Don't Bother Me! I'm Playing Chess!

There are two different things that can--on occasion--be in danger of taking over my life.  One is Sherlock Holmes. If I get on a Holmes kick, I can't get enough of re-reading the original Canon, looking up facts in my copy of the Annotated Sherlock Holmes and perhaps watch a bunch of the more faithful film and TV adaptations.

The other thing is chess. When I'm in practice, I'm a slightly better than average player. But if something triggers my chess obsession, I won't want to do anything except play chess, work on chess problems, read about chess and delude myself into thinking I'm a much better player than I am.

Recently, I read a fascinating history of the game titled The Immortal Game: A History of Chess, by David Shenk. That sent me into serious chess mode. I've got four online games going with different players and I'm pulling up the daily chess problems on a chess website faithfully every day. I'm also working through the site's Chess Tactics exercises and have discovered several YouTube channels in which chess masters analyze games.

Also, I re-read Fritz Leiber's wonderful short story "Midnight by the Morphy Watch." Written in 1974, not long after Bobby Fischer  took the world championship title away from Boris Spassky and was upholding the long tradition among world champions of acting completely nuts. Leiber's short story explains why chess masters often travel to Crazy Town.

The main character, Ritter, is someone I identify with: a slightly better-than-average player who occasionally dives into the game headfirst, but never sticks with it long enough to get really good. Like me, this comes and goes. During this story, he's playing in an informal tournament at a local restaurant in his home city of San Francisco.

When he stumbles upon a dusty store selling an eclectic mix of second-hand items, he demonstrates that he's never seen a single episode of The Twilight Zone by actually going inside. He finds a treasure--a watch he recognizes as one once owned by Paul Morphy.

Paul Morphy

Morphy lived before there was an official world champion (1837-1884), but he was acknowledged as being the best in the world at the time. But he also eventually descended into a sad life of paranoia and isolation.

Ritter has researched other chess masters and in the files he keeps at his home, he finds old photographs that indicate the watch had been owned by two world champions, Wilheim Steinitz and Alexander Alkehine.  Both had been brilliant, nigh-unbeatable players. Both had eventually gone nuts.

Wilhelm Steinitz

The watch was stopped at 11:57 pm, but that night, it starts ticking at exactly that time. And Ritter suddenly finds himself able to visualize chess boards and games perfectly, playing brilliant mental games against himself and, possibly, the ghosts of the watch's previous owners.

Alexander Alkehine

Ritter rips through other players--including two he knew were better than he usually is--at the tournament the next day. He easily defeats a chess master who was observing the tournament. The next night, he is still playing game after game in his head. Does the watch possess a psychic memory of the abilities of its previous owner?

But Ritter is also very aware that the previous owners of the watch all sacrificed their sanity for the game. To avoid the same fate, Ritter soon decides what he must do with the watch, which leads to a really fun ending to a fascinating story.

"Midnight by the Morphy Watch" is in a four-way tie in my mind as Leiber's best short story along with "Ill-Met in Lankhmar," "A Pail of Air," and "Four Ghosts in Hamlet." Even if I wasn't currently obsessing on chess, I would have enjoyed reading it again.

So excuse me for now. I'm going to play a game of chess while reading a Sherlock Holmes story.