A walk in the park with the chess teacher

It was raining hard in Montreal. I was walking to the Sherbrooke Metro station with a friend of a friend whom I had met only the night before. We both wore raincoats slicked with water and shuddered when the wind gusted up on our faces. He explained that he is a chess teacher. Not just a chess player. A chess teacher. And not some do-gooding, part-time, after school community centre teacher. He is a full time, professional chess teacher. With long brown hair and a five o’clock shadow, he’s not a thick-glasses-wearing nerd that you might expect. He spends forty hours a week teaching children one of the oldest board games on earth.

For me, chess is and always has been torture. In grade six, I made a brief appearance at the Bedford Park chess team. In the afternoons, I’d square off against a fellow classmate. Picture it: two squares squaring off through a game of black and white squares. I always lost. Badly. No matter how many books I read or quick tips from peers that I got, my opponents were able to annihilate my poor wooden pieces in mere minutes. Starting with a few pawns, my bishops, rooks and queens were routinely slaughtered, knocked over, raped and pillaged. Not to mention my ego.

I never played much again until I spent time traveling through Asia with my friend Jeppe. During the long hot waits for delayed busses, he’d pull out a small portable chess set from his backpack. We’d crack open a few beers. We’d set up the pieces. And in minutes, I’d lose. He’d laugh. I’d come back for more. He’d win, he’d laugh. Repeat.

“Wow you really do suck,” he’d say with his famous Dutch honesty.

They say chess makes you smarter. I wondered what that mean for me. I decided to stick to other games. Like hockey.

Back in Montreal, our walk continued through Carre St. Louis. We weaved past the deep puddles, and chose our route through the walkways. I explained my chess deficiency.

“That is because you don’t know the true game of chess. You must have passion for it. Chess is a beautiful game. Like music. You must play it like music. Each game has its own rhythm, its own movement. It’s not always about winning. You must feel the game and then go from there. It is a truly magical and amazing experience every time.”

I explained that I never had time to study strategies.

“That is only a small part of it. You have these competitions that my students enter. They play will passion because that is the first thing I teach. You must first show how to love chess, how it moves before the technical parts. In competition they play against Chinese kids who have been playing since age 3 who practice four hours a day! Sure, they play well. But there are no Chinese chess masters at the elite level. They get to a point where they cannot go any higher and the reason is that they don’t have that passion to take you all the way… technical skill is 80% and 20% emotion. But if you lack both you never love or succeed at chess.”

Thinking back to the chess team, and Asian casualties, I realized I never even played chess properly from the start.