Defeating the Master

When I was a kid, my dad passed his love of chess on to me. Just about every night of the week, we would sit down at the dining room table and wage miniature warfare. In truth, it was more of a massacre than a fair fight. My dad was of the school that you throw a kid into the lake to teach him to swim. The same principle applied to strategic board games, apparently. By the time I was 10, it became my mission to defeat him in a game.

This was before the Internet came to the fore, so chess strategies were tough to find. I checked out a few books from the public library and read about the game’s masters – Bobby Fisher, Garry Kasparov and other world champions. If I could learn to play like these titans of the game, there’s no way the old man would stand a chance. In the end I focused on my dad’s habits and patterns of play and found a way to triumph. At family get-togethers, we still break out the board for a game or two.

Related posts:

1. Deep Blue: A Chess-playing Machine
2. Defensive Tactics to Keep You in the Game