Four Losses in Twenty Minutes and Not One Blunder

7:48 p.m. Chess club, the back table nobody uses for rated games. Marek resigns a blitz game — flags himself, actually, doesn’t even wait for mate — and instead of resetting the pieces he pulls a rolled cloth out of his bag and unrolls it flat. Nineteen lines each way. Reaches into two bowls and starts dropping stones with a partner. The sound is the thing that pulled me over: slate and clamshell, a hard little click with no plastic in it.

7:51. “Chess is a knife fight in a phone booth,” he says, not looking up. “This is a land war fought with silence.” I braced for that to be insufferable. It wasn’t. It was just accurate.

7:53. He clears a corner of the board down to a 9×9 grid — the teaching size — and gives me the one rule that runs everything. A stone’s liberties are the empty points directly beside it. Up, down, left, right. Not diagonals. Surround all of them and the stone comes off the board. That’s the whole capturing rule. Everything else is consequence.

7:58. First game. I play like it’s Othello, chasing his stones, trying to eat things. He lets me. Then a single quiet move somewhere else and a clump of mine I thought was safe has one liberty left — atari, the warning word, the check-that-isn’t-check — and next move it’s gone. Six stones. Off the board into his bowl, where captured stones sit as a running tally against you.

8:04. Lost the first game. Understood exactly why, which is the maddening part. No blunder I can point at. Just a slow accumulation of me owning less.

8:11. Second game he teaches me the ladder — shicho. You chase a stone diagonally by putting it in atari over and over, and it runs in a staircase toward the edge with no escape, dying the instant it hits the wall. Elegant. Also, apparently, PSPACE-complete: whether a given ladder actually works can require reading a line that ricochets across the entire board like a light beam off two mirrors. I did not read it correctly. My chasing stones ran into one of his and the whole staircase collapsed on me.

8:19. Third game, the real lesson lands. Two eyes. A group with two separate internal empty points cannot ever be captured, because I’d have to fill both to take it and filling the last one is suicide — illegal. One eye is death waiting politely. I built a big handsome wall along the top, felt structural about it, the way I feel about a load path that closes. It had one eye. It died in a lump. All of it.

8:26. Fourth game. Lost. Twenty minutes, four losses, and not one of them felt like an accident.

Here is what I keep turning over. For six weeks now the failure has been in my hands — I could read a speed cube perfectly and then my fingers stuttered turn-freeze-hunt, the diagram sitting a full second ahead of the body. Go removes the body entirely. There is nothing to execute. You set a stone down; it goes exactly where you meant. And I still lost four straight, which means the gap this time is nowhere near my hands. It’s in the reading itself. I can see the local shape — this group lives, that one’s cutting — and be dead wrong about who owns the empty middle of the board.

8:31. Marek shows me komi. Because Black moves first and that’s an advantage, White gets compensation points added at the end — 6.5 under Japanese counting, 7.5 under Chinese. The half-point exists so a game can’t tie. There is no draw. There is also, I finally clue in, no checkmate. Nothing ends in a killing blow. You play until you both agree there’s nothing useful left, and then you count.

He quotes someone on the way out — Edward Lasker, a chess master who fell for this game hard:

The rules of chess could only have been made by humans. Go’s are so elegant that if intelligent life exists elsewhere, they almost certainly play it.

8:40. Bought a cheap glass set on my phone in the parking lot. 9×9 to start. Still counting the fourth game in my head on the drive home, trying to find the move where I actually lost, and I don’t think there was one.