Chess, like soccer, is universal. Everyone in the world seems to know how to play. But be wary of chess boards while traveling. If you engage in an epic battle of cunning and stratagem while overseas you aren’t just playing for yourself, you’re playing for your entire country.
Here are three helpful things to consider prior to engagement:
1. Size up the enemy. If your opponent is over sixty don’t play. If you even have to think about this then it’s too late. You’re already in too deep. Turn and run. You will gain nothing from winning (what pride is there in defeating the elderly?), but you risk losing everything (people from your country don’t lose to the elderly, do they???). And you will most certainly lose. Anyone over the age of sixty who offers to play you in chess is damned good at it. And they have already sized you up, which is why they are asking you to play.
2. Establish the rules before engagement. The last thing you want is for your Queen to be taken from halfway across the board by a pawn that has been somehow infused with cross-board attacking abilities due to an obscure rule known only to the mountain villagers of southern Kyrgyzstan.
3. According to tradition, if you win a chess game overseas you must promise all onlookers that you are going to do everything in your power to communicate the shameful weakness of not only your opponent, but his entire nation, to the rest of the world. You want to walk away not just from a crushed man, but from a defeated country.
If you like our ‘Round the World series, you might enjoy some of the previous themes: foods, silhouettes, outhouses, cemeteries and donkeys.
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Enjoy.
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