Saturday Move: Reading about CHESS & Remembering why I fell in love with Sports

I had an interesting read about The Bobby Fischer Defence by Garry Kasparov in NYRB via jessicarulestheuniverse that made think about chess and its little part in my love for sports.

Chess is the first sport I played and is part of the very few things I remember from my early childhood.

My surrogate father Tatay Eniong taught me the game and suffered the consequence thereafter. I bugged him often to play with me even if the best match I played against him was getting his queen captured and I got checkmated on the next move.

When I learned "castling" I had the big dreams of becoming a good chess player. As I had no chess books, I contend myself of clipping chess matches printed on newspapers and re-played them on our own chessboard. But I stopped doing so because it is useless when your chess foe deviates from the moves used by grandmasters I tried to copy.

The closest thing to being a chess player for the school was in elementary. But I failed in the eliminations and with that went my grandmaster dreams.

In high school, I got the consolation of being in the top 3 chess players in our dormitory. But that's about it. I never got to win in the inter-dormitory games.

During college, I had the privilege of being friends with most of our course's chess representatives during college intramurals. Because of them I got to see books on chess openings, got to use chess clocks and got to play ivory-looking chess pieces. One advice they gave me was that I should watch chess afficionado's play in Luneta.

My performance against them isn't worth mentioning. I guess they were really my friends because they make an unlikely chess blunder move every now and then so that I won't be shutout in matches that sometimes reach 20.

The last chess match I played with a human being was with GF tintin. I won but that may have been deliberate on her part. Every now and then, I play chess in the PC, but the undo feature does not encourage me to at least think about my moves.

A week ago, my brother Ron, was looking for our old chessboard. I'm thinking of buying a cheap chess clock for him on his birthday.

Reading about Garry Kasparov's review of a biography of another chess legend , Bobby Fischer, made me admire him more and his english. Hehehe!!! Honestly, in the early, I thought he was a kind of android the Russians built as part of its sports domination plans. I also remember reading about Kasparov's chess match against a computer called Deep Blue. Incidentally, their first battle was held in February of 1996. Kasparov won the first time (4-2)but Deep Blue even things up in 1997 (3 1/2 - 2 1/2).

I researched a little today and found out that there have been 8 Filipino Chess Grandmasters so far. Eugene Torre, Rosendo Balinas, Rogelio Antonio Jr., Buenaventura "Bong" Villamayor, Nelson Mariano, Mark Paragua, Darwin Laylo and Wesley So.

*UPDATE 5/10/2011*
Other Filipino GMs include Jayson Gonzales, John Paul Gomez, and Joseph Sanchez.

I hope that in my lifetime, a Filipino chess player will catapult this individual sport into the nation's consciousness the way Manny Pacquiao in Boxing, Efren "Bata" Reyes in Billiards and Paeng Nepomuceno in Bowling did.