Today’s players can compete instantly with each other from around the world.

James Pross was 15 years old when the most remarkable thing happened.

He beat his grandfather at a game of chess.

“I beat him that one time,” Pross says. “He was angry. I was actually surprised how angry he got.”

You can understand the old man’s irritation. An electrical engineer, Pross describes his late grandfather as mathematical and stern; a man who often had three or four games of chess going at once, often playing through the mail so he could take on world class players.

To be whooped by your grandson? Brutal.

But that’s the thing about chess: It’s the great equalizer. One of the oldest games in the world, it was played by ancient kings and lowly serfs. The global elite move their pieces around the boards, but so do inmates in federal prisons and tired men in homeless shelters.

In chess, it’s not who you are but how you play. And as Pross’ grandfather could attest, there is no such thing as perfection.

“Chess is a kind of life in itself,” says Dan DeLuca, “a crucible of learning that invites us to put our panoply of emotions, achievements, successes, foibles and failures under the bright lights of our consciousness to be examined. In this way we grow with every move, every game and every day.”

DeLuca is vice-president of ChessMaine, a statewide organization, both online and otherwise, that promotes a variety of chess-related activities across Maine.

“I don’t think there is such a thing as total mastery of anything, chess included. Players are always on the road to improvement and it’s a practice more than a destination,” DeLuca says. “There has never been and will never be an unbeatable human chess player. The greatest champions of the game, those on the vanguard of new ways of thinking about chess, pioneers in the field, all have lost many games on their quest for greatness. The current world champion, Magnus Carlsen, who has been dubbed ‘The Mozart of Chess,’ loses on occasion. Chess is too complicated, too infinite to be boxed into an always or never description.”

It’s easy to believe that chess has faded into obscurity, pushed aside by more high-tech challenges as computers and smartphones take over our attention. As it turns out, the interest in chess is as vibrant as ever.

Today, a player in Lewiston, Maine, can take on an opponent on the other side of the world, thanks to an abundance of computer programs and phone apps. If anything, the World Wide Web has caused a chess revival. Pross, for instance, was able to reconnect with his old college roommate, who had moved to Germany. They reconnected over online chess, engaging in battles of kings and queens, knights and pawns as if those miles and time zones weren’t between them.

There is also a generational aspect to the game, most players will tell you. Fathers pass the love of chess on to their children, who pass it on to THEIR children and so on through decades and centuries.

“Because my dad taught me, I have always has a special affinity for playing and studying chess,” DeLuca says. “In many ways, my relationship with chess rekindles memories of my relationship with my father — particularly now that he has passed away. It’s a very natural thing for parents to want to teach and instill in their children the lessons that can be learned through chess, lessons like hard work, determination, responsibility, resiliency in the face of adversity, curiosity, imagination and many other desirable qualities.”

Pross leaned from his father when he was 5 years old. He played most of his life, taking a pause while he was in law school, and then picking it back up again. When Pross had a child of his own, there was never any question that he would hand his knowledge over to her.

“I didn’t play a lot until I had a daughter,” Pross says. “When she was 5 years old, I wanted to teach her. It really reinvigorated my love for the game.”

Now his daughter is 6 and, as he watches her grasp of strategies grow, the question becomes: When will she be good enough to beat her old man? And how will Pross react when she does?

More on this later.

“I initially become interested in the game of chess because it’s been a family tradition,” says John Morgan, of Gorham, who was taught by his father when John was 10. “My grandfather is a lifetime member of the USCF (U.S. Chess Federation) and my father is currently ranked 7th out of all USCF members based in Maine.”

Even though his father infrequently played in competitions while John was growing up, Morgan says, “he was an active correspondence player. In fact, he would have 50 to 60 different games going at the same time, and would play against a variety of players around the world via snail mail. On any given day, he’d send or receive a batch of postcards in the mail, each with only one move notated on them. Chess was always around the house when I grew up.”

Jimi Cutting, of Lisbon, has a similar story about his chess evolution, with one exception.

“I was taught the basics of chess by my seventh-grade geography teacher,” he says. “I cannot remember why he decided to teach us chess, but that is where my start was. When I got home that night and told my father I had learned to play chess he sat me down, explained a little more in detail and my real chess adventure was well underway. To this day I have never defeated my father in a game of chess, my one claim to fame being I once captured his queen.”

No one masters chess

When the Boston Globe announced plans recently to end its regular chess column, the protests were so loud and numerous, they decided to keep the column.

On ChessMaine’s lively Facebook page, efforts are underway to get the game back into city parks – whatever happened to that iconic image of old men playing tortuously slow games in sunlit parks?

Several of Maine’s larger communities – Bangor, Lewiston, Portland – are blessed with community parks that still see quite a bit of use,” ChessMaine member Kevin Paquette wrote. “I’ve often thought it would be great if these parks could have even one chess table.”

Meanwhile, the Maine Chess Association, the Maine Association of Chess Coaches and a group in Portland called the Maine Chess Academy are all at work promoting chess in Maine.

That image of old men playing chess in the park? Forget that. It’s also a young man’s game.

Jenn Lagasse, formerly of Lewiston, says her son Cole’s enthusiasm for chess exploded when he started playing in a club at his Ellsworth school.

“He’s 13,” Lagasse says. “He’s been playing since he was about 9. He even played last year with these older gentlemen in California, at a mall with people-size pieces. It was nice to watch them play.”

The game is believed to go back at least to 6th-century India, and hasn’t changed very much in nearly a thousand years. It still demands deep concentration, quiet planning and forethought. No matter how much technology comes our way, chess remains a game played mainly in the intellect, a battle of intelligence rather than of force.

With the exception of savants,” says Cutting, “no one, in my opinion, is born with a natural talent to play chess, or rather have a natural understanding of the game. Patience and forethought are needed, but there are other skills as well just as important: the ability to make sacrifices, big or small; stamina to last through long games; (and) being able to change and adapt is just as important as forethought, as someone is always trying to thwart your plans. The most important thing is the realization that no one piece is more or less important than another. Yes, the King must be protected, however in terms of other pieces it only harms your game to get hung up on keeping the queen alive or not worrying what happens to your pawns.”

If you ever encounter a person who claims to have mastered the game, feel free to call him or her a liar. As DeLuca points out, even those who are considered masters can have a bad day. As former world champion chess player Alexander Alekhine said, a lifetime is not a long enough span to master the game.

Cutting agrees.

“You can never learn everything about chess. It is one of those games that changes as you age and as society evolves,” Cutting says. “Since the inception of the original game of chess, there have been many changes to how the pieces move around the board, eventually settling where we have the game now. However, just as your perceptions and ideas change as you age, so does how you view the game of chess. When you were younger you may have been a hard-charging, kill-every-piece, overwhelm-them-with-power player, but later in life you are slower, more thoughtful and set up traps instead of running a Blitzkrieg.”

Nothing hidden in chess

Chess is a quiet game, one where the silences between moves are as significant as the moves itself. There are tournaments and chess events all over the world, but they don’t tend to announce themselves with parades and tailgate parties. If you’re not a part of the chess world, you might wonder where the game has gone. But it hasn’t gone anywhere.

Not all schools have chess clubs, but some of them do.

“Chess is getting some more attention,” says Keith Hagel, who teaches middle-schoolers in the Waterville area, “because of some very promising young players.”

Are the chess clubs cool these days? Have they lost the association with socially awkward nerds who spend long hours mulling knights and pawns, queens and rooks while everyone else is at the varsity football game?

Pross doesn’t know the answer to that. A lawyer and a writer, he certainly seems cool enough these days, but he does remember his time on the school chess club and the social ramifications that went with it.

“There was a stigma associated with it,” Pross says. “To be on the chess club, that was something I struggled with. I was kind of nerdy, I guess. It’s really fun for me now, looking back at the ripe old age of 37.”

Chess is like war that plays out in slow motion. Each player starts out on equal footing – there is no element of luck to turn to, only strategy and the ability to out-think the opponent. DeLuca, who served as a chess coach, tournament director and board member of the Maine Chess Association before founding ChessMaine.net, says this sets the game apart from all others. There’s no luck-of-the-draw, no hole cards, no stacked decks.

“In the field of game theory,” DeLuca says, “chess is known as a game of perfect information – that is, each player can see all the pieces on the board at all times, knows the previous positions and, theoretically, has all the information with which to make a decision. Card games, on the other hand, where each player’s cards are hidden from each other, are known as games of imperfect information.”

As for Cutting, he still hasn’t defeated his father in a game of chess. Perhaps he never will, and you get the sense that Cutting would be fine with that.

“As for a dream opponent,” he says, “I honestly would not mind playing a game with one or more of the founding fathers, not because they were great players – for all I know they never played – but chess is the type of game where conversation is bound to occur and those are some brains I would love to pick.”

Morgan has had better luck playing against his dad. But only slightly better.

“I just beat him for the first time last spring,” he says, “a win that was decades and hundreds of games in the making. On the flip side, I look forward to when my 7-year-old and 4-year-old daughters are consistently beating me. My older daughter’s been playing for a couple years now, and my younger daughter’s just beginning to learn how to play.”

And Pross? His daughter is only 6 years old and it will likely be many years before the girl is able to topple her old man in the game he taught her. Pross ponders what it might be like when that day finally arrives.

“I guess I have to say I’ll be proud of her,” he says after a moment of deliberation, “for sticking with it and for beating her dad.”

Catch some tournament action

March 21: State Scholastic Individual Championships, Orono

April 18-19: Maine Closed Chess Championship, Waterville

June 27: ChessMaine.net Championship, Waterville.

Information about these events and others can be found at chessmaine.net/chessmaine/events

Chess facts 

* According to the America’s Foundation for Chess, there are 169,518,829,100,544,000,000,000,000,000 ways to play the first 10 moves of a game of chess.

* The longest game of chess that is theoretically possible is 5,949 moves.

* The first chess game played between space and Earth was on June 9, 1970, by the Soyez-9 crew. The game ended in a draw.

* The folding chessboard was invented by a priest who was forbidden to play chess. The priest found a way to hide his chess passion by making a folding chessboard. When folded together and put on a bookshelf, it simply looked like two books.

* Kirk and Spock have played chess three times on the show “Star Trek.” Kirk won all three games.

* The word “checkmate” in chess comes from the Persian phrase “shah mat,” which means”the king is dead.”

* During World War II, some of the top Chess players were also code breakers. British masters Harry Golombek, Stuart Milner-Barry and H. O’D. Alexander were on the team that broke the Nazi “enigma” code.

Source: www.chess.com

Chess in a nutshell

Chess is a two-player strategy board game played on a chessboard, a checkered gameboard with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. Each player begins the game with 16 pieces: one king, one queen, two rooks, two knights, two bishops and eight pawns.

Each of the six piece types moves differently. The objective is to “checkmate” the opponent’s king by placing it under an inescapable threat of capture. To this end, a player’s pieces are used to attack and capture the opponent’s pieces, while supporting their own.

In addition to checkmate, the game can be won by voluntary resignation by the opponent, which typically occurs when too much material is lost or if checkmate appears unavoidable. A game may also result in a draw in several ways, where neither player wins. The course of the game is divided into three phases: opening, middlegame and endgame.

Source: Wikipedia

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