Championing Chess Why A Sixth-century Game Is Thriving In The Age Of The Video

You want to know why chess is still around after all these years? Because chess is a game of stories. Like this one from a recent tabloid: Man loses chess game, becomes enraged, grabs his opponent's queen, swallows it and dies. Wow. Can you see anyone getting so worked up over a Monopoly game that they eat the little flatiron?

And can you imagine any other game spawning so obviously apocryphal a yarn as this one: It's a sunny day in 1492 and Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain are brooding over a thorny chess problem. They are confounded and at wit's end and in no mood to talk to anyone, especially Christopher Columbus, who comes tiptoeing in with a teensy, weensy request for a king's ransom to finance a voyage to the edge of the world and beyond. They give him the royal treatment and tell him to beat it. For a moment it looks like America will never be discovered and no school child will ever get Columbus Day off. Then, the man bold enough to believe the world is round and not flat, peeks over the chessboard and says something like, "Uh, knight to queen-six, mate in three." The king and queen look up, astounded. They exchange glances. They are thinking the exact same thing: Lose the Italian. Moments later the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria are weighing anchor and Cathay is just over the horizon.

There's more. Napoleon, who loved chess, was very, very bad at it. And yet, for some reason, he seldom lost. That's because his opponents, showing profound chess wisdom, always opted for "The Waterloo Gambit," whose chief tenet was to resign as soon as it appeared they were about to beat the world's worst loser.

And please, let's not skip over the instructive story of my college roommate, a lumbering math major named George who loved chess and thumped his massive chest regularly on his way to checkmating every student and proctor in our dorm. He was three moves into a game with Carlos, a scrawny freshman from Puerto Rico, and he was clearly enjoying his mastery over the game, over life, over his friends. Carlos spoke up, in a soft, polite voice: "George, how long you been playing this game?" George flicked ash from his cigarette and chuckled expansively to the little circle of reverent observers, "A long time, Carlos. A long time." Carlos shook his head, sighed, pushed a queen into place and announced checkmate.

No one tells this kind of story about Tic Tac Toe or Chutes and Ladders or checkers.