Introduction Part 1: Have Your Cake and Eat It

Blowing out the candles on my chess cake
on my ninth or tenth birthday.

My neighbor's daughter introduced me to chess when I was about 8-years-old. I still remember sitting in their living room with Sarah showing me how the pieces moved. I don't recall if I was instantly hooked but I was motivated enough to participate in my school's annual chess tournament. My run to the final was mostly routine, except for having to replay a game when my opponent and I finally realized that having a bare king each didn't constitute mating material. In the final, I played a kid named Andrew who crushed me mercilessly, the coup de grâce being a knight fork on my king and queen.

Despite being outclassed by Andrew, it was encouraging that I had reached the final. I joined the junior classes in Horsham, my home town in the South of England. The junior classes started an hour before the adult competitions and finished just as the grown ups were arriving. There I was taught by Peter Alford, a lovely man who needed both good teaching skills and a lot of patience when working with us kids!

I never had many goals in my adolescent chess "career". I suppose I wanted to be competitive, to play to win, and to some day beat the higher rated adults at Horsham Chess Club who viewed the junior players with suspicion. But these goals were all very vague and, when I was about 11 years old, soccer and video games came along and interfered with what was surely my rise to super-GM status. I didn't have a love of chess or any specific expectations of myself. I merely liked the game and, if you want to do well at anything in life, that's rarely enough.

Thus, I let go of chess and largely forgot about it during my early and mid teenage years. Caissa, the goddess of chess, had apparently not forgotten me, however. When I was 15 years old my parents bought a satellite dish and I thought all my dreams had come true. Live soccer, movies only a few months old, and poorly dubbed Scandinavian adult films were all available at the click of a remote.

Less than a year later, I was channel hopping and happened to stumble across one of the movie channels. They were showing Searching for Bobby Fischer, aka Innocent Moves in the UK. I was fascinated and had flashbacks to my childhood chess days. I watched the movie a second time, absorbing the old video footage of the Spassky-Fischer match of 1972, the manic speed chess duels in Washington Square Park, and the love of chess so evident in the characters. I dug up my old beginner's chess book and went through each game one by one that night, with an old chess board spread out on my bed, until I fell asleep long after midnight, pieces scattered all around. Chess, it seemed, had not let go of me after all.