The Problem Solving and Chess 960 tournaments were to be held on the same day, November 21st, 2017, and this was exactly a week after the Whole School Chess Championship. During this time interval, I was scheduled to have two classes with Mr. Mispronounced (the chess teacher), and I planned on asking him if he could play some Chess 960 games with me so I would be in form for the tournament a week later. He claimed that it was unnecessary, and that I would get the hang of it all by myself on the day of the tournament, and I took his word for it. Since it was a busy week at school, I couldn’t play more than two games of Chess 960 during my free time, and this lack of experience fit the bill for the disaster that was to come.
Since the inception of my chess classes, I was known for being well versed at Problem/Puzzle solving, and in most cases, I had a fairly keen eye to notice patterns that many missed. On the morning of the Tuesday in question, my mind was frantic the moment Mr. Blabbermouth told me that Mr. Mispronounced played several games of Chess 960 with him so he can perform well in the tournament. This was a great shock to me, who felt underprepared - but also distraught by the fact that Mr. Mispronounced, who was obstinate about not playing Chess 960 games with me ended up giving Mr. Blabbermouth extra lessons simply because he believed it served as appeasement for the fact that Mr. Blabbermouth’s performance in the last tournament crashed like blue ice falling out an airplane lavatory (yes, this is a Big Bang Theory reference).
The Problem Solving tournament was notorious for being incredibly hard, and the highest score in the history of the school ranged between seventy and eighty. Before that moment, I was ambitious enough to say that I had the capability to beat that record, but my emotions got to me, my mind got foggy and I failed to focus. This resulted in me scoring a measly eighteen out of hundred, and I barely scraped to qualify for the Chess 960 tournament. Throughout all of these incidents, Mr. Mispronounced acted innocent and praised Mr. Blabbermouth’s performance - something that greatly irked me inside, but I decided to act strong and focus on the Chess 960 tournament. Due to lack of time, he proposed that all of us play four games instead of five. Mr. Blabbermouth was confident and exultant going into this phase of the tournament, since he had, to some extent, received a clue that I was out of it. This, coupled with his faith in his abilities, led to him playing fairly well. As I struggled to get the hang of Chess 960, I lost the first two games, but losing both of those games taught me how to play the remaining games. Mr. Blabbermouth was gushing with gratification as he won the first two games. When I won the third game, he drew the match with his opponent. As the tournament was round-robin (implying that every participant had to play with every other participant), I had the opportunity to be paired against Mr. Blabbermouth for the final match. Despite Mr. Blabbermouth’s “experience”, I ended up drawing the game, but in fact I held a winning position and blundered a pawn which led to me having a King and Knight while he had just his King in the endgame.
That’s when it dawned upon me that if I received the guidance that Mr. Blabbermouth did, or at least had the opportunity to play games of Chess 960 during my allotted time for chess, I would have been able to outsmart every single one of my opponents. This realisation led to me feeling nothing but indignation, and I did not have the opportunity to talk it through with any of my friends since I had to go straight to my bus once the tournament was over.
When I got home, I was vexed by the fact that my mother was asking me an unusual amount of questions pertaining to an incident that occurred in the weekend. I found this to be rather insensitive, and this greatly added to my waspishness. After being humiliated to the extent that I was lost for words, I had no intention to narrate these incidents to my mother. An issue I have always had as a person is that I tend to want to deal things all by myself, instead of sharing my problems with others. This was one of the cases where this attitude of mine affected me negatively.
The next day at school, I ended up ranting and venting to Mr. Silent, my acquaintances in the bus, and a few of my other friends about the nonsense that happened. They were all appalled, and I was relieved to know that they believed it was unfair too. Convinced that I was on the right side of things, I decided to tell my mother about everything that had happened, and I went home completely prepared to face my fears. Unfortunately, Mr. Mispronounced decided to get ahead of the entire incident, and called my mother - expressing his sympathy towards my performance and incompetence that led to me messing up the tournaments. As my mother was unequipped with comebacks, pertaining to how he guided Mr. Blabbermouth, she lacked arrows in her quiver, and she was disappointed by the fact that I failed to tell her about everything that happened. Once I explained things to her, she was infuriated, and decided to give Mr. Mispronounced a piece of her mind. After all, we did pay an insane amount of money per hour for my instruction, and it is my opinion as a student that we were overly courteous and welcoming (an opinion I have of how my mother treats people in general).
Mr. Mispronounced had his share of excuses, but eventually, he was rendered speechless, and his responses moot. I was insulted enough to terminate my classes with him, and I even switched my S.P.A. to Yoga (I did consider Karate, but it is my personal opinion that the type of Karate classes offered in my school lacked discipline in comparison to the Karate I did a few years before, worth talking about in another post).
Being the lazy person I am, I did not think Yoga was worth much of my time, so I spent these S.P.A. “classes” talking to my friend about PC games like Poptropica and Animal Jam. Though this was an extremely invaluable way to spend my time, I did find my ego to be worth far more than being in the presence of a teacher who forgot what his job was merely because he was afraid of losing his job tutoring some other kid who screwed up. Metaphorically speaking, this occurrence ought to be coined as strike one.
Nevertheless, I did continue playing chess - and I managed to bag top ten in a few state and district level chess tournaments, but I decided I would be better off if I got a new chess teacher. As I spent a majority of my time on chess.com on the days when my school did not give me a ridiculous amount of work, it did not take me long to realise that I had a wide array of chess teachers to pick from. Eventually, I continued to learn chess under the instruction of a Hungarian Woman Grand Master.
Another tournament was to be hosted by Mr. Mispronounced on the occasion of Republic Day on January 26, 2018. To be blunt, and perhaps a bit cocky, my performance was unrivaled, which led to me winning all five games, the title, and the rolling trophy. Being fed up of Yoga, I eventually went back to choosing chess as my S.P.A., but I gave Mr. Mispronounced a cold shoulder despite the fact that he did make a few attempts to make peace with me and convince me that it was all a “misunderstanding”, though frankly I think the muddle lied in the fact that I understood too well.
In the summer of 7th grade, I hit another breakthrough in state level chess tournaments when I managed to defeat three players with a FIDE rating in a row. This was worth celebration, and my new chess teacher was extremely happy with my rapid improvement and the way I approached my matches. By this time, I had established a style of play - I was an aggressive and risk-taking player who wanted to try new things without caring too much about how it would change the course of the game (whether or not this is a good perspective while playing chess is debatable).
To an outsider’s eye, everything seemed quiet and calm for a few months, the only event of importance was the fact that I defeated an opponent with a FIDE rating of 1400. However, I was struggling a bit with my new chess teacher, as she did not commend my overly hostile and reckless playing style for obvious reasons. I do not in any way blame her for this, since it did result in my performance being stagnant for a good duration of time.
In the APJ Abdul Kalam Memorial Tournament held by Mr. Mispronounced on June 29, 2018, I had the privilege to be vexed once again. Both Mr. Blabbermouth and I ended up winning all five games, and Mr. Mispronounced decided to give first place to Mr. Blabbermouth without even holding a tiebreaker. Knowing that I had outgrown Mr. Mispronounced’s tournaments, I decided to stop playing in them after the following tournament - since I wanted to win first place in my last tournament, and prove to Mr. Blabbermouth that he did not deserve first place. On August 15th, 2018, I succeeded and won first place in the tournament - the beauty of this lied in the fact that the last game was against Mr. Blabbermouth, whose Queen was captured within the first twenty moves.
This marked the end of my journey playing tournaments hosted by Mr. Mispronounced. Now, all I had to deal with was my major blockage while playing chess, and I realised I had to make a hard choice - I could either continue to play carelessly with huge stakes while improving slowly, or adapt to a more passive playing style to achieve a lot more. Events linked to this while playing chess tournaments led to me indulging in unusual behaviour, such as quitting tournaments halfway through. As I went down this road, I noticed that my chess instructor was adopting a passive-aggressive attitude instead of opening up and telling me what I was doing was wrong. At the same time, I did not want to play chess in a style that was strongly against my personality and character, so these aspects served as strike two for me.
The last and final strike was the biggest eye-opener for me. During a tournament, I overheard the strongest chess player in the state for my category talk about how she could not understand basic mathematics. Since I had played with her before, I knew that she was a skilled player, though I found her playing style to be mediocre, utterly boring, repetitive, and too by-the-book. Logically, I had been playing chess due to the stereotype of it being a logical game meant for people who found patterns in the right places, and that was the general outlook I had on the game. Hearing that she was unable to perceive a concept that I deemed to be utterly simple created a disgust for chess that I still find inexpressible to this date. Once again, I quit the tournament halfway through, and it was the last state level tournament I ever played. This event took place in November 2018, and led to me terminating my chess classes, and never participating in state/district level tournaments again.
That being said, I did continue to play chess casually at school, and it was my S.P.A. during the whole of 8th grade. I still remember how people huddled over the desk to watch games, and how some possessed a toxic amount of competitive spirit, while a few saw chess as nothing more than a hobby. To some extent, I am still grateful for friends like Mr. Silent who watched several of my games, including those which were of great importance to me. Ironically, even after I stopped playing chess with the same seriousness as I did once upon a time, people continued to treat me like the school’s chess champion. In a school where many were blind of my abilities (pertaining to academic prowess), even the most clueless had the amusing opinion that I was “Chess Champion”.