Winter is the time for melancholy sport

KDo you name the book “The Art of Learning” by Joshua Waitzkin? Waitzkin was once a chess prodigy. “Searching for Bobby Fischer” is the name of a Paramount film about him. Waitzkin was no new fisherman, no American chess icon, he stopped thinking and turned to the Chinese martial art Tai Chi, in which he became world champion. In his book he describes the process that took him up to perfection. The key to striving for excellence, he writes, is an organic learning process and not living in a shell of static mediocrity.

Why am I telling you this? Because on a table in the corner of my living room there is still a chess board and a chess clock, both relics from last year. And now that winter is coming and it is getting dark again shortly after getting up, it is back again, the time for melancholy sport. In my striving for excellence, I am not thinking of following the path to martial arts that Waitzkin has chosen, rather the opposite path, to the chess championship. Finally: nothing is impossible.

I took the first steps in my possibly spectacular chess career last winter by staying undefeated. The trigger was the Netflix series “Queen’s Gambit”, which suddenly made half the world go crazy about chess. Soon there were no more boards to buy, no chess clocks. Pretty much everyone I know fell victim to the warming chess virus in the cold of winter and lockdown. My advantage: In my youth I played chess at an amateur level, and there were still a few textbooks on the shelf somewhere upstairs, in short, I was clearly on victory against kinship and friendship.

I regularly played video calls against a relative several hundred kilometers away. At first it was irritating that he was convinced that he could move two pawns one square each on the opening move. It was only after extensive internet research that my relative admitted the possibility that this rule must have changed since his last game to the effect that you could only move one or two squares with one pawn.

This is how my winning streak began, whether one on one on the board or via video, where you are right if you argue that my opponents may not be acting at the highest level. But haven’t the most famous boxers also fought their way to the top with opponents who were built up? In any case, the board and clock are still in my old place. Now I think her time will come again. My time.