It was such a bad move. Unforgivable. I play as many as 10 chess games simultaneously at any given time and I play these games on my phone app in the precious few minutes available between the numerous obligations in my life, so I don't have the time to analyze the game closely. That is my default excuse.
The chess games I play allow 1–3 days per move, so I am always playing games in varying stages of development. One current game I am playing began yesterday; another 3 weeks ago. I get an alert on my phone when it is my move. I select the alert and my chess app opens to the game. I can arrow back to refresh myself on previous moves made.
In the game pictured in this story, my White opponent moved his Rook's Pawn to a3, threatening my Queen (please forgive the assumption of a male opponent, but it is estimated that only 5% of chess players are female, so I'm going with the statistical probability). A day or two had passed since his move was made, and when I reacquainted myself with the game, I totally flaked out and did not remember this. I moved my Knight's Pawn to b4 to threaten his Knight. This was a reasonable move, were it not for the fact that a fucking White Pawn was threatening my Queen. My opponent quickly responded by taking my Queen. I'm sure that he was surprised and delighted by this gift. This was a complete disaster only 15 moves into a game.
I felt like just resigning immediately. Trying to dig myself out of a hole from the loss of a Queen against a competent player is damned near impossible. My opponent only needs to start methodically picking me apart, trading pieces, whittling down the clutter on the board until his Queen can freely decimate everything that stands in her path.
This unfortunate sequence in my chess game happens to me periodically in real life. Like most people, things seem to hit me out of nowhere. A lot of these unforeseen events are completely due to my own negligence. When a self-inflicted disaster unfolds, I always default to wanting to quit. But like a game of chess, I never do.
Valuable lessons can be learned from attempting to battle back from the void of defeat. In the chess game referenced in this story, I am back on my heels, trying to mitigate the damage that my opponent is going to inflict on me, looking at every angle in hopes that he will make a critical mistake and I can level the playing field. In most games like this, I am destined to lose. My only solace is that by refusing to quit, I may learn something from my mistake, and avoid a similar blunder in the future. As painful as it may be, that opportunity for wisdom must be embraced in order for this game/life to be meaningful.
