There are no men, women or children in The Estonian Chess Club who are my equals. They are all better than I am. The other day - as promised - I went, I saw and I lost. In fact, I got clobbered. And I had a wonderful time. My first opponent was Voldemar Jaanberg. Lembit Joselin told me that Jaanberg was in his nineties. What he did not tell me is that Jaanberg's rating is 1828. That is a very high rating. Mine is zero. The good news is that my rating cannot go down. The bad news is that it is not likely to go up, either.
What happened then is that during the three games I played with Jaanberg, he beat me six times. That is because during each game, Jaanberg made me take back a dumb move that would have made me lose the game two minutes after it begun. Due to Jaanberg's generosity, instead of getting wiped out in six minutes, I got wiped out in ten minutes.
I do have an alibi. I know a little bit about the etiquette of chess. When you are playing against a superior opponent, you should let him set the pace. If he takes 10 seconds to make a move you should not take much more than 20 seconds to decide what your move will be - otherwise your opponent will get bored. Of course this is a disastrous policy for a player of my caliber. I need more than 20 seconds to figure out each move. I need about a week. And so I got clobbered, just as I expected. But despite the fact that I had no hope of winning, despite the fact that I knew that it was only a game and I was here to have fun, as soon as I sat down to play, I suddenly realized that I did not really want to lose.
Suddenly I became Sylvester Stallone in ROCKY. I knew I was hopelessly outclassed but that did not keep me from starting to hope, against hope, that if I could come up with one lucky punch - one brilliant move - I would flatten my opponent, shatter his confidence, and make everyone in the room start wondering if I was much better than I claimed to be.
No such luck. As I have disovered many times before, real life is seldom like the movies.
We actually did not finish the second game, because at one point Tani made a move that placed one of his knights in serious danger. He had already told me that while many players believe that knights are more important than bishops, he prefers to hang on to his bishops because they can 'shoot further'. Then, when he put his knight in harm's way, I suspected that it was a trap, but as it turned out, it was just a bad move on Tani's part. Following Jaanberg's example, I suggested that Tani should take back the move he did not really mean to make, but he refused and I now know that I must be man enough to follow his example the next time I find myself in a similar situation. Not only that, I must also be man enough to surrender - as Tani did, when he felt that he had lost too many important pieces and was going to lose the game. The truth is, of course, that if Tani had not surrendered, he probably would have won.
My third opponent was Paul Kunstimees and for a moment I thought I had a chance. He began with an opening that I was actually familiar with - it's called 'Narr-matt' in Estonian - a 'Fool's Checkmate'. Knowing what Kunstimees was up to, I tried to make the appropriate countermoves. But Kunstimees knew more than I did. He soon demolished my defences and instead of finishing me off in four moves, he did it in six. So what will be my next move?
I guess I'll go back, maybe once a month to start with, and see if I can teach myself to believe that winning isn't everything. It's not going to be easy, because I'm one of those people who is inclined to feel that winning is the ONLY thing. But I'm going to try, because I know that chess is good for the brain. You have to concentrate and you have to think. And getting all that mental exercise may well have a lot to do with the fact that Voldemar Jaanberg neither looks nor plays chess like a man in his nineties. According to some sources, chess was invented by the General of an army in a famine, to keep his soldiers from mutiny. It would not surprise me if his plan worked. What I know is that a lot of people used to keep calm by playing chess during the war. People played chess in air raid shelters in Tallinn, in 1944, and people played chess in boxcars, in the spring of 1945, when we were travelling through Germany, towards the Western Front, hoping to get there before the Red Army got to us. And the fact is that chess is like clean air. Just because there isn't much of it around these days, it does not follow that it is not good for you.