Now please understand this. I'm not saying that all chessplayers are lunatics. But I do claim that chronic chessplaying affects a man.
Let me tell you about the K Street Chess Club, of which I was once treasurer.
Our membership roll claimed a senator, the leader of a large labor union, the president of the A. & W. railroad, and a few other big shots. But it seemed the more important they were outside, the rottener they were as chessplayers.
The senator and the rail magnate didn't know the Ruy Lopez from the Queen's Gambit, so of course they could only play the other fish, or hang around wistfully watching the games of the Class A players and wishing that they, too, amounted to something.
The club's champion was Bobby Baker, a little boy in the fourth grade at the Pestalozzi-Borstal Boarding School. Several of his end game compositions had been published in Chess Review and Shakhmatny Russkji Zhurnal before he could talk plainly.
Our second best was Pete Summers, a clerk for the A. & W. Railroad. He was the author of two very famous chess books. One book proved that white can always win, and the other proved that black can always draw. As you might suspect, the gap separating him from the president of his railroad was abysmal indeed.
The show position was held by Jim Bradley, a chronic idler whose dues were paid by his wife. The club's admiration for him was profound.
But experts don't make a club. You have to have some guiding spirit, a fairly good player, with a knack for organization and a true knowledge of values.
Such a gem we had in our secretary, Nottingham Jones.
It was really my interest in Nottingham that led me to join the K Street Chess Club. I wanted to see if he was an exception, or whether they were all alike.
After I tell you about their encounter with Zeno, you can judge for yourself.
In his unreal life Nottingham Jones was a statistician in a government bureau. He worked at a desk in a big room with many other desks, including mine, and he performed his duties blankly and without conscious effort. Many an afternoon, after the quitting bell had rung and I had strolled over to discuss club finances with him, he would be astonished to discover that he had already gone to work and had turned out a creditable stack of forms.
I suppose that it was during these hours of his quasi-existence that the invisible Nottingham conceived those numerous events that had made him famous as a chess club emcee throughout the United States.
For it was Nottingham who organized the famous American-Soviet cable matches (in which the U.S. team had been so soundly trounced), refereed numerous U.S. match championships, and launched a dozen brilliant but impecunious foreign chess masters on exhibition tours in a hundred chess clubs from New York to Los Angeles.
But the achievements of which he was proudest were his bishop-knight tournaments.
Now the bishop is supposed to be slightly stronger than the knight, and this evaluation has become so ingrained in chess thinking today that no player will voluntarily exchange a bishop for an enemy knight. he may squander his life's savings on phony stock, talk back to traffic cops, and forget his wedding anniversary, but never, never, never will he exchange a bishop for a knight.
Nottingham suspected this fixation to be ill-founded; he had the idea that the knight was just as strong as the bishop, and to prove his point he held numerous intramural tournaments in the K Street Club, in which one player used six pawns and a bishop against the six pawns and a knight of his opponent.
Jones never did make up his mind as to whether the bishop was stronger than the knight, but at the end of a couple of years he did know that the K Street Club had more bishop-knight experts than any other club in the United States.
And it then occurred to him that American chess had a beautiful means of redeeming itself from its resounding defeat at the hands of the Russian cable team.
He sent his challenge to Stalin himself the K Street chess Club versus All the Russians a dozen boards of bishop-knight games, to be played by cable.
The Soviet Recreation Bureau sent the customary six curt rejections and then promptly accepted.
And this leads us back to one afternoon at 5 o'clock when Nottingham Jones looked up from his desk and seemed startled to find me standing there.
"Don't get up yet," I said. "This is something you ought to take sitting down."
He stared at me owlishly. "Is the year's rent due again so soon?"
"Next week. This is something else."
"Oh?"
"A professor friend of mine," I said, "who lives in the garret over my apartment, wants to play the whole club at one sitting a simultaneous exhibition."
"A simul, eh? Pretty good, is he?"
"It isn't exactly the professor who wants to play. It's really a friend of his."
"Is he good?"
"The professor says so. But that isn't exactly the point. To make it short, this professor, Dr. Schmidt, owns a pet rat. He wants the rat to play." I added: "And for the usual simul fee. The professor needs money. In fact, if he doesn't get a steady job pretty soon he may be deported."
Nottingham looked dubious. "I don't see how we can help him. Did you say rat?"
"I did."
"A chessplaying rat? A four-legged one?"
"Right. quite a drawing card for the club, eh?"
Nottingham shrugged his shoulders. "We learn something every day. Will you believe it, I never heard they cared for the game. Women don't. However, I once read about an educated horse ... I suppose he's well known in Europe?"
"Very likely," I said. "The professor specializes in comparative psychology."
Nottingham shook his head impatiently. "I don't mean the professor. I'm talking about the rat. What's his name, anyway?"
"Zeno."
"Never heard of him. What's his tournament score?"
"I don't think he ever played in any tournaments. The professor taught him the game in a concentration camp. How good he is I don't know, except that he can give the professor rook odds."
Nottingham smiled pityingly. "I can give you rook odds, but I'm not good enough to throw a simul."
A great light burst over me. "Hey, wait a minute. You're completely overlooking the fantastic fact that Zeno is a "
"The only pertinent question," interrupted Nottingham, "is whether he's really in the master class. We've got half a dozen players in the club who can throw an 'inside' simul for free, but when we hire an outsider and charge the members a dollar each to play him, he's got to be good enough to tackle our best. And when the whole club's in training for the bishop-knight cable match with the Russians next month, I can't have them relaxing over a mediocre simul."
"But you're missing the whole point "
"which is, this Zeno needs money and you want me to throw a simul to help him. But I just can't do it. I have a duty to the members to maintain a high standard."
"But Zeno is a rat. He learned to play chess in a concentration camp. He "
"That doesn't necessarily make him a good player."
It was all cockeyed. My voice trailed of. "Well, somehow it seemed like a good idea."
Nottingham saw that he had let me down too hard. "If you want to, you might arrange a game between Zeno and one of our top players say Jim Bradley. he has lots of time. If Jim says Zeno is good enough for a simul, we'll give him a simul."
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