The Akron Beacon Journal from Akron, Ohio • Page 145

have become For IS centuries people story by Abe Zaidan cover and inside illustrations by Chuck Ayers chess, it's not supposed to. People who do play chess, if they are honest about it, will confess that they don't always understand it, either. "CHESS," according to an Indian proverb, "is a sea in which a gnat may drink and an elephant may bathe." That's the beauty of chess. It is so sophisticated in its grand strategies and so vulnerable to muddled thinking that most people can afford to play badly to the grave because they are seldom put to the test of somebody who plays well. There simply aren't that many good players around, which means that bad players have many opportunities to win, and look good when they do.

For all profundity, chess is believed to have a following of about 60 million players on this earth, and Cod knows how many on Olympus. At least 60 countries have chess associations. The U. S. Chess Federation reported an 18 pet.

increase in membership during a recent three-month period. In 1969, it had 225 affiliated clubs; in 1971, 450. BUSINESS is booming for the companies that make chess sets, too. Sales are up about 10 and the players are looking for the better-quality sets. Nieman Marcus, the big store in Dallas, says its best seller is a $35 alabaster-type chess set.

The libraries are filled with volumes about" chess, and you can find out that "moving onesquare at a time, a bishop may go from Kl to K7 in eight moves in 483 ways." (The Chess Companion, Irving Chernov.) Chernov, a chess master himself, also writes that "it takes a knight three moves to check a king that is two away on the same diagonal." CHESS FANATICS devour this kind of information in the same hungry manner that smart housewives search out the number of ounces in a can of beans. The better chess players even remember some of the things they read. The books also contain play-by-play accounts, analyses, critiques, rave notices, tsk-tsks and diagrams of the god-lier chess matches of history. With the dogged pursuit of Biblical scholars, chess scholars want to know everything about every move in every match and want to record it for the eternal good of humanity. There, amid those peculiar K-K2's Continued on page 8 Chess players do things like this: they drum their fingers, fidget and squirm, stroke their beards (real or imaginary), bite through the stems of their pipes, scrutinize their opponents' faces as though they are the maps of Mars, sigh a lot and stare.

Mostly they stare. At their opponents. At their boards. At clocks. At each chess piece.

At nothing. It is probably the closest modern man Will ever come to revisiting the soul of King Solomon. CHESS is a cerebral process. In place of grocery lists, the day's news headlines, Willie Mays batting average, credit cards, aching backs, overdue installments, leaky faucets, bus schedules and all the other debris cranked into one's memory bank, chess players transport themselves into loftier, less communicative circles. They think gibberish like P-K4 (a chess move: pawn moves to the fourth space in the king's file), Q-R2, N-N5, PxP, RxPch, English openings and Sicilian defenses.

Sometimes they put an exclamation point after Q-R6 or 0-0-0, which means it was a brilliant Q-R6! Or, alas, a disastrous 0-0-0! If none of this makes much sense to the person who has never played.