I swept the chess pieces to the floor and ran out. The pieces were still popping around on the ground like popcorn when I left the room where the match was being played. It was my school versus some other school. I had lost.
I didn’t care at all about the rest of my team. Losers.
The coach of the team, an English teacher, ran out after me but he was sort of laughing. "Stop," he said. "Wait."
But I didn’t want to. I had lost. I was worthless. I hated myself. I hated everyone. The rest of my team was laughing. I could hear them. Laughing at me. The other team was in shock.
I am a sore loser. It’s not that I’m so competitive with others. But I’m competitive with myself. I like to do better than I did before. Sometimes that means something very bad: I like to be perfect at the things I’m interested in.
Of course, it’s impossible to be perfect.
I had nightmares that night. My dad opened my door at three in the morning and asked if I were ok. "No," and there was nothing he could do.
I didn’t go to school the next day or the next. I was a loser with acne and now a bad chess player.
A year later I was the highest ranking, under 20 years old, in my state. And then I basically stopped playing, except when my life was in big transition in the 90s and then I played quite a bit.
But I played other games, during other transitions. I always played games to escape the bad things that were happening in my life.
The best games are a metaphor for life. So I would always escape my life (a bad relationship, a bad trade, a bad business, feelings of being useless, etc.) by playing games.
I played a lot of the game Go, when I was burnt out and about to get kicked out of graduate school.
I played a lot of poker (365 nights straight, including the night my daughter was born) when I was, well, becoming a father! I played a lot of Scrabble when I went broke. And then, hearts. And then, backgammon.
There is a particular grammar to mastering a game and it’s not different from the grammar of mastering anything. Once you learn how to speak one new language, it’s easy to learn how to speak a third language and even easier to learn how to speak a fourth language.
I’ve seen this across every game player I know. Someone who is good at chess can easily master poker. Or, and I’ve told this story before, there’s Falafel.
Around 1994, I started playing Falafel in Washington Square Park. He was homeless and often had grass in his dirty hair from wherever it was he had been sleeping the night before.
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