Adhiban

God loves average people, and that's why he made so many of them. That was what I always told myself in the moments, not-infrequent, when my own mediocrity was painfully evident. But of course it never really comforted me. I always secretly wanted to break free from averageness, to achieve some remarkable and awe-inspiring thing, to impress my friends and family and graze on the greener grass at the right end of the bell curve.

It was this vague desire to break free from averageness that motivated me to join the Waco Chess Club. The decision to join was a result of a process of elimination more than anything else. My job was fine but represented a dead end in terms of great achievement. I was single and though women often called me mean, I felt that they had overestimated my percentile and that I was actually below average at dating and relationships. I was physically uncoordinated and out of shape and unlikely to receive a recruiting call from the NFL or the Joffrey Ballet, though I did keep my phone on.

But I had been a decent chess player since I was a kid. After I thought about it and eliminated my other options, chess seemed like the best, or maybe even the only, way that I could ever become more than average at anything. With some hard work and luck, maybe I could even touch greatness, and then poke it in the eye for spurning me for so long. So I joined the chess club, paid my dues, and began to study and play chess with regularity and diligence.

That's how I met Adhiban. Adhiban was another regular at the club. He was quiet and nerdy like most serious chess players, but also gracious in victory and modest in defeat, unlike most of them. Everyone liked him although most people didn't notice him much. Then again, he didn't notice them much either.

Getting to know chess enthusiasts like Adhiban helped me to understand that chess is more than a matter of better and worse, of average and extreme or of talent and incompetence. Chess is also a matter of personality. The progress of the pieces on the board is a shadowy manifestation of the quirks, nobilities, neuroses, strengths, and even the character of the player. The risk-averse and the cautious keep all their pieces together, huddled nervously by the king, watching for the inevitable and inexorable advance of the enemy. Players with combative and pugnacious personalities set up opposition everywhere, bold attacks as far as the eye can see, and fierce sharpness all over the sixty-four squares of the board. Greedy materialists abandon strategic concerns and just try to capture more of your pieces than you capture of theirs. All of the variety of human personality can be inferred from a few dozen moves on an 8x8 board, and it is less interesting to know the best moves than it is to see the imperfect moves that reveal something unexpected about the person who made them.

This is just as true today as it ever was. There is a simple system of chess notation that makes it easy to record an entire game in a compact format. People have been recording their games for centuries, and it is easy to go online and find thousands of games by long-dead figures with diverse and exotic names like Philidor and Mir Sultan Khan and Mikhail Tal and Jose Raul Capablanca. Leafing through their games, we can come feel as if we know them. Among them we can find all of the characters of the eternal human comedy, including the swashbucklers, the romantics, the shrewd calculators, the intuitive, the brilliant, and the fools. If one examines at thousands of games over hundreds of years, one can see the long-term trends of world history reflected on the microcosmic chess board: ceremonial politeness of the Persian court in early games, centuries of empire-building reflected in expansive and domineering styles in later years, cold Soviet precision in the twentieth century, and an international miscellany that seems to be trending towards a bland equality today.

But among all those different kinds of players past and present, Adhiban was my favorite. He played calmly and conservatively most of the time, striving for equal positions and not averse to agreeing to a draw when the moment called for it. But that was not what I liked about Adhiban's style. My favorite was that in about a third of his games, after thirty or forty unremarkable moves, he would play exactly one "sacrifice" move that was inexcusably outrageous: he would give away his queen, or expose his king, or destroy his carefully developed pawn structure, or endanger several minor pieces. These sacrifices always flew in the face of well-established principles of good chess and were soundly condemned by the chess software that we sometimes used to evaluate Adhiban's inexplicable flagrancies.