funny part is he didn’t have to play fast, but he did and blundered a triple-fork. His Queen and 2 rooks are forked by my only knight on the board. But he recovered fast and I simply didn’t know what to move and ended up losing in time. He had a full 8 minutes on his clock at the end.
Throughout the game, he played effortlessly. He was very casual, often looking at other people’s boards and play moves in 2, 3 seconds right after my moves.
And that’s the day I realised that I’m still poor at chess and need to improve a lot. Now I’m focusing on improving my middle games. Because that’s exactly where I get stuck. After 10 moves, I don’t even know what to play. And I make moves which give opponents a chance to attack and I get dominated after that.
These kids are truly amazing and I can say that they have very good careers in chess. But one thing always buzzes me. These kids have a lot of attitudes. I miss kids who are humble these days. I feel like coaches and parents of these kids should work in this part.
Whatevs, I’m not a pro chess guy. Just a guy who plays chess for refreshment and fun.
Checkout my account on chess.com - https://www.chess.com/member/dj_hemath. Let’s play!