Audrey Hepburn - Chess

Audrey Hepburn
May 4th, 1929 - January 20th, 1993
By Mark Anderson

I am not a superstitious man. I do not say God Bless You when somebody sneezes. I might say Gesundheit with a thick German accent but that has nothing to do with anything other than I learned German once. I don't cringe when I see peacocks hanging about a theater. The so-called evil eye in their feathers is really quite stunning; I'm quite happy to be seen by them near a theater or wherever. I carried a deuce in my wallet for years until one cashless, drunken night, I spent it on a coat-check. I adore my black cat who crosses my path any time she damn well pleases. Self-fulfilling prophecies. Placebo effects. You get what you wish for. It's all a matter of coincidence, if you ask me.

That isn't to say I have always been so clear minded. On January 19th, 1993, my mother and I decided to rent a movie. Amongst all the titles we came across Breakfast at Tiffany's. "Is Audrey Hepburn still alive?" I asked as Moon River began to echo in my ears. My mother wasn't sure. By the time we got home, we'd forgotten the whole conversation, having rented something else, probably The Hand That Rocks The Cradle.

Chess
By Michael Herman

Chess is an intricate game. Adapted from earlier Indian and Persian games, it uses an eight by eight checkered board to simulate war. Each piece can move in its own unique and individual way. The queen is the master of the board, able to move in any direction as far as she wants unless otherwise stopped. The bishop is limited along the flanks and moving in diagonal while rooks are shaped like castles but move like cannon shot in straight lines by column or file. The knights have the special skill of crossing over pieces in their way simulating the long distance attacks the makers of the game only saw in their infancy but knew what horrible terror they would wreck as warfare evolved. The pawns are limited in their destruction but share that countenance with the king. The mollis rex is too vulnerable to commit his own atrocities and gives his gauisus phasmatis on to his subordinates. Chess drives home its very simple yet important world to beginner and world champion alike: We may all be moved around the board by the hand of an unseen master but it is not without purpose.

I know all of this about the game and still I suck at chess. I can look at the board and look at my pieces and look at my opponent’s pieces and nothing comes out. No strategy, no master plan. I am the chess-master we fear in our own lives. I have no purpose to the game, quickly becoming bored with creating a defense or enamored with a ploy to capture a way-begone piece. The worst is when I lose patience with the game. It is when I lose patience I lose control. I become a rash mess and will make an unnecessary move which gives the entire game away. What makes it terrible is I know it is the wrong move as I make it. I’ve played enough games to know if I, for example, move a bishop to place the king in check but do not have a knight covering or my opponent can move a pawn to block the queen’s angle of retribution I should not move my bishop into check. But I will do it anyway, knowing full well my gambit will fail unless my opponent is either an idiot or being charitable. I do it because I want something to happen, some excitement to take me over. For a moment, my move seems bold like I’ve swung into motion an intricate and established plan which will lead to attrition, yes, but also ultimately victory. Really I am just throwing disruption into an otherwise ordered game, plotting to do something so remarkable it has to be memorable.

This is not the strategy of a winner. A winner knows the most important thing is winning. They will sit back and assassinate your pawns and rooks and queen slowly and methodically by waiting for opportunity to present itself and then capitalize upon it. To a winner there is no greater concession than an obvious mistake made out of impertinence. It’s a weakness for them to twist to their advantage and yet you are lucky if their eyes light up. A winner will not even give you the satisfaction of knowing you’ve affected them. The best you can hope fore is they lean forward and make sure their skills haven’t slipped to the point of missing something. You can imagine their interior dialog in that moment being racked with self-doubt and humbled by your adventurous fallacy. In most cases they will accept your piece without even a smile. They will sweep it from the board and wait for the anger to grow from inside you into another terrible idea. These are the players who can become champions.

I will make my move knowing it is not what a winner does. I will make it because that is what I do. There are many ways to win a chess game which go by vaguely Nietzschean names like zugzwang and zwischenzug or poetic license like The Fool’s Mate or The Sicilian Defense. There is only one way to play chess as I would and it is to sacrifice. Too many pieces clutter the board and I play better when I am in the open, free to move pieces in guided chorus from all points. It is the player who happily accepts my pieces I want to play because they are helping me to clear the board of theirs. Often the endgame doesn’t materialize until we are each down to a few pieces. They will have their king, their queen (which dogmatically is to be protected like a king), a rook and a few pawns. I will have my king, two bishops and a knight. From this point the game is exciting to me. The strategy reveals itself in its chaotic fervor to be one unlike the romanticized notion of war as organized and clean. Its ambiguity and chaos is like what infantry veterans describe as the fog of war. It is in this section of the game I can use to my advantage being foolhardy and free.

There has been only one player who has found a counter to what qualifies as my strategy. He was a classmate of mine and the first game we ever found ourselves in played out in a way I was left with my king, a queen and a pawn etching its way across the board. He had no pawns, only his king, his queen and a knight to his side. It was by luck I found myself in the position and really even it was more to my bravado than benefit. Still he looked at the board the way I normally would, not understanding how the things laid out in front of him all fit together. As I promoted my pawn and put him into check I could see he was already thinking of the next game. He tipped over his king and asked me to play again. I accepted and moved my pawn first. His next move was small and conservative. I moved my knight out from the rear. His follow-up was again small and conservative. I played my other knight into the middle of the board and again he was small and conservative. Then, after I brought my queen and he was yet again small and conservative, I realized what had happened. I had engendered a fear in him. He was fearful of getting beat by me again with my unconventional strategy. For all of its little intricacies and ideas of grandeur, my greatest advantage was the psychological one. I didn’t lose once to him for the next three years until his family moved away.