I don’t recall exactly how I learned to move the chess pieces. Given that I grew up in a working-class suburb of Boston in the late 1970s, and I don’t recall that anyone taught me, I’m sure it was from reading a book in the local library. Around the time I was in fifth grade, my father saw something in the newspaper about a local children’s chess club which met on Friday nights. He took me there every week, and he’d also take me to the occasional Saturday scholastic chess tournament. The story ends here around middle school for most people who learn chess as a child, who usually drop out at that time due to other activities, but my path was different.
In the sixth grade, when visiting the guidance counselor’s office to talk about some problem, I noticed he had a chess set in his office. Twice a week I would supposedly see Mr. N to follow up on that problem, while we really just played chess for each of those 45-minute periods. After that cover was blown, we changed that to meeting during recess five days a week. In the beginning, he had to go easy on me so that at least I had a chance. But midway through the school year he had to try his hardest to beat me, and by the end of the school year I was beating him consistently!
In the meantime, playing much weaker kids in the unrated scholastic tournaments had netted me a lot of trophies but had become quite boring. Mr N, being an average strength tournament player himself (with a US Chess Federation rating of almost 1500), suggested that I play in rated weekend tournaments, which consisted of mostly adults but were open to all ages. Knowing about the rated tournaments opened up a whole new chess world that wasn’t accessible previously – do recall that in the pre-Internet era that unless someone gave me a heads up, I would have no way of knowing that there was a USCF and that there were rated tournaments.
One of the more memorable early rated tournaments as a youth was over a weekend at MIT when I was 14 years old. In addition to dropping me off each morning with my lunch and a dime for the payphone to call for a ride home each night, my parents had given me $10 for the weekend “just in case”. I had quickly found the student center and spent all of that $10 – which was a lot of money back then – in the video game arcade. That Saturday night my mother hinted to me that I would be in trouble if I didn’t give her that $10 back after the weekend. Oops. Oh, did I mention that these rated tournaments have money prizes rather than trophies? Luckily, I had played well enough to win a class prize and come home Sunday night $100 richer – I mean $90 – and stay out of trouble!
We didn’t have a chess club in junior high or high school, nor did I make an effort to start one, because I would have been the top player and it wouldn’t have been challenging. There was a local adult chess club, but it was hard to go to on a school night. So most of my chess activity continued to be at the local rated weekend tournaments a couple of times a month. By the time I reached my sophomore year in high school, I had a USCF rating of over 1800, which put me in the top 100 in the US for those under the age of 16. That put me at a mini-plateau, and with my only available resources for improvement being books, tournament play, and post-mortem game analysis, I was not able to maintain that meteoric rise through the rest of high school and started college with a rating in the low 1900s.
I had no idea what the chess scene would be like at my college (or almost any other school for that matter) when I started in the late 1980s. I arrived at a school with a chess club which had a great run in previous years, but it was on its final legs, with only a few seniors left and no juniors or sophomores. But we had a few strong freshmen – me, Bruce (who I remembered from Boston-area tournaments), and Jeff – and we were able to bring the club back to life. Although the PanAms were the only true intercollegiate team event, there were a couple of other non-collegiate team events throughout the year, and so alumnus Tom as well as Bruce’s brother Lee were able to tag along on occasion. We also traveled as a group to individual tournaments on the weekends.
In subsequent years we had underclassmen come in and fill the spots left by our graduating seniors, and we were able to get money from the Student Activities Council so that we could fly the team to the PanAms when they were no longer within driving distance.
After graduation in the early 1990s, I was at high expert level, which is one level below National Master. I relocated to California for a full-time engineering job and not knowing a soul out here, getting plugged into the local chess scene was the natural thing to do. Going back through my old scorebooks, I played in a LOT of tournaments in 1991, including a stellar performance in the US Open in Los Angeles. Somewhere in there, my rating peaked at over 2200, earning me the title of National Master. I still have the certificate from the US Chess Federation hanging on my wall.
But then things started unraveling, at least from a chess point of view. I didn’t want to be sitting for hours in front of a chess board on both weekend days after sitting at a desk all day at work during the week. Furthermore, my opening repertoire was lacking a bit, and at this level of play I needed to spend time (which I didn’t have) maintaining it. Finally, I was having back pain and other issues in my early 20s, and my doctor said I had to become more physically active (that’s a story for another day). Furthermore, I met the (non-chess playing) woman that would later become my wife. I dropped off the chess radar into retirement, and that was it.
At least that was my thinking when I originally wrote that last paragraph back in 2011. While all of the above is true, as I write this paragraph in 2026, I can now admit to myself that right after that success, I had a major rating downslide to 2100 after several tournaments, and I pulled the plug to stop the bleeding. I was too focused on that four-digit number and the game results rather than enjoying the process.
Years later I reconnected with some of the folks from the college days, and we tossed around the possibility of a reunion when the US Open returned to Southern California. When all was said and done, Tom was the only one who traveled to play in the event. I ended up not playing, though I met up with Tom a couple of times while he was there. We chatted about the “good old days” and realized that the social aspect of the team was really the glue that kept us going through the college years. Looking back, that was certainly a big factor in why I didn’t stick with the game for very long after graduation.
Still, I have no regrets, having met a lot of great people along the way, and learning a lot from the game, including helping me to gain self-confidence during a time I needed it when growing up. However, if you went back in time 25 years ago when I bought my life membership to the USCF and told me I’d be “retired” from the game today, I would have said you were nuts! Life’s journey can be unpredictable sometimes.
BikingBrian 