Blitz Addiction

My resolution to limit blitz in 2009 does not apply to OTB (over the board) games, or does it? I expressed it as "reduce online blitz," so the "letter of the law" permits endless play in schools, cafes, and clubs. These opportunities do not exist in my city. Nonetheless, tonight's chess club meeting features a G/10 tournament—it is blitz, but slow compared to the 3 0 stuff I play online, or the 5 0 events we sometimes do. The organizer of tonight's quick rated event told me it would be a round robin for up to twelve players. If more than twelve register, the event will be broken into smaller sections. I could have as many as eleven games.

While taking a break from work, I went online to play a couple of blitz games in preparation for tonight's event. I lost the first, badly. The second was worse. After three losses in a row, I knew I was in trouble.

That's how the addiction works: losses mean more play. The game plays second fiddle to the struggle for rating, for pride, for something. Whatever it is, I tried to capture it a few years ago in a paragraph intended to be the start of a piece of short fiction.

His heart dropped after the screen displayed the words “white checkmated”. After all, he was up a rook, had better position, and was rated much higher than his opponent. Nevertheless, his king was hemmed in by his own rooks in such a way that his opponent’s only remaining pieces—a bishop and a queen—were able to deliver checkmate. In his desperation, following this heartbreaking loss, he continued playing game after game, seeking redemption.

I never wrote more of this story—too revealing.

In the fourth game, I tried to run my opponent out of time in a dead drawn rook and pawn endgame. I lost on time in a dead lost position instead. I won game five and was challenged to a rematch. Easy rating points I thought, and accepted. The game was tougher, but I won it too. Thankfully, I was able to stop there.

The New Year's Resolution lasted two weeks.


Joseph Henry Blackburne on Addiction and Chess

Edward Winter's exceptional Chess Notes column on 7 January, "Chess and Alcohol," carried an image of an 1895 republication of an interview with Joseph Henry Blackburne. The article was published first in the Daily Chronicle and then in Chess Player's Chronicle; Winter reproduces it.

The reporter asked Blackburne whether chess is "the intellectual pastime that some people declare," whether it has a place in schools, and whether perhaps it might even serve as a substitute for geometry. Although the question seems a bit over the top, Blackburne's answer serves a cautionary footnote to the efforts of many (including me) who push chess into the school curriculum. The reporter might have asked whether it could supplement or precede the study of Euclid (original works in geometry), rather than replace such study. Would Blackburne's answer have differed? We cannot know. But the truth of his remarks ring true in any case, at least they do when we consider the widespread ailment known as an online blitz addiction.

Blackburne said, in part:

Decidedly not. I know a lot of people who hold the view that Chess is an excellent means of training the mind in logic and shrewd calculation, prevision, and caution. But I don't find these qualities reflected in the lives of Chess Players. They are just as fallible, and as foolish if you like, as other folk who don't know a Rook from a Pawn. But even if it were a form of mental discipline—which I take leave to doubt—I should still object to it on the ground of its fatal fascination. Chess is a kind of mental alcohol. It inebriates the man who plays it constantly. He lives in a chess atmosphere, and his dreams are of gambits and end games. I have known many an able man ruined by Chess. The game has charmed him, and as a consequence he has given up everything to the charmer. No; unless a man has supreme self-control it is better that he should not learn to play Chess.

It has been years since I've read Alexander Cockburn, Idle Passion: Chess and the Dance of Death (1974), a book written in the wake of the Fischer boom in the United States. As I recall, however, Cockburn's argument against chess seems almost a book length meditation on this brief statement by Blackburne.

Chess is intoxicating, blitz especially so.