I HATE CHESS

Yeah, I hate chess. It’s not because I’m a bad player. I can kill the average player. I was a big fish in my little pond. I could go months without losing a game. My best friend called me a butcher. There was no finesse in my game. Cut off their arms and legs and taunt them before killing them off. That was my style.

But then I moved up in class and met players I could never beat once in a lifetime. That knocking on the door is reality. Don’t answer it.

But that’s not why I hate chess.

What happened was these Russians “modernized” the game. They reduced all the openings to rote. They analyzed the best response to every move in every opening and memorized the whole thing. *HERE* is a partial list of chess openings from Wikipedia. There are hundreds of openings and variations there. It would take years for me to memorize all that crap.

Well excuse me. Is that what I have to do just to get an even break? Is it just me or does that take a lot of the fun out of the game? Doesn’t that seem like a lot of work just to play a stupid game?

I wonder why they bother playing out the openings at all if everything is memorized. One guy can just say, “I’m playing the Center Game with such and such variation on move 7.”

The other guy says, “I will play so and so response in answer to that.”

So instead of setting the board up at the opening, they can set it up at move 14, since both players have agreed on their moves, and play the game from there.

That’s why I hate chess.