2001-11-03 - 11:09 p.m.

The Kings of Chaos

I woke up this morning around 10 a.m. I had this funny feeling that I should be doing something. Then I remembered: holy smoke, I'm supposed to be at a chess tournament!

As I've mentioned before, I'm a chess journalist and I cover chess events big and small for the local paper here.

There's an annual scholastic chess event that bills itself as "The Capital District Championship," although it's really held in a small town about a half hour south of the state capitol.

The town has the curious name of Coxsackie, which I suppose is how some Dutch settlers garbled some Indian name a couple of hundred years ago. It's the sort of name that people with dirty minds who like to make puns could play with for hours and hours. Luckily, I don't know any people like that.

But I wonder: what do people who live there call themselves, Coxsackers?

Heh.

But it really is a sweet little small town, so that's the last joke I'm going to make at their expense.

It's one of those small rural towns with just one main street, lined with a few dozen lovely Victorian houses. It goes without saying that the biggest building in town is the church. The streets were alive with late fall color, and the drive down there was very pleasant.

The tournament was held at the local high school, and for the sixth year in a row, I managed to get lost on the way there. I suppose in a small town there's no reason to put up signs directing people because everyone knows where everything is.

As it turned out, I wasn't as late as I thought I was going to be - the first round was just getting underway when I walked into the gymnasium.

The fellow that organizes the tournament is a very nice man that I've mentioned before who helped me out when I was teaching my ill-fated chess class back in the Spring. And this is also the first scholastic chess tournament I've attended since my debacle at the State Championship last February.

Gee, who would imagine that a kids' chess tournament could have so much emotional baggage?

I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but in my opinion, chess is getting "Soccerized." That is to say, there are lot of kids playing chess, but adult interest in the game is dwindling. It must be a perpetual source of frustration to professional soccer players and fans to see all the kids that play the game in school, but who wouldn't even consider it as an actual career once they graduate.

It's the same with chess. All the top U.S. players are either in their forties (like me, relics of the "Fischer Boom") or are émigrés from the former Soviet Union.

And as a result, more and more of the money that goes into chess is being funneled in scholastic events, to the detriment of professional chess.

One of the cliches that people use to sell chess to schools is "Chess makes you smart." Yeah, it makes you smart alright: smart enough to realize you'll never make a living at it.

Well, I suppose it's better than no chess at all. End of rant.

Anyway, in spite of everything, I had a great time at the tournament. I spent the most time watching the top two boards in the High School section. Some very interesting games were played there.

The top-seeded player was a little nine-year-old boy named Andrew. A former nationwide Elementary champion, Andrew was playing with the big boys because kids his own age are not really that challenging to him any more, at least the kids around here. Not only is Andrew nine, but he's a little nine-year-old, so he looks even younger. However, his small size notwithstanding, he's the closest thing to a natural chess genius that I've ever seen. As far as his chess-playing strength goes, I can still beat him fairly easily, but in a couple years that might not be the case.

The other kid that I was watching in the High School section was a boy named Scott. His family had recently moved to the area, and they all were pretty strong chess players. I believe he had two siblings that were doing well in some of the lower sections.

The tournament was four rounds long, and Andrew faced Scott in the final round. They both had perfect 3-0 scores.

Andrew, playing white, soon got a decent advantage over Scott. After a couple more mistakes, Scott looked to be in a terrible bind. Andrew was closing in for the kill, then he hesitated. He couldn't figure out a way to break into Scott's position, so he repeated moves and settled for a draw.

I looked at the game after I got home, and Andrew indeed missed a clear win. I suppose he agreed to a draw because he assumed that he'd win the playoff for first place. It's always bad to make assumptions like that.

There were three kids tied for first with 3.5-0.5, and they were going to play a series of blitz games against each other to determine first place.

To everyone's surprise, neither Scott nor Andrew won the playoff, rather it was a third boy named Will. I hadn't been too impressed with his other games, but when he sat down to play blitz it was another story. He was AMAZINGLY fast. I've seen professionals play blitz, and this kid was every bit as speedy and cold-blooded as a grandmaster.

His amazing speed totally unnerved Scott and Andrew: both of them lost their queens early in the game. Andrew almost struggled back to equality, but he was eventually ground down. Scott was just rolled off the board, and you could tell he was upset about it.

Both of them made the mistake of trying to match Will's speed, and that brought down the quality of their play a lot. Actually, I wondered how well I'd do myself against a speed demon like that.

All in all, it was a relaxing day and it gave me a more positive outlook on scholastic chess. The tournament was smoothly run and there were no disputes that I could see.

The tournament itself was in the gym, while the parents and the kids who were done playing stayed in the cafeteria. While I was there eating my lunch (a piece of pizza that looked like someone had found it lying in the road) I was contemplating the relaxed, small-town atmosphere.

Coxsackie is definitely a rural town, but most of the parents I saw there were definitely Capital District suburbanites with cel phones and the like.

There was a large mural painted on the wall of the cafeteria, featuring a black guy embracing a white girl. The caption read: "Love is blind? No, hate is blind." And then, in big letters: "TOLERANCE."

A nice sentiment, but looking around me I didn't see any black people at all. It's easy to be tolerant when the people you have to tolerate are not around.

On the wall of the kitchen, I saw a more typical sentiment: "Please and Thank You Spoken Here."

The kids who attended the tournament were from all over the area, and there were even a couple from out-of-state. However, by far the largest contingent was from Coxsackie, of course. You could tell which kids were from Coxsackie because they were wearing purple t-shirts that had chess pieces flying all over them, and on the back the name: The Kings of Chaos.

Those shirts are definitely cool. I think I want one. I wonder if they come in XXL.