The Chess Game I Had Already Lost

I play at a small chess club, board four or five on a good night. My opponent that evening was a visitor, an older gentleman with a habit of humming one bar of something between moves.

Around move eight the familiarity started, and by move twelve it was certainty: I had played this game. Not one like it. This one. His offbeat gambit, my slightly passive response, the humming — one bar, always the same bar — even the fact that the radiator behind me ticked twice whenever he took a long think. I knew, with the dull certainty of memory rather than calculation, that on move nineteen I was going to blunder my bishop to a knight fork I would see one second too late.

So I sat there, forewarned, determined to be the exception. This is the part that still frightens me more than any of it: I watched myself approach move nineteen the way you watch weather approach. I considered three alternatives to the doomed bishop move. I had refutations for each — real ones; I checked them at home later with an engine, and they were sound refutations, my reasoning was not sabotaged. Each alternative genuinely looked worse. The bishop move was, by everything my brain could evaluate at the board, simply correct.