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Recommendation: Avoid Playing Chess with Your Girlfriend

Added: January 30, 2006

Please.

I write in an internet cafe that has a chessboard. Various people use it from time to time in a completely harmless way, but every now and then things get ugly.

The title of this article is not cleverly symbolic like "Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance", or "Don't Check Your Email in the Morning" - the title of this article is extremely literal: "Don't Play Chess with your Girlfriend".

Particularly in public.

Really.

It unfolds in absolutely positively exactly the same exact way 100% of the time.

Phase 1 - Innocence
A nice looking couple enters the cafe, gets coffee and then realizes that they have some time to kill before the movie/dinner/event/obligation begins. They look around for something to do, see that all the computers are taken, and then notice the chess table sitting there. They sit down innocently enough "Hey, let's play some chess - Yeah, that will be kind of a cafe-ish, salonish, bookish cool/young/intellectualish thing to do - Yeah!".

They sit down and set up the board, trying to find all the pieces and remember whether the knight starts on the b file or the c file. They joke, they chat, and soon they have things figured out and are ready to get started with the game. So far so good, right?

Wrong.

Our happy couple has just past the last exit off the freeway headed for Disasterville, population: them.

Chess is not a "fun" game, like "Trivial Pursuit" or "Twister" folks...no no no. Chess is a represenation on 64 squares of power in its rawest possible form. If it was introduced into the market today, the tagline would be "Chess, the exciting new game of domination over others!". Its like tennis, only meaner and with more strategy. You don't just win at chess, you destroy your opponents civilization, you burn their cities down, you rape their women and kill their men, you crush the very essence of their will with sheer force, and then ride off to the next valley leaving nothing but smoking ruins.

Trust me on this guys, this is not the kind of analogy you want to get into with your girlfriend.

Phase 2 - The Game
So, having carefully set the stage for a perfectly catastrophic experience, the couple gets started with the actual game. Usually somewhere within the first few moves the woman notices that something is not quite right, but at first she can't quite place it. The conversation dies out, the man's respiration changes, his eyes dialate, and soon it is apparent that a hefty syringe full of some dramatic mood altering substance has been injected directly into his jugular vein. This is the crux of the scenario, this is the magical divergence when the man and the woman have been sucked into tiny black holes under the chessboard and blasted out of separate Quasars 15 trillion miles apart. She is still in the year 2006, moving funny pieces around a board enjoying a bit of unstructured time with her partner before the movie starts. He however, has travelled back to a land long past filled with mud, horseshit and the stench of death. He has entered full-throttle Euro-psycho mode, and is going to show her a thing or two about how to burn down cities and slaughter civilians.

He proceeds to kick her ass at chess, without the slightest shred of mercy. He is mildly amused at the suffering of his prey, and the futile attempts it makes to escape. He ponders how long it will take it to stop struggling as it is slowly crushed to death in his steel jaws of destruction. He clucks his tongue at her inability to escape check. He gleefully blurts "No no nooooo, can't go there honey!" as she struggles to get out of the noose. He smiles knowingly when she says with genuine shock "You...are...so...mean! after one of her outlining villiages is put to the torch. Soon its over, and his pawns are busily sacking her burning capital. She looks at him with shock and sadness as he pumps his fist in the end zone after winning the grotesquely imbalanced match. "Yessssssss!" he says, and then hastily resets the pieces. She continues watching him as he puts the pieces back in their ranks and feels every milimeter of that 15 trillion miles that now separates them. He finishes setting up the pieces and looks up wolfishly: "You want to play again?". There is a brief pause, and then he seems genuinely baffled to realize that instead of being impressed by his savagery in a game of conquest, his girlfriend is exibiting a frightening combination of anger and sadness.

Fellas, it doesn't matter what you do or what you say from now on: the evening is fucked. You just analagously threw your girlfriend in a muddy puddle, stepped on her neck and held her head under water until she stopped struggling, despite her gurgling pleas for mercy. The meal is going to be fucked, the movie is going to be fucked, and, most of all, the sex is going to be fucked (or un-fucked) - probably for several days. Whatever satisfaction you might gain from crushing your hapless girlfriend/wife/partner at chess is not worth the short/medium/long term price that you will pay.

You will pay. It will suck. Don't do it.

If you senselessly pound her at chess for no reason at all (in public), you'd better expect that she is going to be upset, just like she would be upset if you tripped her on her way to pick up her coffee, or if you gave her a good solid shove in the small of the back when she wasn't expecting it.

So, if you are ever in a coffee shop and the chessboard is free, and your girlfriend says "Hey let's play chess!" just say "No, I don't want to do that right now" and find something else to do.

Oh yeah, don't ever mention it yourself either.

I'm sure there are super-duper chess whiz girls out there who can crush their boyfriends. After witnessing so many disasters this would be an amazing catharsis for me. The best scenario would be if the boyfriend delivered a couple of beatings to his date, and then the girlfriend's friend walked in and it turned out she is the total chess-shark ass kicking machine. She watches a game or two, kibbitzes with the girlfriend, denies the boyfriend his prey, he gets irritated and challeges her to a game, then she proceeds to quietly and efficiently lay waste to the very foundations of his psyche until he just has to quit in disgrace. Ahhhh...sweet fantasy!

P.S. As I was finishing this up in the cafe just now...guess what played out on the chess table right in front of me? They went through it by the numbers - Phase 1 - Phase 2 - Fucked. Another night ruined...Aaaack!

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