Lionel and Bruce

A number of years ago I had moved to a small town and was looking to get back into chess again after not having played for several years. Back then internet chess existed but was not yet popular; this was the age of dial-up. Somehow I learned that on Sundays there was a group of players that met informally at the bookstore at the slightly larger town a few miles up the road so I went over there to check it out.

It was there that I met Lionel and Bruce. They were older than me and both retired. Of the players who met at the bookstore on Sundays they were the only ones who were close to my strength in chess; the other guys were so much better that after they found out how good (or bad) I was they pretty much brushed me off. Lionel told me that the same thing had happened to him, and that if it weren't for the fact that Bruce was there he wouldn't even bother coming. Anyway, both Lionel and Bruce were slightly stronger than me, but not so much that I couldn't beat them sometimes if I played well, which is just about perfect when you're looking for opponents.

Lionel and Bruce were opposites both in their political leanings and in their chess styles. Lionel was liberal and Bruce conservative. In chess, Lionel was the kind of player who would try to win a pawn and beat you in the endgame, while Bruce would throw everything at your king and try to force checkmate. They had one thing in common: they loved to play chess. So they were friends. They just learned not to discuss politics and stick to chess.

Since the other players never played with us anyway we started meeting elsewhere to play and occasionally we'd find another player of similar strength who would play with us. We didn't take ourselves too seriously; we didn't usually play with a clock and would talk while we played. I learned a lot, particularly from Lionel. I was particularly impressed with the way Lionel would decide on a certain idea, and then a move or two later would discover that an available tactic for his opponent prevented him from executing it, so he would just move his pieces back where they had been originally and start over. This was something I would not have done; instead I would have insisted on making the best of where I had already moved because I never wanted to retreat and admit my mistake. It was harder to learn from Bruce, because his game was based so much more on intuition than Lionel's. He once explained to me that his idea wasn't much more sophisticated than "I move as many pieces as I can close to the enemy king, and then I figure it out." I tried that a few times, and it never worked.

It was fun to watch Lionel and Bruce play against each other, both because of their contrasting styles and because of the fact that they had played together so much that each knew what the other was thinking. As long as politics were never brought up, they'd happily battle over the board for a couple of hours at a time, and as soon as one game finished they'd go again.

We had some good times. Once Bruce even invited a group of us out to his horse ranch on a Saturday afternoon where we played outdoors under a warm sun for hours. We created a tiny local club and played a match against another small town club about forty miles away (we even won!). Unfortunately even though both Lionel and Bruce were retired they both had other obligations in their lives, to their families and in Bruce's case to his horses. Lionel suffered from some health issues. I was the father of a young daughter who needed attention and we didn't get together as much as we would have liked. We always talked about doing another chess Saturday at Bruce's farm but it never happened.

It wasn't long before changes in my life meant that I had to move away and I never saw either of them again. I kept in contact with Lionel for a few years with occasional e-mails until suddenly he stopped responding. I feared the worst, and eventually I was able to contact Bruce who confirmed that Lionel's kidneys had failed and after a number of rounds of dialysis he had died.

I'm a better chessplayer now than I was when used to play with Lionel and Bruce, and although part of that is because of things I learned from them I still feel like those couple of years when we played together was a period of chess innocence. I just enjoyed playing chess and talking chess (and sometimes other things) with those guys and didn't worry about whether I was improving or what my rating was or where any of this was going. If I were offered either a chance to attend one of the world championship games between Carlsen and Nepomniachtchi or watch Lionel and Bruce battle it out one last time at a nearly empty coffee shop for hours on a quiet Tuesday night in a sleepy little town I know which one I'd choose.