The Chairman of the Board

Part I: The Green and White Chess Board

We had this closet when I was a boy that was overloaded with the strangest and most wonderful stuff. If you’re old enough, you might remember the old “Tennessee Tuxedo” cartoons. If you’re not, well, let’s see, how can I explain them?

Tennessee was a penguin who would regularly escape from the zoo with his walrus pal, Chumley, and then they would get into all sorts of trouble. Like, you might ask: What kind of trouble would a penguin and a walrus get into in this world? Well, it’s probably just what you guessed — scenarios such as, ‘They become weathermen, and a farmer shows up at the television station with a shotgun and demands that they make it rain,” or “they mistakenly apply to work for a gangster as skydivers.”

Inevitably, Tennessee and Chumley would go see their friend Mr. Whoopee, the man with all the answers. And Mr. Whoopee would help by teaching them how to get coal out of the ground or the principles of irrigation or something else that, in retrospect, seems unrelated to the general habits of penguins and walruses.

But before Mr. Whoopee could teach, say, how hot air balloons work, he would need to retrieve his magical three-dimensional blackboard as a visual aid. He kept the three-dimensional blackboard in an overstuffed closet, and now we’re finally getting to the point — every time he opened the closet door, a hundred random things (a goldfish bowl, an archery target board, a television, a tennis racket, books, a birdcage, numerous balls, dolls) would crash down on Mr. Whoopee’s head.

That’s exactly the sort of closet we had when I was a kid.

I realize that’s a very long setup, but that closet was a centerpiece of my childhood. All of our board games were in there, my father’s bowling ball was in there, a bunch of ratty old baseball gloves and baseballs were in there, I recall golf clubs being in there (though nobody played golf), and skis (though nobody skied), old magazines were in there, playing cards, dice, toys, batteries, puppets, screwdrivers, magic tricks, magic markers, magic beans, action figures, paintings, trophies, medals, Halloween costumes, life preservers, candles, kazoos, pocket watches, protractors, crayons, snow globes, random padlocks, tape recorders, old-fashioned compasses like Magellan probably used (the closet might have had a compass that Magellan ACTUALLY used), ant farms, barber scissors, transistor radios, stuffed animals won at the fair, microscopes, seashells, hula hoops and PEZ dispensers.

This is not anything close to a complete list. All I can say for sure is that whenever anyone in the family needed something out of the ordinary — like, say, a miniature model of the Parthenon or a human skull — my mother would say: “Look in the closet. I think there’s one in there.”

Somewhere in that closet was a chessboard. Well, it wasn’t actually a “board.” It was green and white and made of some sort of rubbery material so that you could roll and unroll it. My father would rummage through that closet every week or so (risking a bowling ball falling on his head) so that he could pull out that rollup board and give me my chess lesson.

Dad was a master-level chess player in those days, with a rating that at one point topped 2000. These days, there are a lot of 2000-rated players in the U.S. and the world, but back then it was a pretty rare height. I’m not sure how many people in America back then were 2000-rated chess masters and also 200-average bowlers like my father — that had to be a pretty small club. All I can say is with any confidence is that if you start your filtered search with “2000-rated chess” and “200-average bowler” and then throw in “former semi-professional soccer player” and “credible amateur magician,” Dad would have been the only one to show up in that filtered search.

There were many father-son chess lessons through the years, but I have strong memories of only one. It was a Sunday afternoon, and I recall it being uncommonly sunny outside, particularly for Cleveland. It was probably summer. My father unrolled the green-and-white board on our dining room table. The dining room was a little enclave next to the living room but we didn’t dine there (nor did we live in the living room — it was off-limits). We did play all our games in the dining room, though, from Yahtzee to Life to Mille Bornes to the Guinness Book of World Records game to this old Parker Brothers board game called Careers.*

*Careers was a family favorite. I do not remember any of the rules, but I do know that the general goal was to find a career for yourself. What fun! I also recall there was a sports track, where you could try to become a professional athlete or, if that didn’t work out, a sportswriter. Art imitates life!

On this particular sunny day, my father laid out the chess board and then put just three pieces down — the white king, the black king and the black rook.

“OK,” he said. “Try to mate me.”

In my memory — which is in the faded colors of 1970s television — I kept trying to check the king using only my rook. You cannot get checkmate this way. The king will always have an escape route if you use only your rook (and if you’re not careful, the king eventually will get close to the rook and capture it — as my father displayed several times in the lesson).

No, to get checkmate, you must do this intricate little dance — you must, using BOTH the rook and king, methodically back the opponent’s king to the edge of the board. Then, and only then, can you finish the game by forcing the two kings to face off, and then swooping in the rook for victory.

Dad showed me the pattern once, twice, three times, and I loved it. I absolutely loved it. For the next hour or two or five, who knows, I would have him reset the board, and I would slowly but surely checkmate him again and again and again.

I think about that day a lot. I think about how happy my father was — it was the one day when I was enraptured by chess as he was. Looking back, I don’t think I took to chess quite the way my father wanted. We have never talked about it, but I have always suspected that he would have liked for one of his three sons to be as fascinated by the Game of Kings as he was. And, alas, none of us were.

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See, the game was not only an escape for him, it was also, I think, his connection to the finer things in life. Dad worked in a textile factory six days a week; he fixed knitting machines from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. while a fire-breathing boss made unreasonable demands. When he came home, he was crumpled with exhaustion, and there was oil on his clothes, salami and cigarettes on his breath, and we kids would beg him to take us somewhere, anywhere, the park, the pool, the bowling alley, the backyard for a game of catch. In memory, he always did.

Peace came once a week. On Thursday night, chess night, he would sneak out and go to the chess club. Thinking back, I don’t believe there was a chess club building or anything official like that. It might just have been somebody’s house or or a rented room or the Arabica coffee house in Coventry, not too far from our house.

Wherever it was, on chess night, Dad would lose himself inside those 64 squares. I hitched along once or twice, and I can remember watching my father play, the way he would concentrate as he looked over the board, the stylish way he would capture pieces (all with one hand, he’d move the piece and then almost magically exchange it with the piece already on the square with a twist of the wrist, the way someone does when trying to spin a coin), the emphatic way he pressed down on the clock. Everything he did on. chess board felt — to me anyway — surprisingly athletic, graceful, deft and stylish. I would beam with pride as he sat at the No. 1 table and played against masters and even visiting grandmasters. That’s my dad!

He made it all look effortless — I never recall seeing my father actually practice or study chess. But we knew that he did when we were not watching. In the bathroom — we five shared one full bathroom in the house — we routinely found dog-eared books with names like “The Most Instructive Games of Chess Ever Played,” or “Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess,” or “The Immortal Games of Capablanca.”

You remember the scene in “The Shawshank Redemption” where the inmates are resurfacing the roof of the license plate factory, and Andy Dufresne explains to the captain of the guard, Byron Hadley (“the toughest screw that ever walked a turn at Shawshank State Prison”) how he can keep his inheritance money tax-free, and in return, Hadley gets bottles of beer for all the inmates.

“We sat and drank with the sun on our shoulders,” Red said, “and felt like free men.”

That scene has always hit me in the gut for reasons I had a hard time putting into words. It isn’t that my Dad’s life was like life at Shawshank. But I worked for a time in that factory. I felt how colorless it was, how lifeless it was, how wearying it was — not just physically, but mentally and emotionally — and as I got older I would wonder how Dad kept going through it all.

And it seems clear to me now: Chess was how he kept going through it all. Sure, there were other things — family and television and bowling leagues and weekly card games and such. But I think chess was that thing that was his, his lone connection to royalty, and I suspect that on Thursdays, chess nights, when things were going his way, when he was seeing the board clearly and predicting the future precisely and synchronizing his knights and bishops and rooks and pawns so that they formed an unrelenting attack, he sensed the sun on his shoulder … and felt like a free man.

Part II: ChessUp

Every single day these days — without fail — I watch at least one chess video. This habit began in the early days of the pandemic, when we all were stuck at home and perhaps questioning our connections with the world. The idea, at least at the start, was to become a better chess player … though, digging deeper, maybe the idea was to fulfill, at last, my father’s hopes and dreams. I don’t know. I’m not Freud.

It soon became clear to me that I simply do not have the disposition for playing chess. The strain is too great. Winning brings me little joy, but losing makes me feel like I have just embarrassed myself in front of the entire world. You certainly know that dream where you’re doing some ordinary thing like going to a meeting at work or going to school, only you suddenly realize that you’re naked. That’s how losing at chess feels to me, every single time. I feel naked. I loathe it.

Well, I should rephrase — LOSING doesn’t make me feel that way. If I somehow play well and somebody is just better than I am, that doesn’t bother me. But that’s rarely how it goes. No, I generally lose because I stink at chess, and stinking at chess means that I make the most basic of errors, blow winning positions, compound my errors with more errors, and it all makes me feel dumb and exposed and grumpy … or so my daughters tell me. I honestly don’t like myself when I’m playing chess.

So I really don’t play chess.

But I watch chess videos. Every day. It’s weird, sure, but it doesn’t feel weird to me. It’s like this: I love chess as a concept. I love learning chess. I love the beauty of chess played at the highest level and the hilarity of chess played at the lowest level. I want to understand the game better. But I don’t want to play it against people. Maybe it’s like someone who loves practicing violin but doesn’t want to play in public.

In any case, my YouTube page is basically just a bunch of chess videos, tennis videos, baseball highlights and the occasional John Mulaney bit.

You can really know somebody by knowing their YouTube page.

Some of the chess videos I watch are instructional — there’s a grandmaster here in Charlotte named Daniel Naroditsky who plays random people at various levels and walks us through his thought process in each game. I like those a lot. I’ve mentioned before my affinity for chess’ top streamer, Levy Rozman — who goes by the name Gotham Chess and has something like 1.5 million subscribers — and he is particuarly great at breaking down terribly played games that his subscribers somehow have the courage to submit to him. I like a streamer named Anna Cramling, who lately has been posting fun videos of herself playing against chess hustlers in the park.

And then there’s Eric Rosen, the most earnest of all the chess streamers. As far as I can tell, literally every person in the chess world likes Eric. That’s quite a feat, I should add, because the chess world seems to be overrun with squabbles and rivalries and clashing personalities. A lot of people seem to not particularly like a lot of people. But Eric is a super-nice guy as well as a wonderfully imaginative player, and watching his videos brings me many of the same good feelings that watching Bob Ross painting videos does.*

*In my life, there is simply no higher compliment. The reason there are no Bob Ross videos on my YouTube page is that I have literally watched all of them.

All of it leads to this: Three or four months ago, three things happened more or less simultaneously.

1. My father, who is now 80 and has not played any chess in years — he has talked repeatedly about how he has lost his ability to play — asked me to get him an AI chessboard that he could play against. I mentioned this in passing on a chess podcast.*

2. A woman grandmaster named Tatev Abrahamyan reached out to me, completely unsolicited and unrelated to any of this, to say some nice things about my work (blushing) and, not incidentally, that she was working on this new, futuristic AI chessboard that might be perfect to get my father back into chess.

3. Eric Rosen did a fun video with Tatev Abrahamyan about this very cool-looking AI chessboard, called ChessUp. The video’s title is: “This Chess Board Plays Like A Grandmaster.” As I watched it, I thought: Tatev might be right; Dad might really like this.

*No, I have no explanation why anyone would have me on a chess podcast.

Abrahamyan collaborated on the design of an AI board that could be a real game-changer.

I have not asked him, but I think one of the reasons my father began moving away from chess is that he doesn’t like online chess. That’s the rage now, two people playing on flat two-dimensional boards glowing off their phones or computer screens. But for Dad, I think, chess is a sensory experience — the feel of the pieces, the sound of them stomping on the board, the gorgeous visual geometry of a coordinated invasion. That’s why he wanted a chess board he could play against.

So ChessUp … it is the brainchild of a programmer living in Kansas City named Jeff Wigh. He was doing what many of us have done — struggling to teach his young daughter how to play chess. Most of us handle this conundrum by stopping in the middle and saying, “Who wants ice cream?” But Jeff calls himself a “serial inventor,”* and so he decided instead to invent a board that would teach people how to play and improve at chess.*

*Actually, his original idea was to create a Rubik’s Cube that would teach people how to solve it, but he soon found that it didn’t make a lot of financial sense. Chess was better.

And the ChessUp board is really something. The squares light up — not unlike the dance floor in “Saturday Night Fever” — and that is what allows the AI to do its work. Let’s say you want to play against ChessUp. Well, the board will indicate its moves by lighting up the square of the piece it’s moving and the square where it wants the piece to move. For instance, the knight starts on b8. If the computer wants to move the knight, it will light up the b8 square and also light up, say, the c6 square. Simple stuff. Our younger daughter, Katie, who only vaguely knows the rules of chess (she preferred ice cream) can easily play the AI side of the board.

But it’s the assistance side that’s really cool. See, you can ask the board for assistance — if you touch a piece, the board will show you:

(1) All the reasonable legal moves (blue)

(2) All the terrible legal moves (blood red)

(3) The absolute best move in the position (green)

Even the reasonable moves are ranked — the darker the blue, the better the move.

See, the board is set up so that you can even the odds between two players of different levels. After doing the video with Tatev, Eric Rosen did another ChessUp video where he played Levon Aronian, the No. 6 player in the world. Eric is a very good player, an International Master, but he’s nowhere close to Aronian. So he used the ChessUp assistance and managed to make a draw.

All of this seems super cool to me so, with the help of Jeff and Tatev, I was able to get a ChessUp board for my father.

The results have been … more emotional than I expected.

Part III: Dad Over the Board

One time, when I was 18 or 19 years old, the junky Ford Escort that I had paid way too much to buy started making some sort of horrible sound while I was driving it. I took it to my Dad who, it should be said, has no expertise with cars or their engines.

He opened the hood, rummaged around the engine, and fixed the problem.

I think about that from time to time because when I was young, I was sure my father could do anything. I know that many kids feel that way about their fathers, but mine really could do anything. He could fix anything. He could solve anything. He could build anything. He could make coins disappear and throw pop-ups that jumped above the clouds and make 7-10 splits and hit every target in a shooting gallery and mate with bishop and knight and probably rebuild a carburetor if the situation demanded it.

It’s harder these days. He has trouble walking. He has trouble hearing. There are other health matters that are better left unspoken.

When I first brought Dad the ChessUp board … well, being honest, he only seemed mildly interested. Maybe not even mildly. I reminded him that he was the one who had asked for a chess board, and he vaguely acknowledged it, but he still had this look on his face that was probably the look I had when my parents got me an electric razor for my 16th birthday. I knew I should have been happy; it was an expensive gift. But I wasn’t ready to be an adult. I wanted something more fun.

Is ChessUp child’s play? Apparently so for Zoe, daughter of Bryght Labs co-founder and chief design officer Adam Roush.

In any case, I showed Dad how it worked and he played a couple of games, but his heart really didn’t seem in it. I explained that the board works best when you connect it to the ChessUp app, and added cheerfully: “Hey, I’ll download the app for your phone.” Again, he seemed less than interested, though he finally sent one of his granddaughters to fetch his iPhone.

Alas, I couldn’t download the app on his iPhone … because Dad had the iPhone Negative-17. I didn’t even know that iPhones went back that far. I mean, I don’t want to say it was old but, yeah, it was a rotary iPhone. So I told him I’d get him a new iPhone that he could connect to the board, and he nodded, but if I had to rank my sense of how much he cared on a scale of 1-to-10, I’d probably say, yeah, negative-17.

At one point, he looked over his position, realized it was losing, and just said: “OK, how do you turn this off?” And that was the end of that.

“I don’t think he liked it,” I said to my wife and kids on the way home. They tended to agree. It was … just a little bit sad. It’s hard to say exactly what I was expecting. It’s probably too painful to put into words what I was expecting.

But then, something kind of funny happened. Mom called to say that Dad was playing the ChessUp board. Then she called to say that he was mad at the board because it was making bad moves (he didn’t know how to set it up and didn’t have the app because of his ancient iPhone). Then I went over to buy him an iPhone and he said, “Show me what’s wrong with my chess.”

So we went through it again — I connected the board to the app and set him up to play.

“What level is this?” he asked. I told him it was a super-high level (Jeff and Tatev and the folks at Bryght Labs are still upgrading the app so that you can change AI levels — this is all still very new stuff).

Dad nodded and looked over the board and opened by bringing out one of his knights. And the battle began. I’d like to tell you that it was a close game … but, as I said, the ChessUp level was super high. The computer slowly but surely began suffocating my father’s position.

But that wasn’t the part I was watching. No, I was watching my father over a chess board again, moving the pieces smoothly and almost soundlessly, tapping his fingers while he was thinking, grimacing a little when the AI made a move that he didn’t see coming. It was just like when I would watch him play all those years ago.

“That’s a blunder,” I said helpfully (or not) when he moved a piece to a square the ChessUp board marked red. He pretended not to hear me … or maybe he really didn’t hear me. Either way, he was not interested in the computer’s assistance. Blue squares. Green squares. Red squares. He didn’t care. He was playing chess again.

At some point, after 30 or so moves, the computer’s queen forked a pawn and a knight — fork meaning that it threatened to take both pieces. My father moved the pawn, he lost the knight and realized that the game was lost. “How do you resign?” he asked, and I showed him the resign button on the app. He clicked it.

“That’s too high a level for me now,” he said. He punctuated the word “now.” I suspect he meant that there once was a time when he could play at that level … but I didn’t rule out the possibility that there will yet be a time. He had the look again. I heard from Mom yesterday that he has connected his new iPhone to the board. And the game is on.

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