In the summer of 2018 I flew from Japan back to England with my 15 year old daughter so that she could attend a summer theatre course called "Theatre Train."
It was a week long course and it nicely coincided with my summer vacation and with the British Chess Championships, which were being held in the same week, but in the East Yorkshire city of Hull.
Although I'm keen on chess, I'm not a member of a chess club, and I don't have an official chess ranking of any kind, but I had entered one of the open chess competitions that runs alongside the main event, an "afternoon open" for players rated at "1750 and lower" - in other words, the lowest level tournament at the championships.
After dropping my daughter off in Ipswich on Monday, my challenge was to get to Hull in time to play my first game.
The clock was ticking down and the race was on...
Well, I made it in time for the game, and lost to a 15 year old club player.
It was the fourth time that I'd attended the British Chess Championships (and the fourth time I'd brought my daughter to England to attend a summer course) so I had got to know a bunch of regular players, both amateurs and professionals, all of whom were much better at chess than me and from whom I was able to learn a lot while quaffing pints of nappy ale at the local hostelries during evening sessions of post-game analysis.
Although it was my fourth time at the British Chess Championships, and my third time to enter an open competition, it was my worst ever result as I lost every game.
Not only that, but three of the four games were against teenagers who got progressively younger as the week progressed. On Monday I lost to a 15 year old boy. On Tuesday I lost to a 13 year old girl. On Wednesday I lost to an older guy, the only adult I played against in the competion, and then on Thursday I lost against an 11 year old girl.
Now, although it would tick a lot of old guys off to lose to an eleven year old girl, that last loss is actually one of my favourite and most memorable tournament games.
Two days before losing the to the eleven-year-old, I made a video looking at the game I'd lost to a thirteen-year old, and included some thoughts on how I had not let the clock tick down enough before making a move:
In short, I had been playing at the same pace as the youngsters. As I had been losing games it was likely that I would be up against an even younger youngster on Day 4. I therefore decided to play much more slowly. My reasoning went like this:
Youngsters play quickly. They get impatient when they have to wait. Just consider how ticked off Juliet gets when the Nurse is so slow to tell her the news that Father Lawrence has agreed to marry her and Romeo...
So my cunning plan was to go slow on every single move and wage psychological warfare on my young opponent who, I expected, would get bored and impatient and bang out a bad move that I could exploit.
And so, armed with this key strategem, and the White pieces, I felt confident that I could avoid a whitewash.
However, things did not quite turn out as I had hoped.
It turned out that I was up against one of the world's slowest juvenile players. So there was I, playing slowly, and there was she, the little minx, playing even slower! I found myself locked in a competition to see whose clock could tick down more per move.
When I made a move I would leave the table and wander off somewhere so as to lengthen out the time my opponent would have to wait for me to make a move. But when I returned to the table I found that SHE had still not made a move!
Not only that, but she began to wage a far more devious form of psychological warfare than anything I - in all my years - had experienced before...
After a few moves she leaned in and whispered to me:
"As you don't have a rating, why don't you just resign?"
She did that several times during the course of the game, and our whispered exchanges across the board drew some frowns from players on nearby tables.
Her demands that I resign were quite funny because I had built up a nice position for myself and I was certainly playing my best game of the competition.
When I got into this position which (as the white bar to the right of the board shows) gives me a nice advantage, another unprecedented occurrance took place:
At this point, my opponent began to weep! Her tears kept pace with the tick of the clock.... tick, drip, tick, drip, tick, drip.
The thing was, though, all the time the clock was ticking, she was actually thinking quite hard about what to do and eventually found a good move.
Not only that, but her psychological warfare was paying off. A couple of times I completely forgot to hit the clock after making a move and so she was able to spend several minutes thinking while MY clock was ticking down and not hers. Of course, she knew that I had forgotten to hit my clock, and of couse, she kept quiet.
Had that not happened, it is quite possible that I would have won on time.
In the end, I screwed up a potential mating attack and my young opponent went on the win the game. By the time she won all but one of the other games in our tournament had finished.
Here is the report I posted on Facebook at the time:
I would like to have won, but I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of playing that young madam.
And if you think it is bad for a bloke to lose to 15, 13 and 11 year olds, spare a thought for the much more accomplished players in the major open who were losing to an incredible NINE year old boy. Even as he was beating highly ranked players, the clock was ticking down on his family's permission to stay in the UK. The whole family were at risk of being deported as his father was making less than £120,000. (Happily, thanks to the talent of their son, they were allowed to stay and receive UK citizenship.)
The name of that boy is Shreyas Royal and he is aiming to become World Champion before the clock ticks down to his 22nd birthday.
Check him out at https://www.shreyasroyal.co.uk/
Cheers!
David Hurley