The Great Chess Caper

Pulling rank: payback’s a b!tch!

When I was about six, my father taught me to play chess. Within five minutes, I had the rules down pat.

If you are unfamiliar with chess, I hasten to make clear I am no prodigy. The rules are simple; genius — or lack thereof: hello! — pertains to how you play the game. (Nutritional analogy: knowledge versus practice.)

I played chess sporadically and pathetically for the subsequent fifteen years. I won on a single occasion, when I was nineteen, memorable not only because I won, but also on account of the auspicious circumstances. To which I am not proud to admit — my opponent, being blind, mistook his king for a pawn.

Fast-forward twenty-five years, midway into marital mistake #2. “Dick,” having determined to learn chess, reintroduced me to my long-estranged nemesis. (Our contentious history continually repeated itself over the subsequent several years, in synch with the contention in my marriage.)

Dick became proficient to the point that racking up no-brainer victories against me became tiresome. He went online in search of an opponent who would challenge him. Dick scouted sites that offered email “correspondence chess.” He signed up with checkmates.com and encouraged me to do same.

The way it worked was, our skill levels would be assessed, after which we’d be assigned starting ranks and partners of comparable proficiency. The evaluation was accomplished via back-and-forth play with a chess master on site. Rank assignment was determined by how many moves one managed to make before losing.

The courtesy default rank was 1000, which I was assigned after having fallen for “fool’s mate” — checkmate three moves in. My rank continued to drop with each subsequent game, until it reached the site’s nadir of 800.

Dick, being a decent player, got a respectable rank of 1400 from the start, which steadily rose to its peak of 1600.

A few months into our joint-but-separate venture, as our skill levels diverged ever further, I became increasingly irritated by Dick’s snarky references to our respective ranks.

Adding to my resentment were his snide remarks about my lack of improvement relative to his as to gaining racing speed. Despite a stringent training schedule, my pace had stayed steady. I consistently placed in the bottom half of my age division. Considering there were thirty-something women in my forty-something age group, my modest goal was to make the top ten. I never did.

… Until one day, after a race, Dick, having checked the posted results, bounded over in excitement and congratulated me; I’d come in ninth! He escorted me to the board so I could see for myself.

Indeed, I’d come in ninth … of nine. A distant ninth at that. Dick smirked at my dismay. Chortling in his mirth, he said: Gotcha!

That did it. I determined to get him back. I mulled sundry diabolical scenarios. After discarding those that would likely result in prosecution, I came up with an ingenious plan.

I painstakingly crafted an email, purportedly from the master-player administrator at checkmates.com, the one who tweaks the rankings in the course of our accruing wins and losses.

In my fabricated text, the faux master informed me that on account of my brilliant performance of late, I’d been assigned an advanced-level rating of 1800 — which trumped Dick’s intermediate-level rating by 200 points.

After fudging the source address so that the message appeared to originate from checkmates.com, I forwarded the email to Dick.

He sulked for two weeks, whilst I managed to disguise my delight by affecting condescending concern at his distress. I’d reassure Dick that if he kept at it, he was bound to improve. Eventually. Even if only modestly.

I never did ‘fess up.