Testimonial | The chess player in times of pandemic

For years looking at chess pieces aroused as much emotion in me as looking at a rock. I couldn’t understand how I could devote so many hours of my youth to this game.

Simon Gravel
Journalist at the desk at La Presse and chess master

Then came the pandemic and with it boredom, lack of interaction and stimulation. It had been fifteen years since I played my last tournament, during which time my thirst for competition was quenched through sport.

The first parts were unconvincing. All the players seemed to know more than me. During my absence, chess had changed.

In my early days, I had to ride an hour on the subway to the Chess Specialist and face class B players there. Today, I open my computer and thousands of players from all over the world, from beginners to grandmaster, are ready to fight. Would you leave a child unattended in a candy store?

My first setbacks should have discouraged me, but there is no better bait for a competitor than defeat. Rather die than admit defeat.

To improve myself, in the past, I studied books by laboriously reproducing the variants on a chessboard. Today, it is no longer even necessary to move the pieces, the choice is vast between video, timed problems or instant analysis by computer; we would be crazy to do without it.

Quickly, I found my level and even more. So why stop on such a good path? Let’s continue to see how far we can go. Especially since it only takes about ten minutes to play a blitz. And in the evening, you can fall asleep lulled by the voice of the great master Nakamura dissecting his parts live.

The Queen’s Gambit

You won’t be surprised to learn that chess has experienced a phenomenal boom in popularity during the pandemic, which the success of the series no doubt contributed to. The Queen’s Gambiton Netflix.

Everyone has seen this series, but few people know that the character of Beth Harmon is very strongly inspired by the career of chess genius Bobby Fischer, who did not take drugs, as far as I know, but whose mental balance was fragile to say the least.

We don’t really know if chess contributed to making him crazy. As far as I’m concerned, I must admit that I was addicted. It’s not that chess is inherently bad, but unfortunately there are only 24 hours in a day and each one can only be used once, so choices have to be made…

After two years, I stopped all chess activity. I only give a few lessons to a student whose devotion to this noble mind game I admire. He too tells me that he sometimes loses sleep over it.

He cheated

Hey, hey, chess is all over the news these days. Did young prodigy Hans Niemann cheat in his game against world champion Magnus Carlsen? And if so, how did he manage to get the punches from the computer without getting caught in the act? Niemann says he’s ready to play naked to prove that he didn’t cheat, which wouldn’t prove much, knowing that according to one theory, the blows were transmitted to him using anal balls…

The chess.com site seems to have settled the question thanks to a very thorough analysis of Niemann’s online games. Conclusion: he would have cheated in at least a hundred games, which should disqualify him from any competition, in my opinion. Because in chess, a well-known saying states that the threat is stronger than its execution. In other words, the mere fact of suspecting his opponent of cheating makes confrontation impossible, because the idea that he has access to a computer calculating millions of moves per second makes us completely paranoid.

On the other hand, I disagree with Carlsen that cheating is an existential threat to chess because 99% of games are played with no stakes other than honor and what glory is there to win mere humans using a chess engine?

One thing is certain, of the hundreds of tournament games I’ve played, the only one where a significant amount of money was at stake was completely legal. I will never know, on the other hand, if it was the fact of playing for $10,000 that had made my opponent crack or if he had been distracted by my tie on which was printed a superb nude by Gauguin.