I’m not very good at chess. Never have been. And I’ll never be a good player because I can’t give that much of myself to one thing. But I adore the game. I can see the savage beauty of it. Yes, savage. In chess there is no escaping the power of the other person’s brain. Your mind is laid bare while your opponent laughingly runs rings around your pathetic attempts at strategy. That’s frightening to me. I always end up shouting, “Yeah, well let’s see who can write a better 300 word description of what it’s like to get your ass kicked at chess. Who’s talking trash now?”
 
So chess gets my vote for the scariest game ever. If you don’t think chess is scary, try playing the Chess Shredder sometime. The simple, nonplussed look of the Shredder website gives me the creeps, as does the name of their top product - "Deep Shredder 11 for Linux." FOR LINUX. The Chess Shredder fears no man.

But bad as I am at chess, I'm still good enough to beat the pants off of the chess program that came with my Macintosh. Mac Chess is embarrassingly awful, though i-Movie can create a lovely, multi-media presentation of the chess game you and your Mac shared. Admittedly, I am playing Mac Chess on the lower levels, but even the lowest levels of chess should not be this bad. What happens is I play the Chess Shredder, then run back to the Mac, slide the bar down to the easy level, and savagely trounce it. It’s incredibly childish of me. A classic example of displaced anger, I know.

But I can’t help myself. That damn Chess Shredder makes me so mad. You can feel its smug, superior attitude in the unconcerned silences between moves. Not even a blip or a beep. Just 1, 2, 3, and you’re shredded.

So I got bored one day and developed a new game. The name of this game is: “How badly can I beat the Mac chess program?”

I think this screenshot will answer that question:

Yes, those are all queens.

You’d have a hard time developing a more dominant advantage than I had in that game. And let me tell you, it takes some planning to beat Mac Chess this badly. You have to guard your pawns so you can convert them to queens later. Once you’ve eliminated every piece except the Mac’s king, you have to march all your boring pieces, like rooks and knights and bishops, to the other end of the board and put them where the Mac’s king can take them. Then you wall off the king and meticulously take your pawns to the other end of the board and get them turned into queens.

Hey, it’s not easy having 6 queens on the board. If you imagine that the queens emit laser beams like security systems in the movies when a thief is trying to break into a museum, you’ll see what I mean.

If you make one false move you’ll pin the Mac’s king where it can’t move but is not in check. That’s a draw. If that happens, you had 6 queens and the Mac had one king and still played you to a draw. Now who’s embarrassed?

Anyway I think I’ve taken this about as far as far as I can take it. Maybe you can work it so you have seven queens at the end of the game. Good luck with that. I’ve moved on to other things. My new game is even more fun. I call it, “Playing Windows Hearts and trying to shoot the moon with every hand.”

rlp