Gary and I started playing chess again last weekend. I say again only because Gary used to play a lot when he was in school; he taught me the basics a few years ago, but I never played that much. Anyway, some how we got it in our heads that it would be fun to play chess, so we bought a $5 chess set at the toy store last weekend.
I vaguely remembered the rules; I remembered how each piece moves, but that's about it. Gary is an excellent teacher. After a quick review of how to set the pieces up and move them, we played a game. I beat him! Of course, I should mention that he started with a handicap (no queen) and he helped me develop the strategy.
When he taught me a few years ago he bought a massive book of chess puzzles. It has every known mate-in-one and mate-in-two position, so supposedly if you solve all the puzzles (there are several thousand of them) you've seen it all, as far as end-games are concerned anyway. I think I've solved about 30 so far. Unfortunately it's a big book, so you can't carry it around with you and solve a puzzle or two while waiting on line at the grocery or bank. Well...I guess you could, but you'd probably gain more in upper-body strength than mental acuity.
Encouraged by my interest, Gary started doing research into computer chess games and elegant chess sets (we're not above playing with the $5 set--which also included checkers and backgammon--but it's not as nice to offer guests as an elegant wooden set.) He already had a copy of Chessmaster 8000, which he installed on his computer, but not mine (wrong OS...the only thing that is wrong is the sound, which really isn't a big deal to me, but the game refuses to start because of that.) Personally, I am not a big Chessmaster fan. They have ok tutorials, although some are confusing and given in the wrong order, and they have a terrible collection of chess pieces to choose from. There are some for which I couldn't tell the difference between a pawn and a bishop (bad) or the king and the queen (very bad!) He ordered a program called Fritz, which is supposed to be a lot better, but I don't know what its tutorials are like. Fritz doesn't arrive until next week, so I've been playing with Chessmaster on and off this weekend.
Chessmaster allows you to play games against ranked opponents. This sounds intimidating until you realize that the lowest human ranked player is a little girl (ranking of around 25) and the lowest ranked player in the game is a chimp who moves his pieces randomly (ranking of 1.) I beat the chimp, although not as easily as I thought I would. And I beat the little girl two games out of three (but Gary helped me with one of those wins.) Gary and I teamed played against the little girl a few times (we alternated taking turns) and beat her badly. While Gary is a much better player than I am, occassionally I'll see a move that he doesn't.
You're probably wondering why we don't just play against each other; after all, we have a perfectly serviceable $5 chess set. We're both sick; Gary is recovering from a bad cold, and I just started getting one Friday night. So, we haven't quite felt up to the challenge of playing against each other. And there's a certain amusing sastifaction that comes from beating a little girl in chess.
Posted by Jen at May 11, 2003 08:51 AM