Šachy....

Tento článek mi poslal starý kámoš žijící střídavě v USA a na jižní Moravě. Píše se mu lépe v angličtině - takže jen pro angličtináře...:)) Le.

My chess experience begun when I was quite little, about 7 years old. I learned how to move the

pieces, how to move king and rook to castle and sometime even how to checkmate weaker players.

Then still naive, I was under the impression that this sport is peaceful, tranquil and basically very happy.

Little did I know.

Chess players I've met in Prague turned out to be very violent group, at times throwing mugs of beer at

waitresses and more often fist fighting amongst themselves for losing the game. Mrna, Papirnik, Tlamsa, Havel, are the only 

names I can remember, but  they were all fighters who should have joined a tae kwan do club, instead of the chess club.

All good chess players I've met are suffering from some kind of depression, inferiority complex and alcoholism and

they are all broke. On top of that, they all think they play the best and when they lose, they attribute it to the other guy cheating.

I remember Bobby Fisher, world best chess player, how he slowly became insane until his mind was just about gone and

then moved to Iceland to live in poverty. All the chess players are thinking about are the chess moves. Nothing else seems to matter to them. They are like mathematicians, thinking about numbers, going nuts.

Another phenomena among the Czech chess players is that they are all divorced and dying young. Only a handful made it over 50 years of age and what is the most amazing that just about every other month another player dies, either from internal organ failure or suicide. They are dropping like flies.

So not to end up like them, I left the Prague Chess Club and began to play on chess.com. There are tens of thousands of players at any given time eager to play anybody across the planet day and night. Soon, my wife noticed, I stopped paying attention to her and anything else, claimed to hear primal shouts coming out of me and eventually threaten me with divorce. 

Now I play chess in secrecy, at night or in the library. I just cannot part from it. However, I noticed the constant thinking about chess

took a toll on my life. Aside from the divorce prospect, my health got worse, I gained weight and I may actually have to attend a psychotherapy. There I would talk about the most aggressive sport and how bad the chess is for me, or perhaps play a game with the therapist.

                                                                                                                                                         Jan Halaska