Chess : Man vs Machine

Going Bald Severely Limits Your Haircut Options

I am a fair, sometimes good, but never great, chess player. My cousin Mark taught me how to play when I was 13 or so, and he's pretty good. I know how all the pieces move, I know what each one's special powers are. I play better when I'm angry, and play much worse when I've been drinking, using cold medication, or getting totally sucker-punched by a girlfriend who pretended that she was only a beginner. I am a brilliant strategist, and an utterly pathetic tactician.

In my career as a guy who plays chess sometimes, I've only beaten one "really good" player, this guy Todd who lived on my dorm floor. He was really fucking good. During freshman year we would all get pretty housed on weeknights, and would play chess to pass the time and to prevent girls from being interested in us -- with great success. Todd would pretty much dominate, and could usually dispatch an opponent in fewer than two beer's time. I remember losing to him once or twice in roughly the time it took to pour and drink a single shot of tequila.

So this one time, during a game where he was handing me a slow and decidedly vicious beatdown, I pulled off a valiant move of freakish, flailing desperation. It was like one of the hundreds of fight scenes in hundreds of movies where the good guy is getting the living shit kicked out of him, and he manages to -- before the bad guy has a chance to finish him off -- totally spaz out and grab a bottle or something with which he whangs the bad guy on the head. Yeah, it was exactly like that. He had overfortified his king, leaving it open to one of those horrible attacks that pins your king in behind your own defenses; I'm not even sure I knew what i was doing, but I did it anyway. And I won with dignity -- as soon as someone explained to me that I had won, I leapt to my feet, spiked his king into his beer, kicked my chair over, and shouted "HIYAAAAAAAAGHHH!!!!"

Anyway, I'm not really much of a chess nerd, but I do like a good man vs. machine story, and the one I just read was about chess. Apparently Garry Kasparov, reknowned guy who plays chess well, almost got his ass kicked by X3D Fritz. X3D Fritz is not an aerosol hairspray, as I initially thought, but it is some kinda really good chess-playing computer that demeans its human opponents via a pair of unbelievably dorky-looking Virtual Reality glasses. The big hoo-ha surrounding this game was that Fritz pulled off some kind of desperate, brilliantly Marshall-esque move that nobody had expected; this forced the very human Kasparov to completely freak out, get his goggles all sweaty, and spend the whole rest of the game in a defensive posture until they reached a draw.