Word: chess
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...those days may be over. As with everything else in life, the Internet is offering unbeatable competition. For chess addicts, it offers the Holy Grail: encounters with an ever available supply of partners, instantly, 24/7...
...healthy? "You have, let us say, a promising politician, a rising artist that you wish to destroy," H.G. Wells suggested long before the Net. "Dagger or bomb are archaic, clumsy, and unreliable--but teach him, inoculate him with chess." A Chilean friend quit the club and deleted the whole program from his computer after clicking on a whimsical feature that calculated "percentage of your life wasted on chess." (I paraphrase.) He found the number disturbingly high...
Perhaps my metaphor is wrong. Internet chess is less like a San Francisco bathhouse than the terminal stages of alcoholism. Playing chess first thing Sunday morning, which I confess I did last week, is about as close as you can get to drinking aftershave...
Luckily, I have a family that will stop me from my worst excesses. But what about the others out there, the denizens of the chess netherworld I used to hang out with at the Boston Chess Club? A place of which a psychiatrist friend once fondly said, "I could run a group in here." A place where I once reached over the board to shake hands and said...
...least in those ancient days, we chess addicts had to shower and shave and step out into the real world to get a game. Now, alas, we can roll out of bed in a total state of nature, unkempt and decomposing, and play, and no one knows the difference...