My Personal Queen's Gambit - How I Fell In and Out of Love with Chess and Needed 20 Years to Come Back

One of the surprise TV hits of last fall was Netflix’s miniseries series The Queen’s Gambit.

The show was (like most things on Netflix) well-produced and got a lot of things right about the “Game of Kings.” And it achieved something almost impossible; it made Chess look cool. I binge-watched the show and it brought back a lot of memories.

Unfortunately, there was no Netflix in the late 80ths and 90ths, so I was a rather uncool Chess-playing German teenager for most of my youth and adolescence.

I learned Chess from my dad when I was around six or seven years old. I have always been quite competitive, and playing games or sports that we made up was one way to spend our father-son time.

I guess I learned the basic rules of Chess relatively fast and not so long after found myself playing the youth championship of our cities’ chess club. A teacher colleague of my father just had started a youth program. That was likely how I ended up there. If my memory is right, I finished 9th out of 10 participating, playing three draws in matches that I dominated but could not find a checkmate and losing against better players. Anyway, I got a shake-hands from the town’s mayor and a certificate, which was at that point the greatest moment of my first seven years on this planet.

From then on, I joined the chess club, played in youth teams and the successful school team of my high school.

Coverage of our less than stellar performance in the German national championships for school teams 1992.

For 13 years, Chess was an integral part of my life. In regular weeks I had chess club training Mondays from 4 to 6 pm, one day per week was a meeting of the school’s chess club, and on a lot of weekends, there was a match on Sunday (usually 10 am), either with the club’s youth or senior squad. So through most of my youth, I played or trained at least twice, often 3-4 times a week. Later, I also served as press officer of the club and ran the youth program for the last two years before my high school graduation.

I was a decent player but not great. I never won an individual tournament and only reached a few third places in small local events. My biggest successes came as part of either the school or the club team. We won the state championship with our high school team in our junior year and came in subsequent years a few times close to repeat that feat. Unfortunately, we never managed to get past our arch-rivals from Hannover again and never got the chance to improve our result of coming up 16th of 18 teams in the nationals.

With the club’s youth squad, we were once promoted to the second-highest youth league in Germany (Landesliga). The year of the promotion and the season playing state-wide youth league were also my best seasons.

I was sacrificed for tactical reasons, playing at position three of the eight-player team, moving our better players subsequently lower to increase the chances. Nobody expected anything from me against opponents with much higher rankings, and I scored some surprising points and boosted my rankings. On that level, most opponents were well versed in the majority of openings, having memorized whole libraries. I was not and therefore played somewhat unorthodox, frustrating some opponents.

It’s not that I did not try to study different openings. I collected chess books with the best intentions, but it never felt like I could retain the information.

Not Wired the Right Way? Contextual vs factual memory.

The way my brain, in general, seems to work is much more in terms of context than in the factual, not just in Chess but also in other situations, like studying for history exams. I always remembered the big picture and how historical events were connected, and how they reflected the Zeitgeist. But no matter how hard I tried, I could not remember the exact dates for the most important events.

For my chess game that meant, that I was not up to my peers’ level in terms of opening theory. Playing white, I almost exclusively played d2, c4, Queen’s Gambit. I never really got comfortable playing anything else, and with all the problems I had with memorizing theory, I could compensate with the match experience I accumulated with the opening. With black, I experimented much more, playing at times French defense.

Interested in more Life-Sparring Chess Content? Here is my unboxing video of the Chessnut Air Smart Chessboard

Through all my time as a chess player, I never was fast. Rapid chess matches (school chess tournaments usually were played with 30 minutes for each player) often got me in trouble with the clock, and at Blitz Chess (5minutes per player or less), I was generally hopeless.

I never lacked endurance, though. Even as a very young player, I did not mind long grueling matches. The standard modus for league chess and adult tournaments was two hours per player for the first 40 moves. Looking through the local newspaper archive, I found an article that mentioned me playing a draw for the B youth squad in a match that lasted five hours. The article is from November 1991; I was just 13 years old. According to Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky, Chess Grandmasters could burn up 6,000 calories per day, and I can attest to Chess being a demanding endurance sport, but it never bothered me.

Unlike Beth Harmon’s brain on pills, my mediocre brain never worked as a chess computer, running smooth simulations on dozens of situations in parallel. For me, Chess always felt like mindfulness meditation. I constantly had to use my inner voice to call my wandering mind back to the table and to the specific problem I was trying to analyze. This internal dialogue is possibly why Chess occasionally can make you feel like you are losing your mind.

I would have to sort out my old papers on my parent’s attic, but if I remember right, I for the most time a DWZ score (the German rating system, similar to ELO or the system Chess.com uses today) in the 1400-1500 range: decent club player level but not much more.

My Harry Beltik Moment

In the end, it is hard to tell why I never broke through as a chess player. My inability to memorize situations and opening variants, a lack of discipline to study and do post-game analysis, and at the end, maybe even faltering under pressure and not believing enough in my ability, whenever I was knocking at the door to a big surprise win. You would not think that confidence would play a role in an analytic game like Chess, but for years not being able to beat my dad, despite being already a much more advanced player, made this very clear.

Chess, the Queen’s Gambit, touches upon this a bit with the character of Harry Beltik, is brutal as in letting you know very clearly your limits. It feels as if the mind is a cup with a fixed size. While training and experience can fill up the cup, there is not much that can enlarge the cup itself.

This was the main reason I walked away from the game, quite similar to Harry.

I have always been competitive and enjoyed measuring myself against others, but at the same time, Chess occupied a lot of real estate in my life, for something I would never be first-class in. And, of course, there was the challenge not to be completely uncool. For most of my late teenage years, I had to balance going clubbing on Saturday night and playing competitive Chess on Sunday morning. While I never was a big drinker, I had a few Beth Harmon moments, playing my Sunday morning matches with a slight hangover from the night before.

In 1998, after graduating from high school, I did my obligatory 10-month military service and still played a few more competitive matches for the club. After that, I moved away to study and never touched a chess board again for 20 years. Without the move, the breaking up with Chess would have been more gradual. There was no chance to guilt-trip me into playing a few matches with the physical distance from where I was living.

My current stats on Chess.com - I am “LifeSparring” on the platform.

For 20 years, I played just 4-5 matches with a colleague after coming to Hong Kong in 2008 or 2009. Other than that, I didn’t play a single game from 1999 to when I suddenly decided to start playing on the Chess.com phone app in the fall of 2019.

Twenty Years to Stage a Comeback

I have no idea what prompted me to install the app and start playing. I guess I just wondered how good I still would be after all those years. I started playing on commutes, on the toilet, in bed and have accumulated more than 1,250 games, mostly Blitz (5 minutes) and Rapid (10minutes) matches. My current Rapid rating is 1644; my Blitz rating is significantly lower. I have not become any faster with age, and usually playing not in the most focused environment is not helping to avoid losing on time.

I am still competitive when I play. I am frustrated when I jeopardize a good position with a stupid move or overlook a win. But I am also much more forgiving with myself. Today I am able to see Chess as a game, an intellectual challenge for pleasure.

If you are playing on Chess.com and you are up for it, feel free to send me a challenge.