I don’t know when I learned how to play chess, but it must have been somewhere around third or fourth grade.

I definitely recall playing chess with Wayne Busbea, one of the neighborhood kids when we lived on West Main Street in Richland. He usually won. But then he was a couple years older than I was.

Chess was supposed to be a more intellectual game than checkers, or at least that’s what I thought, even though they were both played on the same kind of game board, and as I was a bright kid, I thought I ought be be good at playing chess. I knew I was a bright kid because everyone told me I was. That’s how I knew I was bright.

I remember playing chess with my uncle Reed as well, and he usually won. Of course, he was three years older than I was.

And I recall playing chess with Eric Blouch. As you can probably guess, he usually won. He wasn’t older than I was, but he was also one of the brighter kids. I knew this because he had an interest in science. That’s how I could tell he was bright.

Once I noticed the pattern that I usually lost at chess, I began to buy books on the subject. Opening moves and end game strategies and step by step listings of the famous chess games.

They didn’t help.

I remained a mediocre chess player.

When the new Elco High School opened and suddenly there were more activities available, I joined the Chess Club. Whatever I thought that would be, I don’t know, but what it turned out to be was—we all just sat around and played chess.

I stuck that out for a few years before quietly dropping out.

Because I had gradually come to the conclusion that I was never going to get any better at chess. Apparently whatever brightness I may or may not have possessed did not extend to the playing of chess.

Actually, to a large extent it didn’t extend to the playing of just about any game or solving so-called brain teasers or whatever.

But with chess there are several problems.

Number one: I really don’t think in visual terms. I mean at all. To be good at chess I believe one has to be able to visualize the pieces on the chess board and what they will look like after several more moves are made. I can’t do that, at least not very well.

Two: I can’t (or at least I don’t) plan more than one or two moves ahead. And really, most of the time I’m not sure I even plan that far because— 

Three: I just can’t take the game that seriously. Not chess or any game really. I mean it’s just a game.

So even if I am (or was) bright (and the opinions on that are by no means unanimous), that doesn’t mean I have to be good at playing chess. I got rid of those chess books decades ago. Every now and then I’ll try one of those computer chess games to remind myself how bad I am, but the last time I played a human opponent was probably sometime in high school.

In case you were wondering about the title of this post, in the May 1962 edition of Worlds of If Science Fiction there appeared a story by Fritz Leiber with that title. It seems to have fallen out of copyright and has been transcribed at Project Gutenberg.

“The 64 Square Madhouse” revolves around an international chess tournament that features an advanced chess-playing machine. This was before any computers had been programmed to play the game. As is usual for Project Gutenberg works, it’s available in a variety of formats for various e-readers and html for web browsers.