Word: chess
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Between the political prisoner and the psychotic genius lies the ordinary player. Like me. We need company. In spring I still frequent the chess tables at Washington's Dupont Circle. On Monday nights my friends still drive to my house for our weekly speed-chess round robin...
...pain when it loses. Or to put it slightly less misanthropically, you miss the shared astonishment and delight at a brilliant combination or desperate last-second checkmate. If a king falls in the forest and there is no one there to see it (except you and some stone-dead chess algorithm), did it ever happen? You might as well make a hole-in-one playing alone...
...need for a partner has always been the bane of chess players. While in forced isolation in the gulag, Natan Sharansky played chess against himself in his head. It kept him sane. (It had the added benefit, he likes to note, of providing him with a lift. "I always won," he recalls cheerfully.) And Bobby Fischer has been playing chess with few people other than himself ever since he quit as world champion and practically disappeared 25 years ago. But then, Fischer has the look of a paranoid schizophrenic...
...satisfying it should be illegal. It's the Internet Chess Club...
...Chicago-based Cybiko company calls the device an "entertainment system" because it aspires to be a new gaming platform, like the Game Boy only better, since you can connect Cybiko to your PC and download a free game every day from its website, says the company. Chess, darts--wireless darts, how cool is that!--billiards, poker and dozens of other games are promised, which you can play wirelessly against your Cybiko-toting pals. I was particularly taken with the idea of CyLandia, which features a virtual creature that's like Pokemon except that you can beam it to other users...