This was a whole new window onto the game: it was not a series of random moves, but rather the application of an already-established pattern. That first day we learned two endgame strategies. So when my school offered a chess club in fourth grade, I promptly signed up. Chess didn’t have the speed of checkers or the satisfying click the pieces made when you snapped one on top of the other and whispered: King me, but I liked that it had a story and characters and the ability to come back from near‑annihilation in a few swift moves. The game turned out to be my gateway drug, and soon I began playing chess. I don’t remember this particular instance because it was unremarkable. ‘Yes,’ said the professor, ‘but the second game I was trying.’ ‘I told you she was good,’ said my father. One of them, a computer science professor, thought he’d humour my parents by playing with their sunburned kid. The hours I didn’t spend in school learning to add a ‘u’ to the word color, or inspecting shells on the beach, I spent playing checkers, first with my family, and then, when they got sick of it, with the visitors who straggled through our cinderblock bungalow. Since we were in a rental house, there weren’t many games or toys around, save for the beat-up travel checkers set we’d packed in our suitcase. When I was five, my family spent several months living in Barbados.
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